I regularly commit journalism (some fellow Flyertalkers have even been quoted by me in the past) so I'd like to chime in on this topic.

The sort of "give me a freebie and I'll write more favorably about you" that seems to be the hope and plan described in the original post is considered seriously unethical in my profession. It is, in most newsrooms, a firing offense that would also render the offender essentially unemployable by other media outlets.

Access (making available to a reviewer tickets to an otherwise sold out play, reserving a seat on the campaign's charter flight) is acceptable. Trading a good writeup for access is not. Many media outlets have codes of ethics which require they pay for that access, too, whether it's the seat at the play or the seat on the charter flight.

That's not to say it's never appropriate to have the subject of a story help with travel arrangements or even pay for them. The best example I have from my own experiences would be an article I did some years ago for a beer aficionado’s magazine about the growing and harvesting of hops in the Yakima valley of Washington.

This junket (and that's what we and the PR folks who played tour guides called it) for writers and broadcasters from around the U.S. was put together by a large brewing concern that picked up my airfare and hotel expenses, arranged several tours of farms and processing facilities, made people available for interviews, and hosted a couple of evenings of media revelry.

I took the trip and wrote the story. In the second paragraph of that story, I told my readers who organized and who paid for it.

To the best of my ability that financial support didn't influence what I wrote -- how they grow and pick hops isn't really a contentious subject, anyway -- but not making it clear how a brewery's PR people made it possible to write a feature story which the magazine itself would not have spent the money to cover would have been leaving out an important part of the story.

And leaving out part of the story is bad journalism.