Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

This was going to be—indeed was first written as—a simple examination of what might go wrong when a newspaper runs stories written not by its reporters, but by an employee of the subject of its coverage.

But you know how it is. You make that one more phone call to ask the obvious question, and, bingo, you get new information that challenges the original premise.

Reporting can really mess up a simple story.

The simple story was based on a simple story in the April 18 New York Times which indicated that the Asbury Park Press and the other Gannet newspapers in New Jersey have decided that their stories about the New Jersey Devils hockey team would be written by an employee of…the New Jersey Devils. Reporters and Players Wear Same Colors .

“Newspapers struggling to plug the gaps in their newsrooms have been turning to outside organizations to supply articles, raising questions about their ability to vouch for the material they print,” said the story by Richard Perez-Peña. “At the same time, professional sports teams, trying to make up for declining news coverage, have been hiring journalists for their Web sites.”

Running stories written by a Devils employee “bridges the gap,” Perez-Peña wrote, but it “puts the papers in the odd position of publishing news coverage supplied by the entity being covered.”

Indeed it does, which provoked an obvious question: What happened to the Associated Press? The Times story indicated that the papers decided to run stories by Eric Martin of the Devils to save money. But the AP covers the Devils and the Gannett papers in New Jersey use AP stories, so they’re already paying for the service. In that case, it seemed strange to use a writer from the team’s communications staff, or flack as he might be called.

Then came that one more phone call. To Hollis Towns, executive editor of the Asbury Park Press, the largest of the six Gannett papers in the Garden State, who answered the question of why those newspapers don’t use the Associated Press to cover the Devils.

They do.

“The Devils are covered by the AP 99 percent,” Towns said. “We’ve used three stories (from Martin). Biography type stories, small supplemental stories in addition to the AP stories.”

The Times story, Towns said, was “very misleading,” ignoring the fact that “The AP provides 99.9 percent of our Devils stories.”

The “99.9 percent” should not be taken literally. Assuming the Gannet papers ran a story after each of the team’s 82 regular season and five playoff games (that’s as far as the Devils got this year), one tenth of one percent would add up to less than one story, even throwing in a few extra features on off days.

As to the “very misleading” part, that’s debatable. Perez-Peña (by email) said that Towns had told him that “the papers were still using AP stories for game coverage, as they had before, but they had also started using features and more general stories that were supplied by the Devils.” Perez-Peña said he knew when he wrote his story that Martin had written only three pieces for the Gannet papers, but at that time, “the arrangement was less than two weeks old,” so it was reasonable for him to assume that there would be more stories by the Devil’s staffer.

The Times story never said that Martin was providing all or most of the Devils coverage. But it didn’t mention the AP at all. So it could give a reader (it did give this reader) the impression that the papers were running game stories by the team’s PR guy. To his credit, Perez-Peña agreed that “it would have been better if my article had said” the Gannet papers were still using the Associated Press to cover the Devils games.

OK, big deal. It was only three stories. At worst, Perez-Peña made a minor error of omission. It was a 370-word story that ran on page B6; on that kind of story, a reporter is not going to examine every possible interpretation by every conceivable reader.

Besides, we’re talking hockey here. It’s not as though the Asbury Park Press or the Home News Tribune in East Brunswick were using a guy from the governor’s press staff to cover the Legislature. Hockey can be great fun, but it has no significance. There’s no reason to go out looking for matters about which to be outraged. Purists, journalistic or otherwise, are often too quick to pronounce any new development the first step down a “slippery slope.”

But not every slope is slippery. Nobody’s being sneaky. A note at the end of each one of Martin’s stories discloses his affiliation with the Devils , and Towns told Perez-Peña that if the team were ever embroiled in a major controversy, the papers would not use Martin or anyone connected with the Devils to cover the story. Nor, he said, would the Gannet papers enter into a similar arrangement in any field other than sports.

Still, even if every slope is not slippery, every slope is, unquestionably, a slope. If using a guy from a hockey team’s promotional staff to write a few feature stories about the team is hardly a giant step toward using a stockbroker to cover Wall Street or a political consultant to cover an election, it is nonetheless a step in that direction.

A tiny step? Maybe, especially if the outsider is only providing “supplemental” coverage. But a step, and a step down a potentially brambly path.

Especially because the impetus here did not come from the newspapers seeking better coverage; it came from the Devils seeking to broaden their geographic footprint beyond their northern New Jersey base. The team plays in Newark, where it is covered by real reporters for the Star Ledger and Bergen County’s Record. The Gannett papers merely went along with the team’s proposal.

Then there is Towns’ assertion that since the readers didn’t seem to care, why should the journalists?

“As long as it served our readers and we told them where that content was coming from, the readers were fine with it,” he said in the Times story. “I think journalists get hung up on certain lines of what’s ethical more than the readers.”

No doubt, and one must respect the readers. A news organization is a business and will earn little money if it does not give the readers what they want. Why should the ethical standards of the producers (in this case, journalists) be any higher than the ethical standards demanded by the consumers (readers)?

Uhh, maybe because they (we) are the pros, and that’s part of the job. To prosper, doctors must keep their patients and lawyers their clients. But rare is the physician who accepts a patient’s self-diagnosis or the attorney who lets a client prepare a motion for appeal. Nor do the doctors and lawyers let patients and clients determine the legal standards of their professions. The pros do, through their associations, on the assumption that the pros know more about their professions.

According to neither the law nor common sense is journalism a profession as are law or medicine; we need no licenses nor academic degrees. But it’s still reasonable to assume that we—the pros—know more about what our ethical standards should be than do the readers.

No insult to the readers intended here. They have their own jobs to do, kids to raise, lawns to mow, fun to have. It would be unfair to expect them to devote time or energy into thinking about the proper/not-so-proper ways to cover the New Jersey Devils or anything else. That’s not their job. The most we can ask of them is that they buy the paper, preferably via home delivery every day.

The suspicion lingers here that more of them are likely to do that if we do our job, using our standards, not theirs. Everybody in the business understands that in covering sports, news organizations are promoting the home team. It’s an inevitable by-product of covering the news created by that team and its opponents.

By agreeing to the team’s proposal to use the team’s writer for some stories, New Jersey’s Gannett papers have taken a step, however small, toward transforming that by-product into…the product. Eric Martin’s central purpose is not to cover the news created by the Devils and their National Hockey League opponents. It’s to promote the team.

That slope might be a bit slippery after all.

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