Iomega, a maker of computer disks and drives based in Roy, Utah, held a party last summer in Manhattan for some sixty of its favorite friends - including thirty-five journalists who write about consumer electronics. The purpose was to introduce Buz, a hardware/software package that lets you edit home movies on your personal computer, inserting sounds, pictures, and special effects.
 The invitation promised every guest "a free Buz of your very own" and noted - not so discreetly - that Buz is "a $199 value." Over cocktails and hors d'oeuvres, Iomega officials showed reporters from "life style" and "industry" publications how Buz works. Most of them signed up for the freebie. Iomega was hoping for Christmas reviews but, alas, Buz hit a technical snag and wasn't ready. By fall, journalists were calling, wanting to know where their Buz was.

 Freebies for reporters and editors, at least some of them, are not unusual in the multibillion-dollar high-tech business. According to one p.r. official whose clients include major electronics firms and who regularly deals with the press: "Products are the agreed-upon perk. It's the exception rather than the rule not to expect and accept freebies." Too many reporters, says a veteran consumer journalist, have come to expect such gifts, and are "more than happy to take them."

 A culture of expectation infects high-tech reporting these days: some journalists have their hands out for goodies, some manufacturers want to buy favorable publicity, and some media organizations, which need the products to review, appear to tacitly approve such dealings. The public, which looks to the press for unbiased help finding its way through the complexities of computers and electronics, is none the wiser. "There's a symbiotic, parasitic relationship here," says an executive with a p.r. firm. "It's getting worse and more insidious."

 Consider "push-back." Iomega was happy to give Buz away with no return necessary; the possibility of thirty-five journalists mentioning Buz in their stories made the cost of the freebie a bargain. But with more expensive items, industry protocol dictates that reporters and editors return the products once they are done with them. Manufacturers want journalists to touch their products, play with them, and, of course, mention them favorably. They also want them back. The goods, however, are not always returned. In a perverse twist on journalistic ethics, makers of big-ticket high-tech items, such as camcorders, large screen TVs, speaker systems, and computers are beginning to wrestle with reporters for the return of the products and to question the ethics of the people they've tried so hard to court.
 "Push-back" is industry jargon for the pointed refusal by a journalist to return a product, and it is on the rise, prompting some manufacturers to toughen their return policies. Sony asks some reporters for their credit card numbers to bill them in case the product doesn't show up. More companies, such as Toshiba and Sharp, require formal written loan agreements. "Virtually every manufacturer now makes you sign a loan agreement," explains freelancer Dennis Barker. "You used to just go to a product person and say 'I need model xyz,' and the time was unspecified. Now with loan agreements, the time you can keep it is pretty specific, usually thirty days."

 Says Martha Whiteley, public relations manager at Panasonic,"It's kind of flattering when someone really wants to hang onto your products. But it's a question of ethics." A few years back when Panasonic introduced the $500 3DO multi-player video game system, some 350 were sent to journalist/reviewers. Panasonic expected them back and made efforts to retrieve them, but more than 100 units never came home, according to the p.r. agency that was responsible for them.

 Cindy Mouracade, product loan manager at Shandwick USA, which handles p.r. for Sharp Electronics and sends out twenty-five to thirty electronics products a month, says getting them back from an editor can be "quite difficult," at times requiring several phone calls. Sometimes even that doesn't work.

 Linda Lentz, articles editor for Home magazine, a Hachette Filipacchi publication, is quite candid about which high-tech items she returns: "After a while things lose their value or importance, and I don't want them. If it's expensive, and I can't use it, I send it back. But for PCs, we hang onto them if they are valuable." Lentz says she's "not as good at keeping stuff as other people." But she's pretty good. Her current inventory includes:

* A Compaq computer the company gave her more than a year ago that she uses to test software. Compaq asked for the computer back, but Lentz requested an extension: "It's in my home and my daughter is using it for schoolwork." Lentz says she will keep it another couple of months.

* A computer supplied by Intel for her office so she could try out a video phone. "They don't want it back right now," Lentz says.

* A Toshiba VCR that she photographed and wrote about. This, Lentz says, she's tried to return. "They said 'we know you have it. Hold onto it for a little longer.' I had already used it in the magazine, so they weren't bribing me."
 A manufacturer's intentions about the return of a product are often deliberately ambiguous. One technology writer for a major business magazine says that early last year a p.r. firm promoting 3Com's $249 PalmPilot electronic organizer sent him the product to review. He did not review it, but liked it well enough to inquire about buying it. "I asked where to send the check, and they said 'we'll get to that later.' The message was you can pay for it or not pay for it. The conversation was intentionally murky to give me leeway to drive it one way or the other." After two months his PalmPilot broke, and the writer returned it, making the question of payment moot.

 Some high-tech manufacturers are willing to forget about "lost" equipment if they detect a publicity payoff down the road. Howard Blumenthal, who writes a syndicated newspaper column called Hi-Tech Home, puts it this way: "Most of the time you send it back, but sometimes the marketing firm or p.r. firm will suggest that the product become a permanent part of your reference system. They know they will get additional space in other articles in the future." Dennis Barker, the freelancer, is blunt: "Companies may have favorites who may have a product longer because that editor has given them more ink."

 Therein lies the danger: a gift or loan that becomes permanent is not so free after all. It's a rope tethering reporter to donor, which can unravel when the manufacturer doesn't get what it wants.

 "They stop sending the products once the reviews stop meeting their needs," says Jeremy Horwitz, a twenty-two-year-old who started an online magazine called Intelligent Gamer Online. (The magazine turned into a print publication and was eventually bought by Ziff-Davis. It later became Intelligent Gamer, which is no longer published.) In 1996, when Sony was about to launch the video game Crash Bandicoot, Intelligent Gamer pointed out some of its shortcomings. "We received telephone calls from Sony," says Horwitz. "I personally was yelled at over the phone by [a Sony public relations person] who made it clear to us we would not be receiving copies of Crash, and potentially other Sony products, because Sony didn't understand what we were trying to do with our reviews."

 Nowhere is the implicit pact between journalist and manufacturer clearer than in the familiarization trips, or "fam trips," which are thriving in the world of high-tech. An electronics maker might whine about a missing $500 VCR, then pay thousands of dollars to send a reporter to Tokyo or Seoul to visit factories and view new products. This fall, for example, Sharp took nine journalists to Japan for nine days to see its offerings. Manufacturers generally provide plane tickets, hotels, and meals; journalists pay their own way for days off and incidentals.

 Some trips are to faraway places; others are to less exotic locations like Indianapolis, the headquarters of Thomson Consumer Electronics. When Thomson introduces its more pedestrian models of RCA color TVs, VCRs, and DVD players, it brings journalists to Indianapolis. When it wants to showcase its premier PROSCAN line of TVs and other products, it flies reporters to Fort Myers, Florida, a setting that more accurately reflects the upscale PROSCAN products, according to James Harper, manager of news and information. "Most publications do accept the trips," he says. "Generally one or two" want to pay their own way. Harper says, for example, that HFN (Home Furnishings News), a trade weekly, and some daily newspapers, when they attend, cover their own bills.

 Do fam trips color journalists' perceptions of the products they review? Trip takers emphatically say "no," maintaining that factory visits and line showings are necessary to do their jobs. Steve Kent, who writes the CyberPlay high-tech column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate, says that "the only way for small magazines to compete is to go on these junkets. Otherwise, you'll never get an interview with these executives. You'll never see the product under development." Kent says he advises editors when a story results from a fam trip. For that reason, The Seattle Times recently declined such a piece.

 Rebecca Day, a free-lancer who writes a technology column for Rolling Stone, goes on several trips a year. "Any time you get a phone call or spend any time with a company, they expect something in return," she says. "You use your own judgment. I feel an obligation to the readers [to tell them] if it's a good product. More often than not, the manufacturers don't bring out bad products."

 If these trips are so useful for reporters, why don't more publications pay for them? The answer, of course, is money.

 Walter Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal's personal technology columnist, declines trips paid for by manufacturers. And he's suspicious of the manufacturers that offer them: "It makes me think that their products are crappy if they have to pay people to see them." But few publications have the financial resources of Mossberg's Wall Street Journal.

 Are higher ethical standards, then, the province of only the richer media organizations? Outlets like Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, CBS, and NBC have rules about freebies. Peter Petre, the executive editor of Fortune who edits the magazine's technology section, says, "Time Inc.'s policy is very clear and very explicit about not accepting free merchandise." CBS's rules even address the issue of press discounts, which its employees cannot accept unless those discounts are available to the general public. Other media organizations don't seem to worry about press discounts, which usually let journalists buy at the wholesale price. According to Howard Geltzer, who heads his own New York City p.r. firm, which counts several consumer-electronics manufacturers as clients: "More than occasionally journalists do avail themselves of this accommodation on an ongoing basis." Does a press discount count as a freebie?
 Codes of ethics for professional journalism organizations, and even the codes of conduct for many media outlets themselves, can be vague. The code of ethics for the Radio-Television News Directors Association, (RTNDA) simply says that members "will decline gifts or favors which would influence or appear to influence their judgments." The code for the Society of Professional Journalists says that journalists should "refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel, and special treatment . . . if they compromise journalistic integrity." What happens when reporters say a free trip to Tokyo doesn't compromise their integrity? Who's to say it does?

 Some publications are not much help to either journalists or manufacturers in delineating the ethics of freebies, because they have no policies or fail to enforce them. If all publications operated like The Wall Street Journal, says a p.r. executive who is fed up with the way things now work, these murky quid pro quos would disappear. Rolling Stone, hardly a struggling magazine, has no policy per se, says assistant managing editor Mark Woodruff. When one of his writers asked if he could go to Japan to see some new technology, Woodruff told him that was his business as long as he didn't make any promises that he'd write about it. And when free products accumulate at the magazine, Woodruff says, they're piled in a special area with a sign that says "free stuff," and the staff can help themselves.

 Frank Lalli, president of the American Society of Magazine Editors, says that there may be "more of this gift business" at service magazines than at hard news magazines. Indeed, explains an editor for one of Hearst's many service publications, who goes on three or four sponsored trips a year, "there are no rules here. It's all about your own personal way of doing things."

 Some newspapers have strict standards, dating from the days when auto, travel, and food writers were courted lavishly by the outfits they covered, and newspapers tried to put a stop to it. The Chicago Tribune has one of the toughest freebie policies. Staffers can accept nothing that costs more than a simple keychain. "You need to keep reinforcing the policy or people lapse," says Tribune associate editor Joe Leonard. He recalls that when goods arrived at the Trib, he used to send a polite letter to the p.r. firm and then donate the stuff to charity. Now, he says, the letter of refusal is less polite and also goes to the top management of the company that's paying for the freebie.

 If a keychain is the standard at the Tribune, what is it at other publications? Some specify $25 or $50; at others, ambivalence again prevails. NBC says reporters can keep a freebie of nominal value, but doesn't define nominal. The code of conduct at Ziff-Davis, the big publisher of computer magazines, says gifts and entertainment "may be accepted by employees of the Company or its divisions when they . . . are so limited in value (i.e., of token value) that they could not be construed as an attempt to buy the recipient's favor or influence the recipient's conduct."

 Drawing lines can be tricky. When does it become too difficult and not worth the effort to return something? Last summer Mary Woodworth, a Los Angeles public relations executive who pitches low-end electronic toys, sent a box of plastic soccer figures, worth about $50, to some 150 newspapers. Only four or five returned them. And what about the stacks of software that companies send unsolicited to entice reporters into trying their products and writing about them? Explains Claire LaBeaux, a public relations manager for Broderbund Software: "In order to get a story about software, the person has to use it."

 Should a journalist keep software that costs $55 but not software that costs $400? Most reporters interviewed for this story say they keep it no matter the price. Manufacturers don't expect it back, they say, since the incremental cost of producing it in quantity is small. Even publications that have rules outlawing freebies say software is an exception - more akin to books that publishers send for review than to trips to the Orient. But is software, especially the expensive kind, the same as a $30 book? The Wall Street Journal says "no," requiring that any software priced at more than $100 be returned or given to charity.

 What about free-lancers, who account for so much of what is written about high technology these days? Do the rules for staffers apply to them? If so, can they be enforced? The case of Rich Warren, a free-lancer who has written about consumer electronics for the Chicago Tribune, illustrates the problem.
 Last February Warren produced a piece about Sony's $300 WebTV unit that, "as if by divine messenger," he wrote, "landed on my doorstep." Warren found it worked so well, he told his readers that he shipped it off to his mother in California who uses it on her "twenty-seven-inch Mitsubishi TV" to send e-mail to her son. "If my mom can operate WebTV, anyone can," he wrote. A few months before that, Warren wrote about two men showing up at his door with "mammoth cartons of loudspeakers." He said they were employees from Polk Audio who spent hours installing, positioning, and tweaking a $9,000, top-of-the-line home theater speaker system. Warren used the word "awesome" to describe the system, adding that "awesome" is a word "I rarely use."

 He didn't tell his readers whether the system became a permanent resident in his home, and we couldn't ask him since he refused to talk to cjr.

 "My button was pushed in the late eighties" about Warren, says Joe Leonard, the Tribune's associate editor. "It was obvious he was keeping this stuff. I don't have any way of policing him. He's a big gorilla, and there's nothing I can do about it." The Tribune revamped its "Friday" section several months ago, and Warren's column no longer appears, although he still occasionally contributes to the paper.

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