The NDA terms are sometimes onerous. For example, prohibiting you from talking about unreleased products regardless of how you come to know about them, not just from what you see on the tour. Every decent journalist would respect that parts of a tour would be off-the-record without the need for a legally binding document.
I've declined the opportunity to receive pre-release review devices before because I didn't like the restrictions the NDA put on what I was allowed to say about them.
>Then they shouldn't have a problem agreeing to that in writing.
Um, you seem to have missed this part:
>The NDA terms are sometimes onerous. For example, prohibiting you from talking about unreleased products regardless of how you come to know about them, not just from what you see on the tour.
See, there's more stuff in the NDA than what common sense dictates. You can't just agree to the parts you don't have problem with.
It's still reasonable to prevent the journalistic equivalent of parallel construction. Publishing is only half the equation...the other half is knowing what to go looking for. You can't expect companies to only protect themselves from one of those.
It's actually quite common to redline NDAs. At one previous employer nearly every company we entered discussions with asked us to cut two clauses in our NDA. We usually cut one and stood our ground on the other and I can only think of one case in several years where the compromise was unacceptable.
> Every decent journalist would respect that parts of a tour would be off-the-record without the need for a legally binding document.
Granted. Still, you don't know who's decent until it's too late. Even decent news organizations can hire utterly odious people, as in the Glass incident. Admittedly, that was more about making information up entirely, but the premise is valid: Even the best-respected news organizations could, potentially, ship you someone just untrustworthy enough that, without the immediate threat of an NDA, they'd leak.
Because that's where laws live: Most people would be largely decent without laws. Some few aren't decent even with very immediate penalties hanging over their heads. (This is a disorder in the DSM, in fact.) Others, some unknown fraction, are only decent because of law; that is, they lack much internalized morality, but they understand consequences well enough that laws keep them from doing bad things.
I've declined the opportunity to receive pre-release review devices before because I didn't like the restrictions the NDA put on what I was allowed to say about them.