The safest investment routes for journalists have long been mutual funds and "blind trusts" managed by independent outsiders. Reporters at TheStreet.com, for example, are only allowed to invest in these kinds of funds. But the current crop of index funds -- which disclose that a large percentage of their holdings include America Online, Microsoft and Cisco Systems, for example -- don't always get you around the "don't invest in your sector" rule.

"Even newspapers which sometimes have very rigid policies that you can't own individual stocks would let reporters invest in mutual funds," says Peter Petre, the executive editor of Fortune magazine. "Do you let them buy a Net fund? An infotech fund? You could say there are conflicts there."

Fortune's own ethics policy, he says, merely instructs reporters to avoid individual stocks in companies they write about and to "always ask your editor" when other situations arise; reporters also aren't allowed to change their position in companies that the magazine is currently featuring.

Fortune, incidentally, wasn't concerned about newspaper ethics when it assigned Chris Nolan to write about trading her AutoWeb stock; this story assignment -- when reported by the Wall Street Journal -- is what cost Nolan her job.

Judy Lewenthal, managing editor of Business 2.0, says that her company's ethics policy is particularly muddy on these issues, and she's organizing meetings to clarify what reporters can and can't do. But, she says, she's sensitive to the concerns of writers who want to participate in the hottest investment sectors of decade. She hypothesizes: "If I had liquid money, where would I put it? The place where I get the best returns. But by essence of being an editor at a computer magazine I can't invest in my future?"

Beyond the sticky question of owning stocks, there's the issue of work that journalists do outside of their day jobs -- writing technical "white papers," consulting, even starting their own companies. More and more journalists are being wooed towards the more lucrative business path -- sharing the sentiments of former Wired editor Todd Lappin, now working at Guru.com, who says he "was tired of writing about business plans; I wanted to execute one. You feel you know as much about this as anybody -- these people you encounter are certainly no smarter than you. Our access to information as journalists is about as good as anybody's."

Rebecca Eisenberg, a columnist at CBS Marketwatch and the San Francisco Examiner, also works as a consultant and owns a few technology stocks -- although not in companies, she says, that she has ever written about. She also is the president and CEO of a brand-new start-up called Chemis -- a fact she has prominently promoted in her Examiner column. "If I, as a columnist covering the Internet industry, know so much, why am I living on columnist wages?" she wrote in June, griping about ex-boyfriends driving sports cars bought from IPO riches before explaining that she was going to "break from the writerly mold" and embark on her own start-up.

But is the very mention of her company in her column a conflict of interest? Free press would certainly appear to give Eisenberg's start-up a leg up over the competition. But Eisenberg says she has no conflict of interest; her column, she points out, is supposed to be an insider's view of the industry, much the way Cramer's columns at TheStreet.com are intended to be from a investor's point of view. "My column has always been marketing for the brand called me; in that respect, nothing has changed," says Eisenberg. "On one hand, I need to disclose that I'm back in the business world; on the other hand, I need to not overdisclose so that it looks like I'm being a marketer."

Freelancers, like Eisenberg, are in the trickiest of positions: There is no company ethics policy to which they must adhere; they have only their own morals and principles to guide them. It is rare that an editor will ask a freelancer about investments; it is up to the freelancer to disclose them. As a result, this question has journalists like Po Bronson in a quandary.

"I don't know what the rules are and I don't want to do anything wrong. I have no one here to tell me," Bronson says. "I used to trade this stuff -- I know what to do. I just can't do it anymore; my money is now parked in index funds. I wish the laws were clearer so I could be advised."

There are probably plenty of freelancers who are quietly investing in tech companies they are writing about; some may not even know they shouldn't. One technology journalist I spoke with said he had bought stocks in companies like Microsoft and AOL while on staff at a prominent technology magazine that didn't have a written ethics policy. While he knew it was a dubious practice, "there was no explicit rule against it," he says. "I didn't think it was a good idea not to have a policy, but there was none. Having sat on the sidelines for years watching pretty predictable things happen to the stock market, I thought I would do something about it."

Of course, he is hardly alone. "I've had lots of discussions with journalist friends who cover technology in the valley who have said that 'so-and-so day trades on the job,'" says Stephen Buel, a former journalist at the San Jose Mercury News who recently departed for a technology start-up. "I have heard those types of stories from a multitude of organizations throughout the valley."

Perhaps the clearest indication of how fuzzy the principles of ethics in journalism have become is the range of responses to Chris Nolan's predicament. Among the more than a dozen technology editors and journalists I spoke with, there was no consensus about whether she violated any ethical code by accepting the friends-and-family stock. Many in the industry feel that she did something questionable, but that fault also lies with the editors, who didn't immediately prevent her from going ahead with her plan. Others see no conflict as long as Nolan hadn't written about the company. And others, like one writer I spoke to, are adamant that she committed an act of wrongdoing: "When you do become a journalist you have to make a decision that if you want to have credibility you shouldn't be trading stock in the industry that you write about, period."

Meanwhile, Nolan is fighting for her column and compensation through her union, the Newspaper Guild; she insists that she did nothing wrong. "I didn't think it was going to be an issue because it's a longtime friend, not a source," says Nolan, who says the AutoWeb incident was the first time she had ever even opened a brokerage account. "This was an unusual set of circumstances -- the intersection of my business life and personal life. And to make sure it was fine I went to my editors ... You run a fine line because you want to say, let your conscience be your guide, but in many cases that's not enough. You need editors to guide you."

Several current and former Mercury News reporters told me that the ethics policy of the San Jose Mercury News is a dust-covered document that is rarely mentioned. The newspaper's policy hasn't been updated since 1984 and might not have been looked at any time soon if the Journal hadn't reported on Nolan's stock holdings.

But the onus is on these publications, says Columbia Journalism Review editor Marshall Loeb, to update ethics policies once or twice a year to address these kinds of situations -- potential conflicts that no one could have envisioned 10 years ago. As he explains, "The world of business and the economy is so dynamic and rapidly changing these days that codes have to be established and, in addition, have to be reexamined with some frequency to make sure that they are current and fulfilling their function."

Almost everyone agrees that for journalistic ethics to work, there must be rules that everyone understands, signs and agrees to. Of the magazines and news services that I polled, several had ethics policies that were out of date, rarely discussed or simply nonexistent -- riding instead on principles that are "understood." Some, including Salon.com, are writing their own ethics policies in the wake of the Nolan incident. The question is whether those rules will be flexible enough to anticipate new issues that will surely arise in this fast-paced industry, where the lives of journalists are increasingly entwined with the people whom they write about and the companies that they cover. Or must all technology journalists simply accept that by joining the writer corps they are taking an oath to disavow the temptations of technology riches?

"The only solution to all this is absolute full disclosure. It's so huge, it's so vast, the stock market so interpenetrates all parts of daily life, that the only way we can deal with this thing in an honest way is to disclose it, put it all out there," sighs Forbes ASAP's Michael Malone. He envisions a database of the investments and projects of every reporter in the industry: "If someone would want to publish everyone's stock holdings in the press, I'd participate."

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