How much does a columnist owe his readers to write something new?

Does a columnist owe it to his readers to let them know if he is actually writing new material?

Writing a weekly column can be a chore. If you’re trying to do it on top of working a full-time job, meeting family obligations and trying to live a balanced life, sometimes it can be downright oppressive.

I bring this up having just finished teaching two intensive January-term courses on column writing. Each course met from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, with two finished columns due by midnight on Friday. Writing two columns a week can be daunting, particularly to those who have never written a column before.

To give students in each class some perspective, I remind them that from 1935 until 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote her “My Day” column. She did this while being first lady of the United States, helping to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and doing other stuff that involved being Eleanor Roosevelt. Until 1961, she wrote six columns a week. In 1962, she cut back to three columns a week until September. She died in November 1962.

Not every column was a literary masterpiece, but they were reportedly widely read and influential. I remind students of this not to shame them, but to encourage them to find their inner Eleanor Roosevelt if they want to write columns regularly.

Near as I can tell, Roosevelt never recycled any of her columns and tried to pass them off as new to leverage her time. That technique is tempting to me as I am now writing the 1,152nd “The Right Thing” column.

Shortly after ChatGPT became available, there was a spate of articles that appeared by writers who acknowledged they were produced by ChatGPT as a way of showing what the bot could do. But doing that quickly became a gimmick and cliched.

There are enough Right Thing columns floating around the internet that I can easily ask ChatGPT to write a column on a particular topic at a particular length in the style of Jeffrey Seglin’s Right Thing column. As research, I tried this and ChatGPT kicked something out in 12.3 seconds. So on those weeks when I am feeling particularly overwhelmed or just plain lazy, why not recycle something I wrote years ago or have ChatGPT write my column for me, a task it can do far more quickly than I can?

As tempting as either might be, each would be wrong unless I told the readers that that was exactly what I was doing. I do revisit topics I’ve written about before if it seems relevant to do so, but I always disclose that I’m doing so to readers and I’ve never just run the same column that ran years ago.

And while ChatGPT can point out copy that is serviceable, it can’t draw from the same experiences I have nor make the same judgments I try to make each week when trying to wrestle with some issue or another.

If the weekly column feels like too much of a chore to write or procrastination seems to be winning out, the right thing is to hunker down and write. It’s a privilege to be able to write for you each week and that, for now, is motivation enough to assure you that the words I use are both new and my own.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should existing customers also get good deals?

Are companies wrong to offer incentives to new customers that they don’t offer to existing customers?

I was a fan of the former television critic for the Boston Globe before he stepped down from the position after holding it for 27 years. His take on which shows were worth watching generally matched my own taste. Often, however, he would recommend a show that appeared on a streaming service to which I didn’t subscribe. On more than one occasion, his recommendation to readers who balked at paying for yet another streaming service was that they take advantage of the many free trial offers that often allowed new viewers several months for free. After that, he advised, you could cancel before the fees kicked in.

Alas, I had no interest in keeping track of which services I needed to cancel before the trial was up. Admittedly, there has never been a television show I’ve missed that made me feel as if my life was somehow less complete. But his advice reminded me of a recent question from a reader about whether it was fair that companies offered incentives to new customers that weren’t offered to existing customers.

The reader, whom we’re calling Clare, had been seeing advertisements from her cable television service, her cell phone provider, and other service providers that offered either better rates or attractive product discounts to new subscribers. The offers were far better than what she was receiving as an existing customer. On the one occasion she called her cable provider and waited on hold for several minutes, she was told the offers she saw were indeed not for her.

The only way Clare figured she might get some of these incentives would be to cancel whatever service she’d been getting and then wait to sign up as a new customer. But even if that were permitted, that meant the possibility of living without television service for a spell. It was hardly worth the effort Clare figured, but it was something she found annoying.

Clare wonders if it’s unethical for companies to offer new customers offers they don’t offer to existing customers.

There’s nothing wrong with companies offering incentives to attract new customers as long as they are clear and honest about whatever it is they are offering. Clare herself may have been attracted to her providers initially because of a new customer incentive. Companies do run the risk of annoying existing customers with such offers, but such risks are likely worth it to them to build up their client base. If Clare is annoyed to the point of wanting to search for new service providers, she should do that if such offers are available.

Even if there’s nothing wrong with such offers, there’s also nothing wrong with companies making sure their existing customers are rewarded for their loyalty by offering them incentives to stick around. Might cable television or cell phone providers lock in customers for life if, say, for every 10 years of being a customer they received a break on their bill or even a month free? Perhaps, no matter how unlikely it is for them to exhibit such gratitude.

As long as companies make clear to customers what they are paying for and for how long, they are doing the right thing. Customers should be able to make as informed a decision as possible.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Readers share their acts of kindness

In December, I shared a story of a young couple who surprised my wife and me by raking up several dozen bags of leaves from our yard when we were away. Their unexpected act of kindness touched us.

Readers responded with their own stories of kindness. Here are some of them.

A reader from Santa Rosa, California, recounted the time he and his wife were driving home and saw a young woman and baby on the shoulder of the freeway near her broken down car. They stopped and used their car service membership to call a tow truck and had it take the woman, baby and broken car to her home across town.

Another reader from Sebastopol, California, and her siblings spread kindness to honor their father. His 90th birthday “seemed like a big deal” so the siblings asked friends and family to do random acts of kindness for others in honor of their dad, and then write a brief note about their act. The siblings compiled more than 90 notes of kindness in a notebook and presented them to their father. “He was touched, but I think a little embarrassed that people, many of whom he didn't even know, had gone out of their way on his behalf.”

In 1960, a reader from North Carolina, was a college student in love. One night, the woman he had hoped to marry after graduating responded “no” when he asked over the phone if she loved him. The reader told his roommate he planned to hitchhike 200 miles to his girlfriend’s university to talk to her. His car-owning roommate responded, “let’s go,” and drove him there. He waited in his car while they broke up, and then drove them back to their own campus. The romance fizzled, but the kindness between roommates thrived.

Finally, a story arrived from a reader from Pennsylvania. Her son-in-law and his father had taken her grandson to a college basketball game. The following day the grandson was to take part in a children’s basketball clinic. During the game, the son-in-law heard a dad tell his son they couldn’t afford a clinic ticket. He spoke to the dad and bought a ticket for his son.

A day after they returned home, the son-in-law’s mother was Christmas shopping. She noticed the checkout clerk seemed stressed. When she told the clerk how great a job she was doing, the clerk teared up and said, “You have no idea how much I needed to hear that.” The woman left, headed to the bank, withdrew $100, returned to the store, and handed the money to the clerk who was gathering her things to leave. “Now I can buy groceries,” the clerk said as she hugged her. The woman called her son’s wife to let her know what happened and to tell her that her son had inspired her. Her son had never told his wife what he had done. His mother only knew because her husband overheard their son at the game.

“To me, this is the best,” the reader from Pennsylvania wrote, “when you share that kindness quietly, without recognition – just purely to be kind.”

Whether it’s quiet kindness or a louder variation, offering when possible to help others who might be in need remains the right thing to do. Continue to share your stories of kindness offered and I will continue to try to share them.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet

Should you correct a colleague or friend who spreads misinformation?

Ten years ago, I agreed to participate at a student journalism conference on a panel with other writers, editors and journalists. I knew several who were going to be on the panel. Each of us arrived in the early evening before the conference began and we spent some time catching up.

As we were all chatting, the organizer of the event joined us. She laid out what we should expect for the next couple of days. When she told the group I would be delivering the keynote address to all attendees the following day, it took me by surprise. I hadn’t prepared anything since I had no recollection of being asked to do this.

Nevertheless, I agreed to give it a go. I returned to my hotel room, took out my laptop, wrote up some notes, and prepared a few PowerPoint slides. The talk was supposed to be about the state of journalism ethics so I drew from past columns and perused a few books on ethics that I had referred to in the past in the column, while teaching or when giving a talk.

The next day went fine, until I put up one of the slides for the group, which was a quotation attributed to the German writer Goethe. I had lifted the quote from the opening of a chapter in a book on ethics an old colleague had recently published. One of the professors in attendance pointed out that he was pretty sure Goethe never wrote the words I posted and that the quotation didn’t sound at all like him. He was curious if I knew the source. Aside from it being featured in a friend’s book, I did not know the source. But I told him I would check.

When I pointed it out to my writer friend, she admitted that she didn’t know the source either but had seen the quote someplace and liked it so she used it. Like me, neither she nor her editor nor anyone else associated with the book had verified those words were actually Goethe’s. After the talk, I let the professor know and also asked the organizer to let the attendees know about my mistake.

Typically, I try to be vigilant about checking original sources for quotes that I see attributed to others to verify the person credited actually deserves the credit. This time I didn’t. I should have.

Now, when a friend or colleague posts a quotation on social media that I know to be incorrect, I take the time to point out to them that they might want to check their source. Usually, I text them or private message them. Most often they check the quote and take it down when it turns out to be wrong. Only once did someone, a K-12 educator, respond by letting me know he didn’t care since he liked the quote anyway.

There’s an old meme with a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.” While Lincoln obviously never said that, the message is strong. When we find quotations we like on the internet, rather than repost them right away, the right thing is to check to make sure the attribution is correct. Just as the internet is full of misattributed quotations, it’s also full of source material that should make checking our facts relatively simple.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

If you receive an item you didn’t order, what do you do?

What’s the right thing to do when you get something you haven’t ordered from Amazon.com?

A few weeks before Christmas, a reader we’re calling Jane received an email alert that a package she had ordered from Amazon had arrived. A photo accompanying the package showed her goods resting safely on her front stoop. Jane was relieved that a small gift she had ordered for her husband had arrived in time for her to wrap it, place it under their tree, and have it waiting for him on Christmas morning.

The gift was a small scratch-off card that allowed users to scratch off specific places they had visited. Jane had ordered one 5-by-7 card and had paid $15.99 for it. But when Jane opened the package, she found that Amazon had shipped her 30 shrink-wrapped cards instead of one. Jane re-checked her original order and bill to make sure she hadn’t ordered more than one card. She hadn’t, and she had no intention of keeping items she hadn’t ordered or paid for.

Jane noticed on the Amazon page that the item was made by a small business that partnered with Amazon. The website encouraged prospective buyers to support these small businesses. Jane was concerned that the owners of the small business that made the cards would lose potential sales on 29 cards that were errantly sent to Jane.

Her past experience with Amazon led her to believe that finding an actual human being to deal with rather than a series of auto-responses to calls or emails could prove challenging. Rather than contact Amazon, Jane looked up the customer service email from the card company’s website. She wrote the company a note explaining what happened. While she had figured that a response from them would be swift, she didn’t anticipate just how swift. Within hours she heard from the company, thanking her for her honesty and her offer to return the items if they told her how. The company told her to keep five of the cards and to provide them with her Venmo account information so they could send her $8 for any return shipping costs.

Jane was touched by the offer. She returned 25 of the cards, gave one to her husband, three to a friend who traveled with her family to similar places, and kept one for herself. She paid for her own postage. Once the company received the cards, they thanked her again for her honesty.

When you receive something you didn’t order or are undercharged for something you’ve purchased, the right thing is to try to correct that wrong. There’s no need to have that correction end up costing you more than the item itself, but Jane figured the $8 was more than offset by the company’s offer to keep four cards, even though she hadn’t intended to spend money on them.

Some readers may argue that Jane should have contacted Amazon directly rather than taking action that might better ensure the small business wouldn’t be out of pocket for the errant shipment. Others might point out that that small business was in a better position to do whatever might be necessary to make good with its partner Amazon. Jane’s actions, however, suggest there are still people who will to try to do the right thing when no one is looking.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.