Which was followed by an admission of the conflict of interest in running a tech-hype story written by the wife of a wealthy VC.

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/conflict-of...

This is some incredibly bizarre reasoning from the T editor:

> it was my mistake in not asking her if there were any potential conflicts. This was an oversight on my part. I say this not as an excuse, but she is, separately from her husband, a billionaire (making her through marriage a billionaire twice over) and for that reason I think I failed to consider any monetary conflict in her case.

She assumes that rich people have no 'monetary conflict' [of interest]? What?

I think what they are saying is that she is independently wealthy - as such they didn't check into her husband in the same way they would have if she depended on him for money.

I take it that you are not claiming it is not wrong ?

Regardless of whether she depends on her husband for money, or if she was independently rich, there can still be conflict of interest.

I'm not claiming anything. It's obviously wrong, and the editor admits as such - I was just paraphrasing their reasoning behind the mistake.

Although that article is (misleadingly) hosted on nytimes.com, it was not published in the New York Times, but in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Also, it was written by Silicon Valley socialite Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, and not an NYT reporter.

And the author was slammed by the NYTimes editor for not disclosing conflict of interest throughout that piece (Marc Andreesen invested heavily in AirBNB through A16Z / Laura Arrillaga-Andreesen is his wife)

http://recode.net/2015/10/29/nyt-public-editor-blasts-arrill...

By the New York Times Public Editor, who isn't part of the normal editorial process - she's meant to represent the readers and handle their complaints about things like undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Technically that's a guest post (by Marc Andreessen's wife, where the OP already discussed the Twitter-blockings by him) and was not at the peak of the Theranos hype when the referenced New Yorker article was written.