Di Stefano De Leted
Some may recall local Buzzfeed baby Mark Di Stefano, who moved to Buzzfeed’s UK office a few years ago before somehow ending up at the Financial Times. That appointment is not working out well.
Some may recall local Buzzfeed baby Mark Di Stefano, who moved to Buzzfeed’s UK office a few years ago before somehow ending up at the Financial Times. That appointment is not working out well:
The Financial Times has suspended recently hired Mark Di Stefano as media and technology correspondent.
The tenacious reporter joined from Buzzfeed where he covered media and politics. He accessed private Zoom conference calls held by The Independent and Evening Standard.
Expert sleuth Di Stefano allegedly did indeed access those calls, but in so doing compounded his ethical breach with a further error:
Log files show an account registered to Di Stefano’s FT.com email address joined the private video call for The Independent staff on Thursday for 16 seconds.
The caller’s video was disabled, but journalists saw his name flash briefly on screen before he left the meeting.
Oopsy! Di Stefano should have bailed at that point, but the intrepid idiot blundered on:
Five minutes later, a separate account joined the call, this time unnamed ...
The anonymous user account, which remained in the meeting until the end, was later shown to be linked to the mobile phone used by the same Financial Times reporter.
And then Di Stefano filed a story derived from his online snoopery:
Shortly afterwards, the Financial Times published a report by Di Stefano, including confidential details about the company’s advertising downturn and quoting chief executive Zach Leonard.
The article stated that “people on the call” were the source of the story.
Adorable. Now that he’s suspended, Di Stefano may have to time to study his own newspaper’s code of conduct:
The FT’s code of conduct specifies: “The press must not seek to obtain or publish material acquired by … intercepting private or mobile telephone calls, messages or emails. Engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge … can generally be justified only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means.”
Few seem upset over Di Stefano's difficulties. If the Financial Times requires a replacement who actually knows something about finance, perhaps they should hire this kid:
Little man knows more than most Greens MPs. pic.twitter.com/CpwBv3axYG
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) April 26, 2020
A journalist from The Financial Times accused of gatecrashing video conferences at two rival newspapers may have broken computer hacking laws, according to experts.
Mark Di Stefano, the FT’s media and technology correspondent, allegedly eavesdropped on Zoom meetings at the Evening Standard and the Independent as staff were being informed of coronavirus cutbacks ...
In joining the Zoom meetings Mr Di Stefano may have breached both the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and the Data Protection Act 2018, even if no password or approval was required, legal experts said.