Altino wrote:2) Cosmos are bad. They're bad, they are. And this is exactly why. Some citizen of Lazarus who may or may not have been NST staff leaked Lazarene insider info. There is nothing I can see that reasonably can be done about that, aside from Laz just saying TELL US! and NST saying NEVER! However, the person who was writing the article in question containing Lazarene leaks, the person who approached Jo for more information regarding it and received these further leaked DMs, the person who posted this statement to blast Jo and Lazarus... this person was also a citizen of Lazarus. Does he stop becoming a citizen of Lazarus when he enters other servers? It is against his interests as NST staff to not run the leak, but it is literally illegal for him to run them as a citizen of Lazarus. That's really unnerving to me. Clearly loyalty to Lazarus is not high on his priority list, which is fine. Whatever. But it makes me nervous about NST staff roaming around our regions, watching our channels. NST current and former staff have all bounced in so far with a "no, this was totally fine to do" attitude. Where we do fall on their priority list?
I mean, take me with a grain of salt, of course. I'm not involved in Lazarus, and I am good friends with lots of people in NST, but nepotism toward my friends in NST has still not been strong enough to compel me not to really hate NST. I've never liked them, I feel like they make bad and damaging decisions. I do try to help them, because that's who I am as a person, but everyone knows I don't like them. So. I will admit a bias here. But I still find this leak/statement incredibly irresponsible and this whole kerfuffle from a Lazarene perspective has definite been illegal.
I feel compelled to answer this message in particular to prevent any miss-understanding of our policy on this sort of thing.
We do not accept leaks from our own staff directly, and we do not place pressure, nor have we ever asked, our staff to provide us with restricted information from their own regions. Doing so would be repugnant, as you have identified, and would be a gross violation of the basic values of journalism. In addition, doing so would rightly place us into 'espionage' territory. That is not the situation here; the staff member was passed leaks, without prompting, by a citizen of Laz external to NST, and immediately sought to stop writing the article (and swapping it with another writer) so he wouldn't have to write leaks in violation of the law or loyalties.