Here's the actual language:
Staff members may not accept gifts, tickets, discounts,
reimbursements or other inducements from any individuals
or organizations covered by The Times or likely to be
covered by The Times. (Exceptions may be made for trinkets
of nominal value, say, $25 or less, such as a mug or a cap
with a company logo.) Gifts should be returned with a polite
explanation.
... it's the Times' internal ethics rulebook specifically aiming at the conundrums of journalism -- but I think that quite a lot of it applies to ethical business practices in general.
Queued up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OerW0Q_2_7o#t=32m03s
Not sure yet what, if anything, is to be done about this. Gabe is experimenting with Gittip as well:
Perhaps the system could even convert dollars to some sort of non-monetary "token", which they could pass along to someone who could cash it out, and then there's further reason that it wouldn't be considered a gift?
There are sections in that guidebook about donations to political parties. Gittip forwarding would be a similar, albeit grayer, area -- donating to (say) prominent folks from Microsoft Research would be iffy. More so if you then proceeded to work on any Microsoft-related stories in the future.