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“I might possibly be able to understand Ms. McLaren’s motivation for writing this. What I can’t fathom is the Globe’s motivation for publishing it,” added reader Wolseley.

Public editor Sylvia Stead agreed with those commenters.

“I agree with our readers and told the editors last week that in my view they should not have published it. It is clear to me that Globe staff members or freelancers should not be involved in articles in which they could stand to gain financially or in which there is an appearance that they may,” she said in a note Thursday.

“Globe editors agreed this did not show proper judgment and should not have happened. They said The Globe and Mail shouldn’t run articles about the sale of an employee or freelancer’s house whether that article is written by that person or anyone else.”

McLaren, admittedly, didn’t help that perception with a tweet promoting her story.

https://twitter.com/leahmclaren/status/249069249237245952

Globe and Mail media reporter Steve Ladurantaye issued the newspaper’s internal response to the McLaren controversy on his personal website.

“A number of people have asked this week about an article that appeared in Friday’s Real Estate section, in which one of our columnists wrote about her own property for sale. It was an unintentional oversight on our part, but to clarify, it is not Globe editorial policy to allow people to write about things that could result in their own commercial gain,” features editor Kevin Siu wrote in an internal email titled “Note on conflict of interest.”