Posted on February 6th, 2012 by Deborah Potter
How far will you go to protect the identity of sources who give you information on the condition that you not reveal their names? If you haven’t thought about it, you should. Every reporter eventually runs into a story so important that it’s worth getting the information on a confidential basis. But you’d better understand [...]
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Posted on January 31st, 2012 by Deb Wenger
The chairman-elect for RTDNA, Vince Duffy, wrote an interesting post that asks whether — from an ethical standpoint — comments on Facebook and Twitter are free for use as quotes in a story. Like many ethical issues, the answer may be, “It depends.” I think we can all think of situations in which using a tweet [...]
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Posted on December 14th, 2011 by Deb Wenger
Tomorrow is the day to express your creativity, support free speech and win $5,000 in scholarship money through Twitter. December 15 is National Bill of Rights Day, which marks the 220th birthday of the First Amendment. Here’s how it works: Beginning at midnight on Dec. 15, students ages 14 to 22 can tweet their support [...]
Filed under: 01. The Multimedia Mindset, 11. Multimedia Ethics, 12. Getting Ready for the Real World | No Comments »
Posted on November 12th, 2011 by Deb Wenger
Seek truth and report it is the prime directive of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. And one of the basic conditions of reporting truth is to be sure you are accurate. For a multimedia journalist, producing a story on his or her own, getting it right is just as important, but tougher [...]
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Posted on September 6th, 2011 by Deb Wenger
The Washington Post has now put its digital publishing guidelines online. Section titles include: Social Media, Taste and Tone and Third-Party Content. The Post’s ombudsman says that some people aren’t going to like the fact that the guidelines allow reporters to sometimes post directly to the Web without the content going through an editor. Others, [...]
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Posted on June 24th, 2011 by Deborah Potter
The mayor of Seattle is telling local TV stations to back off. In Georgia, the governor’s office went so far as to ban an Atlanta station from a public event. What’s going on here? Elected officials often don’t like the way they’re covered but they usually put up with it. After all, they’re on the [...]
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Posted on June 14th, 2011 by Deb Wenger
Reporters do it every day. They talk to people “across differences” as Poynter’s Kenny Irby likes to say. But reporters don’t always do a good job of exploring those differences for the audience to tell richer stories. “If you can get to appreciate ‘otherness,’” says Irby, “embracing conditions of difference can help us move to [...]
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Posted on April 6th, 2011 by Deb Wenger
What happens when a newsroom values diversity? Reporter Jessica Chapin of KGUN-TV in Tucson, Ariz., says it leads to better storytelling and better decision making. “Tucson is an hour from the border, so diversity in the newsroom and Spanish as a second language is definitely a plus,” Chapin says. “I’m constantly doing interviews in broken Spanish [...]
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Posted on September 23rd, 2010 by Deb Wenger
While the country continues to get more diverse every year, America’s TV and radio newsrooms are becoming more homogenous. The latest RTDNA/Hofstra University Annual Survey found that, overall, the percentage of minorities in both radio and television fell for the third straight year, although the drop in television was small. “Again, the percentage of minorities in [...]
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Posted on September 14th, 2010 by Deborah Potter
Transparency, accountability and openness are among the core values of journalism. They’re embodied in the SPJ ethics code, after all, which thousands of journalists and news organizations subscribe to. So what would be the point of a pledge to support those three values–a pledge that comes with a new seal of approval? John Hamer of the [...]
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