“This year, the winning entries go beyond the basics of diversity coverage and truly embrace the concept of community,” said RTDNA chairman Mark Kraham. “These organizations set a high and apt standard of how diversity coverage should be done.”

CNN and CTV News – Prince George’s Community Television were both selected as winners in the television category.

CNN was awarded for the highly recognized “CNN Presents: Latino in America,” and CTV News was honored for its piece “Black, White and Shades of Gray.” 

In the radio category Alabama Public Radio was chosen as a winner for its “Matters of Race” piece, American Public Media was honored for its “Early Lessons” and WBEZ-FM was selected for its compilation of diversity coverage. 

Check out the award-winning entries for yourself — they are impressive examples of how journalists can create powerful storytelling by sharing the experiences of the many different types of people who make up our news audiences.

According to the Miller-McCune website, a new study published in Electronic News compared the faces of reporters and anchors on the ABC, CBS and NBC network newscasts in 1987 and 2007.

The differences were startling. In 1987, men reported 73 percent of stories; in 2007, men reported 48 percent of stories and women 40 percent. (The remaining 12 percent were team efforts featuring reporters of each gender.)

Members of minority groups, both male and female, also made strides. In 1987, only 5 percent of stories were reported by minorities; that figure increased to 32 percent in 2007. “White correspondents still dominate network news staffs,” the researchers report, “but in certain prominent roles, minority groups appear in significantly higher numbers.”

Taking a look at the industry as a whole, the 2009 RTDNA/Hofstra University Annual Survey found that  the minority TV workforce stood at 21.8% — women made up over 41% of employees.  Still, women and minorities are underrepresented when compared to the U.S. population, where minorities made up an estimated 34.4% of Americans in 2009 and women approximately 50.7%.

Speaking before a packed house at the University of Mississippi, Rather said “journalists must bear withess;” they must be “honest brokers of information.”

Rather was at Ole Miss to help dedicate the school as an historic site in journalism history. When James Meredith became the first black student enrolled in the university, riots broke out and French journalist Paul Guihard was killed. Rather was a reporter on campus that day.

“It became a hell hole … for a short period, this became a war zone,” Rather said.

He went on to describe how difficult it was to cover the civil rights movement at a time when CBS was sometimes referred to as the “Colored Broadcast System,” and it wasn’t unusual to see a hotel with a sign reading, “No reporters/no dogs allowed.”

Rather said in the midst of covering a controversial or difficult topic journalists just have to “get as close to the truth as you can.”

He reminded his listeners of Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “truth is rarely pure and never simple,” but he urged journalists to doggedly seek that truth.

“Any journalist worthy of the name must insist on being independent, fiercely independent,” Rather said.

While other sites, including the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, linked to the story, mainstream news organizations started checking. Within half an hour, Radar posted an update based on “new information” that Roberts will stay on the bench. But the site continued to insist that its original story was well-founded:

Despite considering resigning from the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts will stay on the bench, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned. As RadarOnline.com was first to report, Roberts, 55, was considering resigning from the nation’s highest court due to personal reasons. RadarOnline.com has now learned Roberts will in fact remain as Chief Justice.

That night, NBC’s Brian Williams told a black tie dinner in Washington, DC, that his network’s Justice correspondent, Pete Williams, had knocked the entire story down in about seven minutes. “Let’s just call it ‘primary sourcing,’” Williams said.

But where did the story come from in the first place? Did Radar just make it up to generate Web traffic, as some commenters on the site suggested? Not exactly. Turns out, a professor at Georgetown Law School was trying to teach his Thursday morning class something about the credibility of informants. As David Lat writes at Above The Law, Professor Peter Tague told his class they’d be hearing big news the next day from the Supreme Court about Roberts’ resignation. He also told them not to tell anyone.

“It was an exercise,” Williams said, “but in 30 minutes it had been Tweeted out of the classroom” and you know the rest. “Facts are tougher,” Williams said. “Information is easy. Facts are very tough. They’re best when they’re right. And we’ve got to get it right every day and every night.”

Is there a lesson here? I’d say there are several. 1) No story is too good to check. 2) Mainstream journalism still has standards that set it apart from (much of) the blogosphere. And 3) Primary sources beat rumors every time.

Guidelines like the RTDNA ethics code, which warns journalists not to “manipulate sound in any way that is misleading,” are a good starting point. But that general rule is open to interpretation and reasonable people may disagree.

A recent issue of News Photographer magazine quoted this sound advice from an ethics guide David Leeson developed for the Dallas Morning News:

Audio should always be presented in context. It is perfectly acceptable to edit out unwanted audio as long as the audio chosen for your story is used in proper context.

That leaves room for interpretation, of course, which isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe that’s why this set of guidelines on audio ethics from J-Source in Canada struck me as just a little too detailed in terms of what’s permissible.

It’s okay, even expected, that you will cut out ums, ers, long pauses, and other examples of verbal stalling – unless their verbal stalling is key part of the story, as in the case of a politician ducking tough questions.

It’s okay, even recommended, that you will cut out extraneous words.

In other words, it’s okay to make edits that help someone sound sharper, tighter, clearer. It’s just NEVER okay to change the meaning of what they said.

Yes, technology makes it easy to cut stuff out, but heavy internal editing can raise questions of credibility, even if your motive is simply to make someone “sound sharper, tighter, clearer.” If the person just doesn’t talk that way, isn’t it misleading to make them sound on the air as if they do? Leeson again:

In general, subjects should be presented…’as they are.’ If your subject naturally uses a lot of ‘umms’ and ahhs’ while talking then it could be inappropriate to remove them and change their natural way of speaking. Use good judgment.

“Cleaning up” bites used to be common practice in some newsrooms to save time or to make stories flow better. But these days, when the same audio is often available from lots of different sources, it’s easy for listeners to compare an edited version to the original. And that’s bound to raise questions about why stuff was taken out.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Sourced from: NewsLab

We wanted to speak to how speed and space limitations can compromise accuracy and fairness. We wanted to speak to the frictions that occur when journalists “friend” people on Facebook. We wanted to say something about how journalists are always journalists, even when they are off the clock. We also thought it was important to speak to how journalists sometimes say or post things online that they would not say or show on the air.

Additionally, we wanted to say loudly that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other such sites have a legitimate place in the distribution and collection of news and information, but that like any tools, they should be used carefully.

In addition to all that Tompkins mentions, one of the guidelines that strikes me as particularly noteworthy is the suggestion that news organizations correct their social media mistakes.  As someone who turns to Twitter and other social media sites during breaking news, I can tell you that many news organizations do report inaccuracies, but few seem to own up to it.  It seems to me that preserving journalistic integrity is critical to preserving journalism’s future — and that every station ought to be developing a social media corrections policy.  How about you?

Betty Boop Explains Libel from Mark Harmon on Vimeo.

But some things won’t change, Lehrer told his audience last Friday, like the guidelines he’s always lived by:

Do nothing I cannot defend

Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.

Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story

Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am. Assume the same about all people on whom I report.

Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.

Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label everything.

Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.

I am not in the entertainment business.

I’m thinking of printing out that list and posting it in every newsroom I visit. It would certainly be good discussion fodder!

Watch Lehrer’s full explanation of the changes coming to the NewsHour here, and read more about it in this piece from the New York Times.

Not very well, says Craig Silverman, founder of Regret The Error.com. J-school students may lose points for errors like misspelled names but fear of mistakes doesn’t lead to accuracy, Silverman says. Instead, he suggests formal accuracy training based on real world examples, public consequences and checklists.

One school is doing this now, according to Silverman: the Tilburg School of Journalism in the Netherlands, which has a three week fact checking program for its fourth year students.

Each morning, the students gather in a room to review the day’s news and identify stories that seem questionable. Then they go to work, hitting the phones and other sources to pull suspicious stories apart and see if they hold up to scrutiny. As of today, roughly 80 per cent of the stories checked have contained some form of factual mistake, according to instructor and Dutch journalist Theo Dersjant. Their findings are published on a blog.

Here’s the best part. If the students goof up and falsely accuse a journalist of making a mistake, they have to apologize in person and hand deliver a pie!

Sounds like a great system to me. Any other schools want to try it? Any schools already doing something similar? Let us know in the comments.

Now, according to the Florida News Center, we  have a GM and news director at WPMI in Mobile, Ala. who have been suspended for a week without pay following an inadvertent tweet on the station’s electronic billboard, which features the anchor team and a Twitter feed from the station.

There may be more to this billboard story than we realize, but the incident reinforces a couple of important points:

1.  News organizations are going to make mistakes when using new technologies (think gyro cams on news helicopters and some of the privacy issues raised with those).

2. Because the technology is new, those mistakes will be magnified by the critics and used by them as evidence that the journalists involved are being reckless.

Knowing this, newsrooms and individual journalists would be wise to go above and beyond their usual verification and pre-publication checks.  Continuing to educate themselves on both the potential benefits and drawbacks of these new tools is important, too.