Journalism ethics question -- when a picture is only an illusion

So here's today's journalism ethics question.

The latest edition of USC's Garnet and Black Magazine​ has a big story on a woman who was a teenage mom, but has worked hard to be a college student while caring for her 3-year-old daughter. Very nice story and very inspirational stuff.

And very nice "awwwwww" photos of mom and daughter.

 Except ... At the very end of the story there is this: "*Models portrayed in this spread are not Bourne and her daughter, or an actual mother-daughter pair." (The online version I'm linking to has only one photo -- the print version has several, including a full-page one with reverse type over it that starts the story.)

So what do you think? A couple of people -- not journalists -- I've shown it to have reacted rather strongly and negative.

They feel "taken in." "I'm reading it, enjoying the pictures -- and then it's not them." Would it have made a difference had the mag headed the story with the disclaimer?

 (I've still yet to figure out what the asterisk refers to.)

This is from Chris Rosa, the editor in chief, after I asked him for his thoughts:
"We should have written a disclaimer at the beginning of the post instead of the end. The original photos of the real mother were extremely poor quality and we didn't have time to reschedule with her, so we had to improvise."

Caveat emptor: Comptek/Universal Media Syndicate, Aereo and morally challeged newspapers

We've all seen them, the full-page ads for Amish heaters (where it doesn't exactly say but where, apparently, primarily only the frames are made by the Amish), "rare" coins and bills, etc. While the debate about "native advertising" in digital rages in various forums (punctuated by John Oliver's hilarious takedown of it), the old-fashioned "advertorial" has become more and more a staple (from my observations) for cash-strapped newspapers.

But even newspapers have some moral, if not legal, obligation, it seems to me to at least give these things a vetting for being misleading -- and, frankly, from a business sense, too, since this kind of stuff doesn't do much to help your already steadily eroding credibility.

This ad was in The State newspaper today (The State is happy hunting ground for all these ads) on page A13. It's not masquerading -- it is clearly labeled as "Special Advertising Feature":

But what the ad is trying to do is trade off what may be for many people some dim recollection of this thing called the Aereo case that got headlines a few months ago when the Supreme Court ruled against the company. The ad artfully misstates what Aereo really was, however:

• Yes, it did use "mini" antennas.
• But they were in a bank of antennas in a huge warehouse in Brooklyn, for instance.
• And they were not so much designed to plug into your TV as to enable you to watch your over-the-air free TV stations on your computer anywhere you wanted to.
• And, finally, consumers have been able to get "free TV" as long as TV has been on the air

There's no evidence I see that this "slick little $88 device" that "pulls in crystal-clear digital TV channels for free with no monthly bills" does any more than a $15 or $25 antenna from Wal-Mart (or other retailers) that you can plug right into the back of your digitally enabled flat screen. And if you happen to have an old analog TV, you can add a digital converter box for about $35, bringing the total cost to maybe $60 instead of almost $100 with shipping and handling. Heck, one of those boxes will even record shows if you plug in a large-enough digital drive.

The ad promoting the "Clear-Cast" and using as a source "Comptek, 8000 Freedom Ave., Canton, Ohio, 44720," is artfully worded to avoid legal issues, things like "consumers who have a slick little micro antenna device will receive all of the major network Hollywood movies broadcast over the air for free." Yep, and you can receive those same movies with one of those cheaper antennas or, if you have an enabled flat screen, artfully shaped aluminum foil shoved into the antenna input, it would seem. Always have been able to. (Any implication that wording might make in the minds of the slightly informed and hugely gullible that they might get things like HBO or even TNT is, of course, an unintended consequence, I'm sure.)

No surprise here. Universal Media Syndicate, the operation behind these questionable ads, has been the subject of numerous complaints.

The only "slick little device" in this ad is the wording.

But at what point does a paper like The State have to make some moral decisions and say enough is enough? You no longer can separate the newsroom from the business, as if you ever really could. And that makes it even more important that news organizations -- newsroom, ad, business and corporate -- examine their morals and ethics when it comes to things like this.

(And I haven't exactly seen press associations rushing to rethink this, either.)

Oh, indeed, the almighty dollar is tempting -- and sorely needed -- at times like this. But if news organizations don't do it with an enlightened sense of what they are about, they will ultimately be almighty dead. Because, you see, even the dullest consumers have flashes of brilliance, and when they do these days, all they have to do is hit a button ...

Journalism ethics: You shoiuld watch and read this

If you teach journalism ethics -- which should mean if you teach any kind of journalism at all -- you should hop on over to this N.Y. Times piece about Richard Jewell and the rush to judgment after the Atlanta Olympic bombings.

In today's environment, I'd recommend it be a discussion point in every class.

(This one has some special significance for me because I and my family stood in that very spot just a day earlier.)

From the NY Times video

Important reads: How HuffPo wins SEO battle; How things went wrong at Fox, CNN

Two important reads:

• Frederic Filloux illustrates why the Huffington Post continues to suck traffic away from trad media on the trads' stories by effective use of search engine optimization.
• Tom Goldstein, publisher of SCOTUSblog, has a very detailed, long timeline on what went wrong in the reporting of the Supreme Court's health care decision. This would be a great reading assignment for any reporting, management or ethics class.

Should journalists ID themselves when covering public events?

Journalist-turned-prof Kenna Griffin of Oklahoma City University has an interesting - and to me, disturbing - blog post recounting how another j-t-p recently said at a public event that journalists should identify themselves before live coverage of such events.

The other j-prof was none other than Jacqui Banaszynski of Missouri. The idea of tweeting, blogging or whatever else passes for live coverage of a public event these days made her "uncomfortable with this kind of stealth world."

Well, yes, it is uncomfortable. But when you appear at a public forum or other public event, c'est la guerre.

As one commenter pointed out he, as do I, usually takes some time to introduce himself to the key players in the room, if nothing else as a courtesy and as long as that's practical. And I generally don't file live - I like to digest things for a few minutes - because I have learned, sometimes painfully, during the years that it is best to engage my brain before my keyboard (and this from someone who started out doing live radio and TV reporting).

Banazynski may express those nagging misgivings that tug at many of us just from a purely human sense that it's probably not a good thing if the world becomes one big "Truman Show." But she also needs to get a dose of reality.

The world, not just journalists, is equipped with smartphones and wireless and the ability to go live from anywhere at about any time. Journalists have no more of an ethical responsibility in those situations to flag themselves than anyone else in the audience who is perfectly capable of performing an act of "journalism."

Perhaps that is the real source of her unease, that "public" events are now truly public.

Does the technology change things? In some cases, yes, but if you somehow felt more comfortable with the old paper-and-pen crowd covering things that your words and actions were not going to be taken out of context or misconstrued, think again.

As Griffin put it:

Any person can live report information from a public happening. This is a fundamental right as a citizen. Therefore, people should be careful not to say things in public that they don’t want mass disseminated, especially in today’s tech-savvy world.

Those are words of wisdom for everyone, not just those in the public eye, however fleeting.

Or, to borrow from the old carpenter's phrase: Think twice, speak once.

Figuring out who we are as journalists

As online journalism moves into a decade when we will see consolidation, and rethinking, and more rewriting of the rules, and more of the Internet being reshaped in business's image, David Sullivan has put up a thought-provoking post about the rules of journalism and how maybe it's time to rethink and retrench a little.

Retrench, as in not go off headlong chasing every rumor that shows up on a website or a blog. Where do we draw the line? There is no percentage in trying to keep up with the whole Internet; its like trying to empty the ocean with a teacup.

The key in the coming decade will be for each of us - individuals and organizations - to figure out what we are and what we stand for, not, as Sullivan says, to try to be most things to all people. Retrench, yes. Withdraw, no.

As Sullivan writes in his discussion of the wild goose chase regarding a Philadelphia Eagles rumor:

[W]e need to stop thinking that we are competing with everyone in the world. We are competing with people who do what we do to gain the readership of people who want to follow what we do. Those are our customers. Other customers will go to other types of information. With every person having a printing press, it has to be that way. There are too many options to cover every bet. We have to figure out what customers we can get and what they want, and not be worried about the customers we won't get.

Correcting Twitter - to delete or not

An excellent conversation is going on at Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard blog given the erroneous information that went out this weekend on Twitter that the Arizona congresswoman had died.

Pick one:
- Do you delete ("scrub") the erroneous information as if it never happened?
- Do you scrub it but put out a correction?
- Do you scrub it but attach make a screenshot of the former tweet so that the erroneous one does not live on "in the wild" but the context is preserved as best you can (though you lose a lot of meta information)?
- Do you retweet the erroneous tweet with the correction appended?

Of course, saying to pick just one is simplistic. It's much more nuanced, taking into account how the speed of propagation has changed many of the old "rules" (which were never followed that well anyway when it comes to corrections).

It's worth reading.

Doing ethics: A nice summary of the pressures we face

Poynter's Steve Myers' lengthy piece about how several media organizations were led astray by a joke photo posted on Twitter nicely summarizes the pressures we face these days.

I was especially struck by this:

"When it comes to something like the tornado," Adrian Chen, who posted the photo on Gawker, told me via e-mail, "you've got to have something up quickly, and you're pressed hard by the knowledge that thousands of people are tweeting about it, basically 'scooping' you in real time. So you have to use pictures from Twitter. "

Unfortunately, I think Chen's "everyone's doing it, we gotta to it" reasoning leaves out the reality that he -- and others manning news desks -- have an even greater responsibility to vet these things. As Chen noted later in the piece:

"Next time, I'll do a bit more digging around Twitter to verify the authenticity of a photo I find there, maybe by contacting the person who posted it, or seeing if others had posted similar pictures," Chen told me. "And I imagine I'll opt for a more plausible -- if less dramatic -- photo."

Uh, yeah. Alex Howard got it right in a follow-up Tweet:

Is Gmail at fault if users FWD flawed stories? Or AT&T if false MMS spread? Wrong msg on semaphore? People duped, not medium

Myers outlines some common-sense ways that Craig Kanalley, traffic and trends editor at Huffington Post, became suspicious about the photo.

Robert Hernandez has more at OJR - some excellent thoughts on speed vs. responsiblity (but also the well-placed admonition against wanting to deprecate social media and its place in the news ecology).

One of the things I find tough as a teacher is creating the true pressure atmosphere I think is needed to teach these things. We can use something like this as a case study, for instance, but often the raw, real-time material needed to make this very real isn't there or goes away (the jokester, for instance, has now put his Twitter account on protected status). How are others approaching that? I don't think the standard case study adequately produces the kinds of escalated pressures reflected in Chen's statement.

Ideas?

How much 'voice' is too much - two interesting perspectives

One of the things I struggle with - and I think I can say I'm not alone among journalists, academics or journalist-academics (jacademics?) - is how to insert enough of a wedge between the old idea of "objectivity" (disclosure - I don't subscribe to that; I prefer fairness because no one can be really objective) and the idea of putting some voice, some fun, into the news product.

The immediate challenge, of course, is to teach how to do it so that the resulting product does not read like some gross disgorgement of self-indulgence, while at the same time acknowledging that as much as it may be a moving target and to some extent a strawman for other grievances, there remains the shadowy figure of "going too far."

A good example is that debate played out in the past week between the New York Times' new public editor, Arthur Brisbane, and Jonathan Weber, editor in chief of the Bay Citizen, which provides content for some of the Times' West Coast editions. (The column in question was one that Weber did on San Francisco city workers' pensions - hey, anyone who can get a rise out of the audience on pension matters has my respect! Interestingly, Brisbane also cites a NYT article by Ron Lieber on public pensions in Colorado as problematic, though I thought Lieber did a nice job of blending voice and fact until the final five grafs, where he starts coloring outside the lines a bit).

I'd recommend you read both columns. (FWIW, my thought is that Matt Bai's column that Brisbane referred to went a little wide of the turn.)
--------

On another matter, read the San Francisco Weekly's outtake on NPR's new blog network, Argo. Very insightful on how NPR is trying to take "blogging" a bit beyond its current form and into the "hard" news realm. Kind of a reverse of the above, given bloggers' "pajama-wearing" image that ignores the vast range of sophistication and expertise out there.

Playing around with the photos in W.Va. - dumb, dumb, dumb

Well, at least we know Photoshop has made it to West Virginia.

Seems a Morgantown newspaper didn't like that a bunch of legislators were standing behind the governor when he signed a bill to toughen penalties on hit-and-run drivers. It just wanted the members of a victim's family, who also were there.

So, poof, no more legislators.

The paper's explanation: It's election year and it doesn't want to run pictures of folks seeking re-election. And besides, it called the picture a "photo illustration."

Like that changes anything. It's a news photo, folks. Not an "illustration." As they say in golf, you play it as it lies, you don't improve your "lie."

So while we know Photoshop has made it across the Ohio River, photo ethics apparently are still a bit behind. But, hey, in these days of struggling newspaper revenues, maybe The Dominion Post (warning, the site is an Olive e-edition that requires a subscription beyond the headlines) has hit on a new revenue stream: photo retouching.

(More on this from Ralph Hanson's blog, including the strange tale of how AP reporter Larry Messina broke this on his blog, then took the story down. No credit to Messina or the AP that he won't comment. I'm betting the D-P complained as an AP member. There are no sacred cows in AP - just members (lol).)

'Unpublishing' - the growing challenge for editors/publishers

I just came across some work by Kathy English, reader's representative for the Toronto Star, in which she looks at the growing number of requests for news organizations to "unpublish" information in their digital archives and on their Web sites.

English did her paper, "The longtail of news,"(PDF) for the AP Managing Editors. It should be required reading for every journalist, but especially every editor. (Here also is an earlier article from English on "Why the Star does not 'unpublish.' ")

It follows up on work that I, Larry Timbs and Will Atkinson did in 2007 in what we think was the first academic study of newspapers' "digital attics." It was presented at the annual Huck Boyd conference, and you can find our paper in the winter 2007 edition of Grassroots Editor.(PDF)

English finds much the same thing we did - there is widespread opposition against unpublishing. But requests seem to be growing. At the time we did our research, more than a quarter of those at community papers and more than half of those at larger papers said they had had requests to remove material from the archives. (Our research was based on responses from 63 editors at Southern Newspaper Association member papers. The response rate was disappointing, but given English's conclusion that this is a growing problem -- enough so that the APME commissioned her study -- I would hope future studies would see greater response.)

English's nine-question survey does not appear to ask directly how often the respondents (110 editors responded nationwide) have had to deal with such requests or the frequency. However, she cites one Gatehouse executive who says that while five years ago such requests were rare, now he deals with them almost daily. (On the other end, a Chicago Sun-Times editor says he rarely deals with such requests.)

She finds more than three-quarters of those who responded would consider unpublishing in some circumstances. That indicates a bit of a softening from the 95 percent who supported the statement in our study that changes should not be made unless there is clear error. But both studies still find strong opposition to unpublishing overall.

It is still disappointing to find in English's study that barely half of the news organizations she surveyed had some kind of policy for dealing with such requests. Our study found policies at about a third -- but this issue is too important, and growing, for any organization not to have considered what to do. Our paper, more than English's, goes into some detail on the legal horizon (and a principle, quickly disappearing, called "practical obscurity" - more in a 2008 NY Times article), and it is not at all certain that the legal system won't weigh in on such things. (A higher court later overturned the order to remove the stories from the Kansas City Star Web site, but we are likely to see more such cases.)

What our study does that English's doesn't is pose four scenarios to the editors and measure their reactions. I think you would find the results interesting.

The problem, of course, is not confined to the U.S. See this U.K. editor's ruminations from earlier this year and readers' responses  [2011: This link is now dead]. And in 2007, the same year as our study, one professor told the New York Times that archives perhaps should be programmed to eventually "forget" some information, much as people do. Brad Dennison, the Gatehouse executive interviewed by English, haswas, according to her paper, decided that instituting a pilot project at some papers in which most police blotter items would disappear from Gatehouse archives six months after their first publication (though he knows they may well live on in other cached parts of the Web).

English points out that police blotter reports posted online pose the potential for increasing problems. I can tell you from personal experience as founder of Hartsville Today, a community news site affiliated with the local twice-weekly paper, that such discussions have been a hot-button issue. (Unfortunately, a system crash late last year wiped out all the previous threads, but I think I may post something on the site asking for updated thoughts.) The thing that seems to infuriate people is that news organizations are willing to publish blotter items but then seldom follow up on the outcome to produce a complete record. (And, even if they do, they seldom use the ability to digitally link the stories.)

I think English has some good recommendations in her best practices section. That includes having a clear policy and making it known to the public. I especially like her recommendation that unpublish decisions should be made by consensus. As she notes, this provides a way for editors and publishers to deflect requests from powerful people and institutions. I can think of nothing worse than, if a news organization does unpublish, it gets a reputation of toadying to the powerful and ignoring the powerless.

About 50 non-journalists also answered English's survey, and she says most supported the resistance to "unpublish." I think it may be time to do some more extensive research in this area -- and then repeat it periodically. I have a feeling this is not going to be a static subject.

Also worth looking at:
This Jan. 5 article on Walletpop from Jason Cochran about newspaper archives in general being in jeopardy -- and with it major chunks of community history -- as the industry contracts.

Convergence Conference: Thursday quick hits

Quickly wrapping up some other interesting sessions:

Thom Baggerman, Capital had an interesting two-part presentation, first what is the archetype of a good multimedia site and second how is that being carried out by newspapers and in cases where there is newspaper and TV co-ownership in a market. His initial observations:
• People want control over their media
• Convergence requires "tool-neutral" storytellers
His archetype is the Las Vegas Sun. Because it is an insert in the larger Review, the Sun's been able to concentrate on the Web. "I have not seen many other sites that offer up their media so willingly for sharing." He says the NY Times and USAToday come close. But he hit the Washington Post for requiring registration to see comments, hits the LA Times for putting comments into a blog.

He also looked at six cases that he said rose to the top of cross-ownership examples, but he found little content sharing, especially video. The cases he looked at: Dallas, Tampa, Phoenix, South Florida, and Dayton and Columbus in Ohio.

Serena Williams of Arizona State detailed some of the struggles she's had in defining news quality and the extent to which citizen journalists follow it. To some extent she has concluded our traditional definitions of news quality needs a re-examination. She also noted that few news organizations explain (where it can be easily found) the principles/ethics under which they operate.

Traditional definition: large number of sources, diversity of viewpoints, identified sources and local information.

Citizen journalists tend to have more stories with a single viewpoint, but she wonders in the age of aggregation if this is necessarily a bad thing.

She also says there is a lot of research out there that can help as we look into citizen journalism – all the research that has been done into community journalism. Smaller papers tend to emphasize consensus over conflict and interpretation over straight reporting, she said, all useful in looking at citizen journalism.

There was a really good session on legal and regulatory issues that I could write several posts on, but time is pressing. So let me whet your whistle with two quick observations. I hope we'll be able to get more in the Convergence Newsletter:

Woodrow Hartzog of North Carolina, representing a team of five researchers that has carved off a piece of a larger project, said it might be counterintuitive, but that group has concluded that sites lacking clear terms of service tend to actually discourage outside contributions. The problem is that without a good TOS, privacy and copyright issues are murky.

Jeff Wilkinson of United International College (and one of my co-authors on "Principles of Convergent Journalism") says we are entering an age where the definition of "original" will become unclear. In short, if so much is on the Web and accessible, it may be impossible for creators not to have had contact with the same underlying patterns/structures that could show up in their work, even if they don't do it consciously. He calls it the "curse of the long tail."

Hope to have some more from Friday's sessions, but will be running to catch a plane after my panel.

Read 'em and retch

The rash of e-mails about S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford's disappearance have been released. Among them are some media missives that will make you retch.

http://media.charleston.net/2009/pdf/govstaffemails_0713009.pdf

It runs almost 600 pages and 11MB.

Among my favorites is David Gregory of "Meet the Press": So coming on Meet the Press lets you frame the conversation how you really want to ... and then move on.

And Micael Ryan, editorial page editor of the Augusta Chronicle: Y'all are making it tough on those of us who support the governor.

New views of plagiarism in a new age

If you want a good give and take -- and some eye-opening comments on how some folks view plagiarism in a completely different light in the social media age -- check out this from early last week about Chris Anderson's upcoming "Free" and its apparent liberal use of Wikipedia entries and some other sources without credit:

http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/

The comments are the most interesting.

Newspapers' digital archives pose ethical challenges

Interesting story in the Chronicle of Higher Education (free area) this week on how college alumni, including former student journalists are trying to rewrite history by asking that embarrassing material -- including stories they have written -- be taken down from college publication Web sites.

So time for a little self-promotion here.

Larry Timbs, Will Atkinson and I did some of the first exploration two years ago into the ethical and operational issues raised by newspaper Web sites and the digitization of newspaper archives. We asked newspaper editors a wide range of questions, including some relating to four possible situations in which someone might ask that their picture or a story naming them be taken down.

You can find How America's newspapers handle (or don't handle) their 'digital attics': An investigation into ethical, legal and privacy issues emerging from publications' Web archives at the Grassroots Editor Web site. (The paper was presented at the 13th Newspapers and Community Building symposium.)

If you want the direct link to the PDF, here it is.

Fair use in video - best practices

The American University Center for Social Media has put out a "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video."

I could do without the "Code of" wording -- I think anything online that smacks of a "code" is destined for a rocky time at the least; this isn't a code-fearin' bunch. But, having said that, it's a useful site for going over some of the ins and outs of fair use for video, which is a bit different than for text.

The nut graf:
More and more, video creation and sharing depend on the ability to use and circulate existing copyrighted work. Until now, that fact has been almost irrelevant in business and law, because broad distribution of nonprofessional video was relatively rare. ... As practices spread and financial stakes are raised, the legal status of inserting copyrighted work into new work will become important for everyone.

The site has six fairly plain-spoken but well-explained principles, all of which it says are rooted in "transformativeness."

1. Commenting on or critiquing copyrighted material
2. Using copyrighted material for illustration or example
3. Capturing copyrighted material incidentally or accidentally
4. Reproducing, reposting or quoting in order to memorialize, preserve, or rescue an experience, an event, or a cultural phenomenon (that one alone ought to clue you in that there are some heavyweight lawyers on the group that put this together)
5. Copying, reposting and recirculating a work or part of a work for purposes of launching a discussion
6. Quoting in order to recombine elements to make a new work that depends for its meaning on (often unlikely) relationships between the elements

And there is this good advice:
Inevitably, considerations of good faith come into play in fair use analysis. One way to show good faith is to provide credit or attribution, where possible, to the owners of the material being used.

A full PDF version is also available.

Andy Dickinson has a good follow-up on the state of the law on the UK side of the pond. And there are some differences, especially that "fair dealing" does not apply to photos ther. (Why should I care, you say? Because digital media have this nasty property of not respecting borders.) Definitely follow his link to the BBC editors' post on questions about using pictures from Facebook, etc.

Blog of note

My colleague David Weintraub, who occupies the same nook as I do oh so far, far away from the main office, has been blogging for Black Star. Good stuff, especially if you are into teaching -- or learning -- visual communications.

David is an accomplished photographer. His latest post (yeah, yeah, try not to look at the date, OK; I said I was behind) is a good recap of the joys, mostly, of teaching the beginning and advanced photography classes. Some good thoughts, I think, that apply far beyond just photo classes:

• Here's the take-away message for me from all this: given something fun and creative to do, students will figure out the technical challenges -- this is their reward for being so-called digital natives. They still need to be taught the broad concepts: developing a story arc, shooting sequences and details, editing for maximum impact, and using audio effectively. (David was talking about having them do slide shows.)
  
• The students themselves told me they need more training in basic photographic principles -- good old f-stops and shutter speeds, lighting ratios, depth of field, etc. I think I've succumbed to the "set it on auto" syndrome. ... The fact is, the current crop of auto-everything digital SLRs are so good that you can hardly go wrong by using the auto setting. But what I heard from my students was instructive: they weren't learning much from letting the camera do the thinking. They wanted to be in control and, if need be, learn from their mistakes. (That's something we all can remember as more and more of this stuff just becomes turning to a site on the Web, be it audio, video, slide shows, site creation, etc.)
• I've found that teaching is a delicate balancing act: sometimes you provide as much information as possible, and sometimes you stand back and get out of the students' way. Knowing when to do which is a challenge.

Also, read two of his previous posts:

• What do you tell students who want to be photographers in the age of everyone-can-do-it photography? (Hint, that they need to realize they are not just photographers, but visual problem solvers. And I like David's implicit endorsement for why many vis comm students should take my editing class: They may also be called upon to write captions, press releases, articles, and produce infographics.)
• A solid piece exploring the bounds of ethical practices in visual communication.

As I told David, my only quibble isn't with him, but with Black Star, which has the blog set up rather weirdly. There is no way I have found to click on a link and see all the posts David has written. No archive of past posts, no clickable link on his name. And if you go into the main blog, rising.blckstar.com, and click backward, I'll be danged if I see any of his posts. Unless I'm being exceedingly dense (highly likely), Black Star is running afoul of some key points of the blogging ethos. It's also making it hard to know when to go to the site to read Weintraub since the RSS feed is of the main blog only, not broken down by contributor.

On the other hand, Black Star is using Joomla, which brilliantly is one of the few content management systems that allows you to immediately download a PDF of a post (yes, it's not that hard to print to PDF these days, but this one is formatted correctly the first time -- ever run into the fun of printing some sites in a Mozilla browser? -- and is quick). Again, a small quibble that so few sites seem to get -- include a URL in that printout. Maybe I want to hand it off to someone else who wants to see the thing digitally or who wants to cite it down the road.

Maybe they missed the session on anonymous sources?

I find myself disturbed today as I finally get around to reading an otherwise good Washington Post profile of Ben Scott, "Net Neutrality's Quiet Crusader."

Right there, 10 grafs down in Cecilia Kang's article, is this graf:

Free Press's critics -- who spoke on condition of anonymity because discussions on net neutrality policy are ongoing -- say the group often oversimplifies complex technical issues, dismissing the importance of some network management practices that block spam and pornography, for example. Free Press is also not the populist group it makes itself out to be, critics noted, partnering with corporate interests when it suits its goals, as it did with Google on net neutrality. Also, they said the group is not as boot-strapped as it may appear, with donors such as billionaire George Soros and singer Barbra Streisand.


Let's accept the argument, for a second, that absolutely no one -- not a one -- of anyone who is on the other side of this debate would go on the record. Still, whatever happened to the idea that you don't use anonymous sources for ad hominem attacks. You may use them for hard information. You may use them to explain their side's position (sometimes, though we overdo that). But you don't use them to launch brickbats at the other side.

That's Journalism 101.

Don't give me the "balance" argument -- that's he said-she said journalism. Doing so anonymously lets the scoundrels off the hook. (And besides, Kang essentially parroted the funding stuff in the next graf, though pointing out that its lobbying budget is far less than the budgets of its opponents.)

So if Kang *really* *wasn't* *able* in this large nation to find anyone who would go on the record on a topic that has had life for some time now, then maybe the only sentence in that story should have been:

None of the Free Press's critics would go on the record with their criticism.

Sometimes, it's actually journalism to say to the other side -- especially when the other side is no babe in the woods when it comes to working the system: You want your voice heard, then speak up on the record.

(For the record, nothing here is ideological. I'd write the same thing were it Scott anonymously taking a shot at the other side.)

(This is also my monthly Carnival of Journalism entry; the Carnival this month is hosted by Will Sullivan at Journerdism.)

Dwyre pens a must-read column

If you read nothing else this week, read L.A. Times sports columnist Bill Dwyre's take on the controversy about a Golf Channel anchor's ill-advised comment about Tiger Woods and the firing of a Golfweek editor for putting a noose on the cover promoting the story inside.

Dwyre takes it beyond a single incident, seeing a parable of our times. Aside from tossing it aside as yet another rant at the machine, think about his larger meaning. An excerpt:

We blog before we report, when it should be the other way around.

We write more about ourselves than we do about our subjects. We have Facebook and YouTube, and we see the world as being all about us, on all topics, every day. News isn't news unless we agree with it.

We are afraid of quiet. Our children don't see the world around them in our minivans. They watch TV.

The editor of Golfweek who put the noose on the cover probably went home that night, thinking he had done what his bosses and the world around him kept telling him -- to think outside the box, be creative, groundbreaking, innovative.

There is a fine line between those things and stupidity, of course.

Our society has a massive appetite for drama, and little for reality. We read about Britney Spears when we need to read about Afghanistan. And the media, which has the mandate -- and the constitutional right -- to lead us from this abyss, are all too often not doing so. Media, which once led public opinion, now all too often follow it.

Then, when you are done, go over to Columbia Journalism Review and spend some time with Lawrence Lanahan's cover story, "Secrets of the City." Lanahan, in looking at this final season of "The Wire" and what it says about journalism, the myriad forces we are dealing with, and the Herculean task of trying to convey the reality that is the modern metropolis, does a good job of not turning the chasm between David Simon, creator of "The Wire," and his former employer, the Baltimore Sun, into a simplistic he said-they said or into an overblown morality play.

He explores the conflict in a way that helps sketch out and make you think about these broader journalistic forces and conflicts of vision and purpose.

If you don't read the article at least twice, you're not getting all of it.

(Unfortunately, like "The Sopranos," I'll have to wait till "The Wire" comes to A&E or a similar channel. Yeah, I'm cheap. I have a problem with paying $80 a month for cable, so I don't get the premium tier and don't get HBO, and I haven't been able to crib an invite to someone else's feed.)

Smith gives his side

A few days ago I wrote about the troubles W. Thomas Smith Jr., an occasional colleague here at USC, has run into over his reporting from Lebanon.

Smith has now posted his response on his Web site in two parts. It relies heavily on an unedited e-mail from Toni Nissi, general coordinator in Lebanon for the International Lebanese Committee for UN Security Council Resolution 1559 and a further defense by Tom Harb, the group's general secretary. I encourage you to read both parts -- the first laying out the facts as Smith sees them and the second detailing the interaction with other media as this developed.