Managing user-generated content

How much attention should a news organization pay to the comments on its Web site? Should comments from users ever drive coverage? Is it ever appropriate to shut off comments altogether? BBC news manager Peter Horrocks raises these questions in a thoughtful examination of the issues surrounding user-generated content. Horrocks [...]

Archives pose digital dilemma

How should news organizations handle requests to alter their online archives? Most just say ‘no,’ according to a survey of newspaper executives, which found that 95% of respondents consider their print and digital archives to be a “historical record” that should not be changed. As one respondent put it:
There have been several cases [...]

Graphic video concerns

A police chase leads to a head-on collision. Two people are killed. And it’s all live on TV. It’s happened before, and it always sparks a debate about how stations decide what to air and when. This time, it happened in Phoenix when police were chasing a suspected bank robber and [...]

Aggressive or offensive?

The case of KDFW-TV reporter Rebecca Aguilar should raise questions in TV newsrooms everywhere. Aguilar was suspended after a parking-lot interview she did with a 70-year-old man who had killed two people trying to break into his home-based business in separate incidents.

After viewers complained vociferously, Aguilar was suspended. But the station’s actions are [...]

Declaring war on errors

The founder of the Web site Regret the Error (slogan: Mistakes Happen), Craig Silverman, has a new book out by the same name. It’s not just a compendium of hilarious newspaper corrections, although there are plenty of them, including these winners:
* “We spelt Morecambe, the town in Lancashire, wrong again on page 2, G2, [...]

Ethics in translation

How do you use sound bites from an interview with someone whose native language is not English? The standard approach is to have their answers translated and use a voiceover for the bite you decide to include. That sounds simple enough, but it can get complicated, as Rich Beckman points out in NPPA’s [...]

Video veracity

We often talk about the opportunity multimedia reporting provides to tell more of a story - the Web, for example, is a perfect medium for providing audiences access to source documents, links to more information, etc. Now, KCNC-TV in Denver has found a way to use the Web to be more transparent in its [...]

Journalistic suicide

A cable news anchor in New York has lost his job for making a crank call to one of the station’s talk shows. A Washington Post reporter has been disciplined for sending an angry email. Both journalists expressed their personal opinions in ways they clearly should not have.
According to the New York Daily [...]

Are social networks fair game for journalists?

Social networking sites now host billions of pictures and comments, a few of which might be relevant in covering a news story. Can the media use them? In the October 2007 NPPA News Photographer magazine, Brian McDermott reports that different newsrooms answer that question differently. KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh used photos from a [...]

What do you owe your newsmakers?

There’s no doubt that your approach to a story may change in the process of reporting it, but do you need to let the people you’re covering know that, too? 
For me, this question was raised by a little brouhaha involving a student journalist and her professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.  The reporter, Carla Babb, did a story that the John [...]