Highlighting dangers of citizen journalism, Utah mayor uses fake name to report on his city's "good news" | Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

Dean Wright on Online Journalism Ethics

In the following video, Journalist Dean Wright gives advice on "Transparency" and how "Citizen Journalists" can gain the trust of their readers. I think this is very useful information. Your thoughts?

Lila Rose vs. Planned Parenthood

This is what I did my Undercover Ethics paper on. A young anti-abortion activist named Lila Rose has walked into numerous Planned Parenthood's, executing sting operations by carrying a hidden camera and posing to be an impregnated minor involved in sex trafficking. The point of these undercover operations is to expose unethical behavior that is going on at Planned Parenthood. What do you think? Are her efforts ethical?

A Simple Ethics Problem: A Naked Guy in a College Newspaper

College editor defends running uncensored photos of streaker Jim Romenesko | Nov. 9, 2011 WNCT.com | The East Carolinian On Tuesday, the student newspaper at East Carolina University in Greenville, S.C. ran photos of the streaker who ran across the field

Here's a Tool to Enliven and Enrich your Term Paper, Adding Currency

How to use Storify as a reporting tool

by Mallary Jean TenorePublished Dec. 28, 2010 6:08 am

Zombie Journalism
Storify has been getting a lot of buzz lately as a new tool that lets you pull in various elements of social media to build a story. On the Storify backend, you can enter a headline or a summary and search for tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube videos and other elements to tell your story and then reorganize the elements and add text to give them more context. You can also let the people in your story know it exists so that they can help it go viral.

In a post on her Zombie Journalism blog, TBD’s Mandy Jenkins outlined 10 ways journalists can use this new tool. Here are some of them:

• To curate topical content. NYU Studio 20’s East Village, for instance,used Storify when creating SocialDiningNYC, a site that features curated information about New York City restaurants.

• To create a social media/multimedia narrative. Jenkins used Storify to make sense of a story involving a death outside of a D.C. nightclub. The story had a lot of twists and turns, so she used Storify to illustrate the narrative in tweets, photos and documents.

• To organize your live tweets into a story. Michael Margolis of GetStoriedrecently did this. Jenkins pointed out that reporters who live tweet government meetings, press conferences and other events could use Storify to display their tweets and then weave in quotes and anecdotes to help fill out the story.

Mark Luckie of 10,000 Words also wrote a good piece on Storify and explainedhow journalists and newsrooms are using the tool.

AP Talks about the "Objectivity Ethics" of Retweeting (Thank You, Poynter Institute from Whence This Came)

Associated Press
The Associated Press has added a new entry on retweeting to its social media guidelines. Staffers are reminded to keep their opinions to themselves.

Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day.

Disclaimers — like “retweets do not constitute endorsements” — do not protect AP staffers if they violate these guidelines.

Previously, the guidelines — which were last updated in July — said simply that staffers “are welcome to retweet and share material posted by official AP-branded accounts on social networking sites (e.g. @AP, @APStylebook, etc.” Read the full update below, from Tom Kent, AP’s deputy managing editor for standards and production.

RETWEETING

Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you’re relaying. For instance:

RT @jonescampaign smith’s policies would destroy our schools

RT @dailyeuropean at last, a euro plan that works bit.ly/xxxxx.

These kinds of unadorned retweets must be avoided.

However, we can judiciously retweet opinionated material if we make clear we’re simply reporting it, much as we would quote it in a story. Colons and quote marks help make the distinction:

RT Jones campaign now denouncing smith on education: @jonescampaign smith’s policies would destroy our schools

RT big European paper praises euro plan: @dailyeuropean “at last, a euro plan that works” bit.ly/xxxxx.

These cautions apply even if you say on your Twitter profile that retweets do not constitute endorsements.

Photojournalism Ethics

This photo was taken in 1975 in Boston by Stanley J. Forman. It won the Pulitzer prize in 1976. The photo shows a woman and child falling from a building during a fire when the fire escape gave way right at the moment a fireman's ladder reached them. We assume that both the woman and child are about to fall to their death. Turns out, the woman died as soon as she hit the ground and the child survived because she landed on the woman's stomach. What is more chilling about this photo then a photo of the end result? Would you have published this photo? Is it any more or less ethical to publish a photo showing the last moment before death than of death itself?

Epilogue: Forman's work paved the way for Boston and other states to mandate tougher fire safety codes.

-Stellar Cassidy