Poynter Institute weighs in on St. Pete Times‘ Mug Shots

Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins for his take on the St. Petersburg Times‘ Mug Shots website. Poynter, in case you didn’t know, owns the Times. Tompkins was critical of the site and brought up some pertinent ethical issues:

I think there’s some serious concerns this kind of coverage raises … How do you make it right for those who are found to be not guilty? … Maybe we don’t have an obligation, but I think we do.

Tompkins explained that he isn’t opposed to posting an individual’s mug shot. However:

I just want to make sure there’s a reason to post it, and not just do it because we can. That’s never a good reason to put something on the Web, just because we can.

Poynter also has archived Thursday’s chat on the ethics of posting mug shots online. Matt Waite, one of the developers of the Mug Shots site, explained to Poynter’s ethics faculty Kelly McBride its function as journalism:

The main journalistic purpose of this feature is that we’ve given transparency to the grinding wheels of the justice system. The jail population is no longer an abstraction. You can look at them, as they come in. These people are your neighbors. The jail, the deputies that run it, the courts that have to deal with these folks, you pay for it. So there is a purpose to showing that to people. I would also add that people have said they found great value in being able to look at people who said they lived in a specific ZIP code because they only know their neighbors by sight.

Social networking class at Poynter

Just a quick alert: Poynter Institute will be hosting a live webinar called Social Networks: The New Architecture of the Web. Paul Gillin, a content marketing consultant, will lead this virtual class, which will explain:

• Why online “friends” are the foundation of social networks’ appeal
• How trusted sources are migrating from mass media to friends’ networks
• From examples of news organizations that are leveraging social networks to extend their influence
• What newspapers can do right now to tap into emerging communities

The webinar is scheduled for April 14, 2-3 p.m. The cost is $24.95.

A paid content idea from Poynter

Roy Peter Clark, senior faculty member at Poynter Institute, offers his two cents for yet another way newspapers can earn revenue — by devoting a corner of the paper to poems:

It will cost the poet –- or a patron — $100 to have the work published before thousands and thousands of readers, many, many more than reads the typical poetry journal. …
… Perhaps a bookseller or wealthy patron of the arts could be persuaded to sponsor the space in the paper, attaching a good name to the work of community poets. But wait, there’s more!

I especially like this part:

Poynter is there in Rocky times

Poynter Institute is offering the Rocky Mountain News’ former journalists career coaching. Most of the 14 Poynter faculty listed are making themselves available at various times next week, March 2-6.

After 149 years, the Rocky Mountain News closed up shop today.

New York Times: Get it right before you get it first

New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt was a credit to his paper this past weekend when he essentially admitted that the Times screwed up in publishing anonymous quotes in a story about Caroline Kennedy’s withdrawal from consideration for the Senate seat in New York:

On Jan. 22, the day after Kennedy withdrew, [Times reporter] Hakim received one of the calls from the [Gov. David] Paterson camp, and at 2:52 p.m., an article appeared on the paper’s Web site under the headline, “Taxes and a Housekeeper Are Said to Derail Kennedy’s Bid.” It quoted the anonymous source as saying that Paterson “never had any intention of picking Kennedy because it was clear that she wasn’t ready for prime time. She had botched her rollout. She was unprepared. She clearly had no policy experience and couldn’t handle the pressure of the public stage.” The article had no more information about the tax and housekeeper problems than was in the headline.

As Hoyt explains, Times staff felt the pressure to keep up with the New York Post, which had just posted a story about Kennedy nine minutes earlier. In its haste, the Times did a disservice to Kennedy and its readers.

But Mathew Ingram, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab, saw the gaffe and subsequent reader reaction as a case of news business “evolving online in real time“:

But to me, the Kennedy story evolved exactly as many stories evolve in real-time online. … Readers complained to Hoyt within minutes of the story appearing, as did some other NYT editors, and as a result the story was broadened and more fact-checking was done.

That to me is a success.

It is indeed a positive that more fact-checking was done as a result of reader and editor complaints, and that the story was enhanced with quotes disputing the source’s account. But that doesn’t mitigate the basic cause of those complaints: that the Times had violated its own Confidential News Sources Policy:

We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack. If pejorative opinions are worth reporting and cannot be specifically attributed, they may be paraphrased or described after thorough discussion between writer and editor. The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source.

Hoyt quotes Bob Steele, ethicist at Poynter Institute, who sums up the issue correctly in my opinion:

“Competitive fervor is not a justifiable ethical value.”

EveryBlock’s creator says “follow your passion”

I’ve put up a couple of posts about EveryBlock, here and here. Today, I found David Cohn’s brief interview with EveryBlock creator Adrian Holovaty at the Poynter Institute. Go to Aggregation is Creation at NewsInnovation to watch their talk.

Toward the end of the discussion, Holovaty offers advice for computational journalists, which I think could apply to journalists of all stripes: “Pick something you’re passionate about, and make a website about it.”

New York Times: Farewell sweet print?

What would a post-print New York Times look like? In the current issue of The Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn asks that question and offers ways the Gray Lady could thrive in an online-only world.

Much of what Hirschorn proposes — a mix of original reporting with aggregation and outside news sources — is a model that should be increasingly familiar to news outlets forced to cut back their newsrooms as they contend with shrinking ad revenues and smaller circulation rates.

Had Hirschorn’s article been written about any number of Your Hometown local dailies, it’s unlikely it would have caused more than a single ripple across the vast oceans of the World Wide Web. (How’s that for an inappropriate metaphor?)

But our nation’s most storied newspaper? Its print demise is a scenario Hirschorn knows is loaded with drama and import: