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Setting limits online
One of the more disturbing things to turn up since the recent church fires has surfaced on YouTube. It’s a video showing The Memmorial Baptist church as it burns with Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” playing as accompaniment.
Ordinarily, we would jump at the opportunity to provide our readers and users with a link that helps tell a story, and upsetting as this may be, it is part of the story. But providing that link wasn’t even a matter for discussion when it came up during our editors’ meeting this week.
Still, this illustrates how many traditional newsrooms have been swimming through a tidal wave of transition — and we’re no exception. With all the talk about convergence, those of us in the print media think it’s incredibly exciting to provide a video or break a story immediately rather than waiting for the presses to roll, hours hence. The Internet means we can give you access to material we’ve never been able to provide and, like most journalists, we want you to have any and all information available to help you understand a story.
But it also means we’re faced with a whole new set of ethical questions. Suddenly, we’re not only swimming in that tidal wave of new capabilities, we’re awash in new responsibilities.
This one was fairly easy. Others have not been as simple. Do we upload an autopsy file as we report on a controversial death? Do we provide e-mails obtained to illustrate the facts of an investigation? In cases like this, the potential for invasion of privacy is compounded in ways we never imagined.
In the past, none of this would’ve been considered. Now, it presents bothersome questions that disturb a print journalist’s comfort zone. We will continue to examine and re-examine our decision-making processes, but we’re finding that, when media capabilities grow at warp speed, it important to install a governor on our own accelerator.
What about the video? Given our belief in free speech, we won’t argue the producer’s right to put something like this online, but you can bet that we will argue our right not to endorse it by providing a link.
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