Ethical challenges as common as the common cold

Ethical dilemmas grab onto the pantleg of a humble journalist just like a child wanting to be held. Yes, they are always there. No, they do not care what you are doing. Yes, they want you to pay attention to them. No, they will not go away if you ignore them.

That's only gonna make them louder.

Understanding ethics in theory is one thing, but in the field, at the desk, it's quite another. Just to "seek truth and report it," which is where the Society of Professional Journalists recommends you begin,  raises all kinds of issues. Like, who's truth? And, report it...how?

And, if you don't know what I mean about "who's truth," just start asking questions. What is the "truth" of red to someone who is color blind?

Mix this with the second major principle on the SPJ's list, which is to  "minimize harm", and you really have to start thinking. What if it's true, but it's going to be harmful to someone? What if that person's harm is balanced by a service being brought to many, aka: "the greater good?"

                                                                                                                jmichaelrios


Guardian journalist David Banks told a great story back in October about the ethical dilemmas he faced some 20 years ago when asked to find and approach the family of a killed soldier before they even knew the soldier was dead. 

"The dilemmas came thick and fast - accept the job or not, given the family had not been officially informed? Once I had found them, should I contact the Foreign Office first, or knock on the door? And if you do go ahead and knock, what on earth do you say to a family in those circumstances?"

Banks told the story to his readers in a great way, too. He posted the story assignment and subsequent sequence of events in real time on his blog and Twitter, and challenged readers to follow along and talk about what they would have done in his shoes. It makes for a great read.

Of course, there are many more real-life stories of ethical dilemmas out there. Indiana University has a fascinating collection of ethics case studies here.

The SPJ's code of ethics, as mentioned above, has been the industry standard for many years. But as the new, digital landscape created the need for a new, or expanded, code of ethics? Stephen J.A. Ward thinks so. Here he is, writing at the University of Wisconsin's Center for Journalism Ethics.

Faculty at Santa Clara University also feel that some new ethics codes are necessary for the modern media world.

The codes of ethics of many big media organizations and associations are collected by the Pew Research Journalism Project here.

Finally, for anyone interested in following ethics in and within the news industry, iMedia has some entertaining coverage.

Getting the whole picture

For anyone wondering why we are taking up the study of photography in what is primarily a writing class, this article on iClarified should provide a pretty good answer to your question. As stated, in the spring of last year,management at one of the country's major newspapers, the Chicago Sun Times, laid off all of their photographers and started training their reporters to take pictures with iPhones.

The move was, of course, met with derision from the remaining staff, and who can blame them. Should writers really be responsible for collecting images? Do they have the skills and the know-how to do so?

                                                                                                               Michael Boccieri
                                                                                                           

Apparently, they better. As the Pew Research Center reported last November, nearly half of all visual journalist jobs at U.S. newspapers have been eliminated since 2000. And reporters are increasingly being asked to take up the slack.

This fits right in with the idea of "convergence" in the textbook for class. Of course, that convergence is happening not just in the media, but in the journalists themselves. A skilled reporter entering the workforce now increasingly needs to be able to take a decent picture, design a page, and put together a compelling video. Sounds like a lot more than writing, doesn't it?

Many of the same skills that we are leaning in this class will come to bear on your photographs, however. We need many of the same qualities: transparency, truthfulness, immediacy, relevance and context. And even more so than writing, photography presents the journalist with a great chance to capture and share the emotion of a situation.

This Slide Share by Nithin Kalorth presents a simple, informative introduction to photojournalism. It is certainly worth taking a look at.

In class on Thursday, we'll hear about what makes a great photo and how to capture the perfect image. Before then, it would be helpful to become familiar with some of the work being produced today. Take a look at some of these photo galleries, just to get a sense of what's possible.

http://greatphotojournalism.com/

http://www.americanphotomag.com/photo-gallery/2012/12/2012-photojournalism-year

http://www.noupe.com/photography/35-powerful-photos-that-each-tells-a-story.html

http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/20-photojournalists-fantastic_b354

For anyone looking to take things a little further, this e-book by Adam Westbrook breaks down the finer points of multi-media journalism and offers some great pointers.

Data journalism

The emerging field of data journalism is full of fascinating possibilities. For those who are new to the idea, Simon Rogers, a former news editor at The Guardian and now data editor at Twitter, is a great place to start. Rogers is a boots-on-the-ground storyteller who has found his way to the forefront of what is quickly becoming the standard bearer for investigative journalism. He's got a great facility for describing what he does in this Tedx Talk from 2012.






I have to say I love data journalism for the infographics you can produce. Sites like
visual.ly allow the user to plug in data sets to create great looking posters, like this one about the apparently wonderful pineapple. To throw all this information about a fruit into a 20-inch article would likely net a pretty dull result, but doing it this way speaks of so many possibilities.


Data journalism largely involves mining huge sets of information to produce meaningful statistics, uncover trends and discover hidden stories. For a while data journalism was the province of coders, but that is changing, and changing fast. The emergence of apps and other online tools that scrape data, mine data or turn data into great looking inforgraphics is, as Rogers refers too, democratizing the field.

Here's a list of some links that might be useful for anyone wanting to take the study of data mining a little further:

Vocativ is an exciting news organization using data mining and other innovative technologies in their work.  The magazine Fast Company did a fascinating piece on what the group does.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists  is another hard-hitting group of reporters who are making use of data mining technology. They've got some great tips and tutorials on computer assisted reporting here.

The National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting offers courses, data and services such as cleaning, mapping and analyzing data.

Some tools and writings about tools:

http://blog.ouseful.info/2008/10/14/data-scraping-wikipedia-with-google-spreadsheets/

http://gijn.org/resources/data-journalism/

http://sabcmedialib.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-data-mining-tools-for.html

http://www.scoop.it/t/data-mining-for-journalists

http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/211954/10-digital-tools-journalists-can-use-to-
improve-their-reporting-storytelling/

http://truth-out.org/news/item/15306-five-great-online-tools-for-mining-public-records

https://scraperwiki.com/

http://www.journaliststoolbox.org/

https://investigativedashboard.org/

Finally, the Data Journalism Handbook  offers a wealth of information, including this great list  of data journalism examples.

crown of thorns

In class we are reviewing the inverted pyramid style of writing, and as i was thinking earlier this evening about teaching it i found a great explanation by Jennnifer Dukes Lee.

"In essence," Lee says, "we are giving away the ending in the opening paragraph, reversing what storytellers have done for centuries when they stack facts chronologically. It goes against our instincts as writers."

 Lee lays the style out so directly and succinctly. I only aim to speak so clearly.
Lee titles herself  "A storyteller. Grace dweller."  That is a graceful description.

Most of Lee's other posts are quite Christian oriented. I scrolled across this post from Romans 8:1 just as, on Netflix, Harvey Keitel goes through an extreme and shocking state of intoxicated gnosis in Bad Lieutenant.  Sync!

It makes sense, though.  The movie is about grace and redemption.

Can the Bad Lieutenant find redemption? The very question troubles him to his core.

They live!

UFOs are everywhere today!

At least in my news feed they are...

First comes a report from an investigation at  London's Heathrow Airport, where a pilot says he swerved out of the way of a metallic, cigar-shaped UFO last summer.The United Kingdom Airprox Board, part of the country's Civil Aviation Authority, investigated the incident and found as follows, according to London's Daily Mail:

"'Although only supposition, members opined that this may have been due to a combination of a possible reflection of the low sun off one of the aircraft to the west, and of the pilot's head movement as he looked forward.

'It was decided that, although the reflection theory had some merit, the overall dearth of information relating to the event rendered and meaningful finding impossible.'"

In other words, no explanation at all. Hmmm.....

                                                                                                        www.allnewsweb.com

Even more intriguing was this piece  by Travis Gettys at The Raw Story about a former Canadian defense minister who says space aliens live among us but won't give us most of their technical know-how until we disarm our nuclear weapons. 

Defense minister Paul Hellyer, originally speaking to Russia Today (maybe not the most reliable journalistic organization, but you can't take the guy's credentials away, and there he is in the video yammering away) was quoted saying:

“We have a long history of UFOs and of course there has been a lot more activity in the last few decades, since we invented the atomic bomb, and they are very concerned about that and the fact that we might use it again, and because the cosmos is a unity and it affects not just us but other people in the cosmos,” Hellyer said. “They are very much afraid that we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again, and this would be very bad for us and for them, as well.”

Turns out, the Russia Today interview is quite in-depth, and includes warnings of galactic war and all sorts of sci-fi scenario stuff, aliens living on the planet for thousands of years, and etc. The entertaining interview contains many gems from Hellyer, including this one: 

"I don’t know if you personally have ever read the Bible or not but I think the star of Bethlehem was one of God’s flying saucers."

Jesus may have been the work...of ancient aliens?

That's pretty rich, really. But, who is this guy? Should we trust him just because he held a high-level Canadian government position 40 or 50 years ago?

I started Googling Hellyer. Turns out, he's been saying off-the-wall stuff like this for the past 7 or 8 years. But a thread from 2005 that kind of seems to discredit him early on. It refers to a Wikipedia article about Hellyer that states:

"In early September 2005, Hellyer made headlines by publicly announcing that he believed in the existence of UFOs. On 25 September 2005, he was an invited speaker at an exopolitics conference in Toronto, where he told the audience that he had seen a UFO one night with his late wife and some friends. He said that, although he had discounted the experience at the time, he had kept an open mind to it. He said that he started taking the issue much more seriously after watching ABC's Peter Jennings' UFO special in February 2005.^{[citation needed]}

Watching Jennings' UFO special prompted Hellyer to read U.S. Army Colonel Philip J. Corso's book The Day After Roswell, about the Roswell UFO Incident, which had been sitting on his shelf for some time. Hellyer told the Toronto audience that he later spoke to a retired U.S. Air Force general, who confirmed the accuracy of the information in the book. In November 2005, he accused U.S. President George W. Bush of plotting an "Intergalactic War"."

Now, Wikipedia is clearly not the most reliable source. But if this is accurate, we are to believe that Hellyer saw something on TV, read a book that is controversial at best , and talked to someone in the US Air Force for his information. None of it seems to have had to do with any time he spent in government. Not very reassuring, it seems.

But what are we to make of the whole thing? A strange form of insanity that lets the victim comport himself in a completely sane and normal manner while saying things that most people think of as crazy? Or is there something more....

All the Googling I could do turned up little more about Hellyer, other than his stranger and stranger statements. Will we finally have to just accept what Yahoo Answers told  "Jesus Was My Pal" seven months ago when he asked if aliens were real?

"probably. It is too arrogant to simply discount the presence or absence of other beings in the universe."

Seems like a guarded statement to me, Yahoo Answers. But I guess it's all we have for now...

Tick-tock

Reporting recently in Newsday, Delthia Ricks highlighted the ongoing problem we are having with Lyme disease here in the Northeast. Three sudden deaths from swelling of the heart? One begins to wonder.

Every time I read about or report on Lyme I am reminded of this Yankee Magazine  article by Edie Clark. In this fascinating piece, Clark reviews information tying together World War II, Nazi scientists, germ warfare and bird migration routes to present a surprisingly plausible theory about the introduction of Lyme disease into the United States.
Of course, as human beings, we are always looking for patterns. So, perhaps it's just a simple matter of Man vs. Nature,, 21st century style. Once upon a time, we just got sick and died. We lacked X-rays, MRI imaging, heart stents, and high-resolution everything. Now, we can see the Lyme spirochetes under the microscope, we know how they spiral their way into our vital systems.
We see so much. But what do we really know?