Mangled Captions: Sydney Smith cites news mistakes where photos are mislabeled or the photo of the wrong person is used to accompany a story.
Other common mistakes: Misspelling names, numbers, geography and details about history, politics and sports.
The case for shunning hacked emails: Nathaniel Zelinsky calls for a “responsible journalism pledge” to prevent Russian from meddling in U.S. elections.
“Most reporters distance themselves from questions about the origin of information, so long as it remains verifiable, while tech companies tend to believe no one should restrict access to information on the internet,” he writes. “But at this particularly dangerous point in our nation’s history, reporters and Facebook alike just might be willing to embrace a new ethical obligation out of a sense of civic duty.”
Repeating a mistake is a mistake: Sydney Smith cites a British Independent Press Standards Organization ruling showing the dangers of printing a story from another news outlet.
The original story was an invasion of privacy, and so was republication of that story, said the U.K. press regulator.
“The fact that this material had been published by another newspaper was not sufficient to justify this intrusion in the public interest,” it said.
The ethics of interviewing traumatized women: Zahera Harb says journalists often add to their suffering.
“Seeking informed consent in such cases is crucial,” she writes. “But before asking Yazidi women to give consent to these stories being recorded and disseminated, journalists should have informed them about how, where and when their stories would be published or broadcast.”
Post Florida mass shooting: Alexandria Neason says pay more attention to local reports of shootings and bomb threats, which are shifting education coverage.
“For local reporters working the education beat, local threats have dominated their attention the past few weeks, even if they’ve only been a blip on the national radar…,” she writes.
Where are the mental health stories? asks Meg Kissinger.
“The truth is we’ve effectively abandoned the public mission to care for people with mental illness in this country,” she writes, and lists ideas for every reporter to consider.
Profiling killers or victims?
Russell Frank writes that mental health professionals urge journalists to focus less on the perpetrators of shooting rampages and more on the victims.
“The question that arises with every mass shooting is whether these instant illustrated profiles of the killers do more harm than good,” he writes.
Embedding and linking challenged: Eriq Gardner says a judge’s surprising decision on the use of a Tom Brady photo could disrupt the way news outlets use Twitter.
“Many of these cases involved some application of the so-called ‘server test,’ where the direct liability of a website publisher for copyright infringement turns on whether the image is hosted on the publisher’s own server or is embedded or linked from a third party server,” he writes.
The new battle over journalism’s digital legacy: Maria Bustillos finds that digital data is disappearing.
“When we consider that the internet is a library, and the community it serves is all mankind, the responsibility of digital archivists acquires a gravity that is hard to overstate,” she writes.
Paying for photojournalism: Visual journalists say the value of their work and legal rights to distribute their photos often are not recognized.
Brush up on the National Press Photographers Association code of ethics, they say, and use it as a guideline in your newsrooms.
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists 