It’s amazing that after all these years we are still running into new ethical gray areas in journalism. Here was yesterday’s issue: We posted a short story early in the afternoon about the double homicide off of Coliseum. Our online stories allow comments. One of the first comments was from a woman who said she knew one of the victims. If you read our comments, you know that the identity of the commenter is a little squishy. People often use screen names. In this case, it was—I think—Angelina1. Anyway, if you’ve ever posted a comment on journalnow, you know that it requires registration, including an email address. So we had this woman’s address. And the question was, whether it was proper to contact her and see whether she wanted to talk with a reporter about her friend. Our Web site has an extensive privacy policy, which spells out a lot of things, but doesn’t exactly say whether your email address can be given to a reporter. I talked with our attorney who helped draft the policy, and it was his opinion that legally we were allowed to contact this person. From an ethics point of view, we didn’t. Our reasoning was as follows: the comment was made with the expectation of privacy. Now, that’s not a rule going forward. It’s how we looked at this particular case. If it was a life or death situation, i.e. a killer on the loose etc., we might see things differently.
But this shows the mingling of the online and print worlds in ways we couldn’t imagine. I’m going to do some research on this—time permitting—and see what other news operations do in this area.
I’m also interested in your thoughts about the proper course of action.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
Why not just remove the email requirement so that there is true anonymity.
In general I don’t comment where registration is required. The only purpose I can see is marketing and I get enough of that already. Why does anyone need my email address?
(By the way, I attempted to post here without an email address but was rejected. Why? Considering how easy they are to obtain, how does that validate me in any way?)
I would say make email optional and add a check yes/no box authorizing the person to be contacted about THAT story. I wouldn’t make a blanket authorization form or include it in registration, because some people might be willing to talk about some things but not others.
I’m not registered there. I comment more than enough on the Journal on my blog.
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