Otterblog

There are a lot of ways that technology is changing how reporters do their job. Some good. Some bad. We used to have to call people to get information. Now we just go online. It’s quicker, but of course something gets lost in the anonymous transactions. Good reporters still call their sources.

Online diaries are also being mined. Many students post bios and write extensively about themselves on myspace.com and facebook.com. They’re fun snippets of young people and their friends and their thoughts. They’re also potentially valuable sources of information—for parents, for prosecutors, for reporters.

Imagine this scenario. A college student is charged with a serious crime. Would he give us his high school yearbook so that we could better understand who he is and what he believes? Probably not. But we can go online and find out much of that information from facebook or myspace. They’re essentially open sites.

We studied the facebook entry of

Marcos Bryant the other day

. He’s the student at Winston-Salem State University charged with two counts of murder. We used some information from that site, but other information we chose not to include in our story because we thought it was inflammatory and it was hard for us to get a sense of the spirit in which it was written. Context is important. And as most of us know, what we write and tell our friends isn’t always the truth.

Online diaries were a key part of the

reporting on the tragic death of James Dungy, the son of Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts. His myspace entries painted a very different picture than what he often appeared like to family and friends. Reporters chose to use those—and I think rightly so—because the comments were extensive enough to offer some insight into his troubled mind.