Colorado school shooting -- privacy issues

Both The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News have gone all-out in covering the tragic events this week at Platte Canyon High School in suburban Denver. I'll link to several stories in the next few days and pose some questions about them. See also the posts to my other blog www.comm207fall06.blogspot.com for other stories.

The Rocky Mountain News had an exclusive interview with one of the girls who was held hostage in the school. I thought it was as tastefully and compassionately reported as possible in circumstances like this. But I'm pretty hard-boiled because I used to cover police news myself. What do you think? How do you balance people's right to privacy with the public's right to know?

Here's the lede, bylined by reporter Fernando Quintero:

Lynna Long picked up her books and headed toward the door as her honors English class wound down.
She had nearly reached the hallway when a man wearing a blue hooded sweat shirt calmly walked into Room 206 of Platte Canyon High School, blocking her path.

In that split second, Lynna's world changed.

The girl who dreams of being a doctor became one of Duane Morrison's six hostages. Over the next hours, she was terrorized and she was molested. She thought she was going to die. And when he finally let her go, she felt guilty about the girls left behind.

Lynna, a 15-year-old sophomore, talked Thursday about what it was like inside that schoolroom-turned- chamber of horrors during an exclusive interview with the Rocky Mountain News.

She and her mother agreed to allow her identity to be revealed, but asked that her photo not be shown in the newspaper.

By the way, have you noticed how few pictures there have been, at least on the internet, of the kids at Platte Canyon High School? Partly that's because the community is clearly, and properly, protective of them. And partly, I'm sure, because the media have treated this story pretty carefully.

I'll skip over some of the details, other than to say it's a general principle that when you're describing sexual crimes, you keep the description to a minimum. And Quintero follows that principle. He continues telling the girl's story, partly in her words and partly in his own:

Meanwhile, Lynna also could hear the SWAT teams outside the classroom.

She thought about action movies.

"I imagined that a group of SWAT team guys would bust through the windows. Or that I could fight off the gunman with a kick in the groin. But that just happens in the movies. I guess it doesn't quite work that way in real life."

She also thought about the possibility her life was ending.

"I didn't want to die. I thought about my family. I'm the oldest of three kids. I thought about my 4- year-old brother without his big sister. And my other sister. And my parents and my friends."

Lynna paused at this point in the interview, looking out the window of her family's restaurant to the traffic whizzing by on U.S. 285. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

"I never had a really strong relationship with my mom. But I thought, 'I'll never get the chance to make things better with her.' "

She returned to the retelling of the nightmare.

Morrison began ordering the girls to leave, one by one. " When he was letting a girl go, he would grab one of us as a shield."

It's hard for her to estimate how long it took to be released.

"Time was so slow, and so fast."

Later on in the semester, at least in COMM 207, we'll talk about invasion-of-privacy issues. People like Lynna who are involuntarily caught up in a crime become "limited purpose public figures," because crime and the law are legitimate matters of public concern. That means they lose some of their right to privacy, but only to the extent it takes to tell the story.

Tickle the public, make them grin ... and win?

Today's online issue of The Guardian, a newspaper in London which is arguably the best English-language paper in the world, has a story on the decline of newspaper readership as it plays out in the U.K. In an interesting aside, the Guardian's Patrick Barkham quotes Stefano Hatfield, editor of a free newspaper in London that appeals to readers in the 18-34 demographic:

Newspaper chiefs are no longer so sure. Hatfield edited the Metro in New York. "Research suggests young people don't read newspapers for three reasons," he says. "One, they find them boring - they find the stories and design too dull. Two, the internet has taken away the newspaper imperative. And three, they are sick of left- and rightwing bias."

The free papers try to make up for that by making the news more entertaining, and by giving it away.

(Which he can do by selling ads.)

Barkham also says, "Tickle the public, make them grin, the more you tickle, the more you win."

A sure recipe for media success, or a recipe for disaster?

Read Barkham's story in full, and then media critic Jack Shafer's take on the future for newspapers that appeared a few months ago in MSN's online Slate magazine. His headline sums it up: "The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper: Newspapers are Aying, but the News is Thriving."

Then make up your own mind? What does the future hold for newspapers? How can they appeal to young adults? What are the opportunities for new media?

COM 150: Wikipedia discussion question

Here's the question: Should Jimmy Wales use Potter's Box to think through the ethical responsibilities inherent in screening who posts information to an online encyclopedia? If you were him, what would you put in the different quadrents of P.B.? What would your final answer be?

Please note: To answer this question, you'll want to know who Jimmy Wales is and what Potter's Box does. Link here for a two-part story in The Boston Globe that will help you answer question No. 1. I can't link you to our textbook for question No. 2, but you'll find Potter's Box in Chapter 14. But you already knew that, right?

Post your answers as comments to this post. There will be prompts in the comment field that show you how to do it.

COM 150: Wikipedia, read and discuss

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is nothing if not controversial. It's been heralded as a new way of getting around the gatekeepers (HINT: please note vocabulary term likely to appear on midterm, final exam, etc.) and gathering information in the most democratic and self-correcting way possible. And it's been denounced as a vehicle for defamation that lets anybody post wild-eyed slander about anything in the world.

Here's a recent example of what goes wrong with Wikipedia. When crocodile hunter Steve Irwin died Sept. 4, the NEWS.com.au network service, a part of Rupert Murdopch's media empire, reported:

INTERNET encyclopedia Wikipedia was forced to remove an offensive message posted on its entry for Steve Irwin within minutes of the Crocodile Hunter's death earlier today.

Within minutes of the news of Irwin's death breaking this afternoon, someone had written: "Steve Irwin's dead! LOLOLOLOLOL!" on the biography of the Australian icon.

The entry was quickly spotted and removed from the page.

Typical, both the encyclopedia's critics and its defenders would say. Malicious information was broadcast immediately, as the critics maintain. And it was swiftly corrected, as the defenders are equally swift to reply.

Wikipedia even came up in class the other day. I like to use it myself -- carefully! -- as a starting point for research. Other instructors at SCI stay away from it, and not without good reason. Let's read up on it, decide what some of the issues are and come to our own evaluation of Wikipedia as a class. In addition to its usefulness -- or lack of usefulness! -- as a research tool, I think some of the stuff that's written about Wikipedia tells us something about the nature of the internet and the role of mass communications in general.

Here, for starters, is the Wikipedia entry on, yep, you guessed it, Wikipedia ... of course, it might be kind of suspect, because it's Wikipedia writing about Wikipedia, but then if everybody can write in, then it should be objective, shouldn't it? Read it and decide for yourself!

And here's what an opinion writer for the British Broadcasting Co. News website has to say about it. "The Beeb" is arguably the most objective news site in the world.

A longer look at Wikipedia appeared in The New Yorker a couple of months ago. I think it's the best thing written on the subject. You may not have time to read it in class, but I'll bet you will between now and the midterm.

(BTW, do you realize what I just told you?)

So, google around, see what's been written pro and con, and make up your own mind. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you read:

1. How trustworthy is the information? Does the "self-correcting" nature of a wiki work, or is it a handy-dandy tool for character assassination?

2. What does Wikipedia tell us about free speech on the internet? What does it tell us about building cyber-communities on the internet?

3. Would you use Wikipedia for a term paper? If so, what precautions would you take to verify information?