The Mackerel Wrapper

A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Monday, April 23, 2007

COMM 209, 317: Newspaper ethics and child porn

Here's a riddle for you:
Q. What's worse than accusing a newspaper guy of downloading kiddie porn onto a newsroom computer?

A. Running a story about it without contacting him first to comment on the accusation.
Read all about it in Jim Romenesko's industry blog on the Poynter Insititute website. It's called -- what else? -- "Romenesko," and its "daily fix of media industry news, commentary, and memos" is must reading for news junkies.

Today's blog has several stories on the child pornography story, which apparently grows out of a longstanding labor dispute in Santa Barbara, Calif. Scroll down to the headline, and link, that says, "Roberts blasts News-Press' "defamatory" computer porn story." There are stories linked from The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times and local papers in Santa Barbara.

Open another window, go to the Society of Professional Journalists' website and see which canons of the SPJ Code of Ethics come into play here.

Here's another one. You won't find it in the SPJ code, but here's something working journalists have done for years and years. You can refuse to have your byline put on a story. Sometimes you have to. I wonder if that's what's happenening with the anonymous story in yesterday's paper.
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About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.