Journalism ethics don’t (always) require us to be assholes

Jason Plotkin’s new Cover.

Journalists should go to extraordinary lengths to protect our integrity. But when a courtesy or kindness doesn’t threaten our integrity, we should say “thank you.”

Jason Plotkin, an extraordinary (Emmy-winning) visual journalist for the York Daily Record, blogged recently about a marine giving him his “Cover” (“The Army wears hats. The Marines wear Covers,” the marine explained).

Jason wrote about all the gifts he had given away over the years, or passed on to a YDR charity auction, guided by the ethical imperative to maintain independence from sources. His colleague, Buffy Andrews, called the dilemma to my attention, asking what I thought.

Photojournalist @jasonplotkin shares #dilemma. Thoughts? yorkblog.com/look/2013/02/1… #DigitalFirst @johnrobinson @stevebuttry #ethics #newspaper

— Buffy Andrews (@Buffyandrews) February 15, 2013

Here’s what I think: We should absolutely – and insistently, if necessary – politely refuse gifts of significant value that could threaten our integrity, if only by appearance. But journalists don’t have to be assholes. Our jobs too often force us to annoy – asking difficult questions, refusing pleas not to publish embarrassing information, intruding on grief and other private situations. I defend (and have practiced) all of those actions and many other unpopular things journalists need to do. But we don’t have to insult people who are being kind in ways that don’t threaten our integrity.

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When should journalists use branded social media accounts? Or individual accounts?

When should journalists use their personal social media accounts and when should they use the branded newsroom accounts?

An editor raised those issues in an email (edited lightly to avoid identification, because I welcome private requests for help, even though I sometimes address the issues publicly):

Some of my staff members — copy editors who also do reporting — have been finding that crowdsourcing on our newsroom’s Facebook and Twitter accounts has been very useful, as would be expected. But, at times, they say, there can be so many reporters and editors doing it that their questions get lost in a sea of posts, all of which are almost always quality. They say they sometimes can have better luck posting crowdsourcing questions to their private Twitter and Facebook accounts, which means their sources have been gravitating toward those accounts and not the official branded accounts.

A concern raised among some editors is that these private accounts don’t give our official sites the hits and exposure they could if the groundwork was done through the official accounts. In addition, the private accounts and all the new followers staffers generate through their work here would go with the staffer should they leave.

It’s hard to find a best practice for how other papers handle this. This harkens back to the day when reporters on the cutting edge of technology initially used their private email accounts before newspapers caught on and got people their own company email account.

Anyway, I hear wisdom on both sides. Just wondering if you had thoughts that you wouldn’t mind sharing. Hope that isn’t asking too much. I read your blog routinely and find it very helpful and interesting.

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My blogging themes for 2010: job change, Twitter, business models …

Reviewing 2010 on this blog:

My job change to TBD was a major theme of the year here. My most-popular post of 2010 shared tips on job-hunting, from my own experience finding a new job and hiring the community engagement staff at TBD. That’s my second most-read post in two-plus years writing this blog. Other posts among the year’s leaders dealt with my job change as well: Pursuing a new opportunity in Washington, Wanted: vision for community engagement and Our community engagement team is taking shape. Another post relating to the job change took a longer view, discussing how I have twice redirected and rejuvenated my career. I also told how TBD’s launch prompted my first foray into public relations and brought back memories of an earlier launch. I explained why we need a director of community engagement, even though engagement should be everyone’s job. I have blogged as well for TBD, writing about our commitment to accuracy and transparency, and about why and how we chose TBD as our name.

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Chuck Offenburger: writer, teacher, mentor, friend

The first time I saw Chuck Offenburger, he was sitting on the steps of the Evening Sentinel, wearing an old-style leather football helmet, inviting people to pelt him with eggs.

I was a high school junior in Shenandoah, Iowa, and Offenburger, now in his 50th year as a journalist, was the youthful sports editor of the local paper. I enjoyed reading his columns and following the local sports teams through his stories. I was interested in being a journalist someday, and Offenburger was the best journalist in our small town. He had made some prediction about how Shenandoah High School’s Mustangs would do that season or the previous weekend, and he had been wrong. Offenburger liked to back his predictions up with the threat of public humiliation. So he was sitting on the steps of his workplace with egg — and a smile — on his face.

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Some TCU memories from a proud Horned Frog

My first journalism boss, Chuck Offenburger, asked me on Facebook for some stories about TCU.

Chuck, an enthusiastic football fan who was sports editor at the Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa, when he hired me in 1971, wanted to prep for tonight’s national championship game between Texas Christian University (my alma mater, where I enrolled a year after Chuck hired me) and Boise State. Yes, I said national championship. Don’t give me Alabama-Texas; they’re hiding behind the BCS skirts. TCU and Boise State take on all comers and would be playing in the national championship game if the alleged power conferences would agree to a playoff. You think Texas and Alabama play tougher schedules? Well, TCU foes have won six bowl games, to five for ‘Bama foes and four for Texas’.

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Crowdsourcing on Twitter: My tweeps help me start geotagging

Read this post in Russian, translated by Google. Читать этот пост на русском языке, перевод Google.

Twitter is an excellent crowdsourcing tool.

An email from Jim Cremer, who’s team-teaching a class with me at the University of Iowa next semester, asked if I could geotag my tweets. Our course will teach students how to develop iPhone applications and Jim wanted to show a current course something about geotagging. He thought some geotagged tweets from Siberia would be fun to show students.

I had seen that Twitter was going to be adding geotagging soon, but didn’t know whether it was available yet. I had already left Siberia and was in St. Petersburg. I would be leaving shortly for a walking tour of the city. To tweet without outrageous international data roaming rates, I would need to use the hotel’s free wifi.

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Let’s #beatcancer

I don’t engage in a lot of Twitter memes. But I gladly joined the #beatcancer meme today.

As a two-time cancer survivor (colon in 1999, basal cell in 2005), I know that cancer is not a sure death sentence. But I also visited my father three weeks before his death from prostate cancer in 1978 and visited my nephew, Patrick Devlin, four days before his death from leukemia last month. The enduring memory of Dad’s death and the fresh memory of Patrick’s underscore for me that every time someone can #beatcancer, I should join the celebration.

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A tough month of cancer news

Thanks to all who have prayed and expressed concern and support for my nephew Patrick, whose battle against leukemia I wrote about in February and again in March after his bone-marrow transplant.

I wish I had an encouraging update, but tests this week confirmed that Patrick’s leukemia has relapsed. He and his parents are considering a range of treatment options. He is a brave young man (turns 16 next Thursday) whose good humor in the face of this heartbreaking news had doctors and his parents laughing. We continue to welcome prayers.

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A publisher asks tough questions about C3 blueprint

Tough questions help test and sharpen any vision for innovation.

Marty Weybret, publisher of the Lodi (Calif.) News-Sentinel and LodiNews.com, asked some tough questions on Chuck Peters’ C3 blog about the Complete Community Connection concept Chuck and I have been promoting. “The Complete Community Connection vision that you and Steve Buttry have enunciated is intriguing,” Weybret started. “You may detect a certain hesitancy in neutral words such as ‘vision’ and ‘intriguing.’ Frankly I have studied C3 with a fair patience and yet I don’t feel like I have my head around it. May I ask you a few questions — some carry the baggage of skepticism, for which I apologize. Some are posed with wide-eyed curiosity.”

First, I’ll embrace the skepticism and the curiosity. Though I will say that I regard “vision” and “intriguing” as positive words and I am pleased that this publisher has spent this much time and patience studying the vision. I don’t always have my head around it either and I wrote it. Changing deeply ingrained ways of thinking takes patience as well as persistence.

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Personal news: Big news in small circles

When I started in the newspaper business, “local news” often meant who was sick and who was visiting.

My first job as a journalist was at The Evening Sentinel, a daily newspaper of about 4,000 circulation in Shenandoah, Iowa, that went out of publication in the 1990s. I was a sports writer, covering the school teams in nearby towns even smaller than “Shen.”

Chuck Offenburger, the sports editor, and I filled some space in the back of the paper with game stories and features on local athletes. The front page reported big (for Shen) news such as the city council and school board actions and an occasional crime or court case. But the heart of the newspaper was what we called the “locals,” a string of one-paragraph tidbits giving updates on someone’s illness or telling whose kids were visiting from college or from the distant big cities where lots of Shen’s kids moved off to (and if you were in Shen, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City were big cities).

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25 random things, but not a chain letter

This week my boss, Gazette Co. CEO Chuck Peters, “tagged” me in a Facebook application called “25 Random Things.”

As closely as I work with Chuck, I learned some interesting things about him through the 25 facts he posted. I saw that I was supposed to post my own 25 random things, then tag Chuck and 24 other people. I didn’t mind sharing some facts about myself, but the tagging process felt a bit like a chain letter. Plus I was busy when Chuck tagged me, so I knew it would be a few days before I would be able to compile my 25 random facts.

Then yesterday I saw that John Robinson, editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., noted in his Twitter feed that 25 Random Facts was “officially dead” now that a newspaper (the Charlotte Observer) had written about it. The story explained both the upside I had noted, learning interesting facts about people you sort of knew, as well as the downside, that chain letter thing.

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