Now here’s a question:
If I post a
comment or a photo on the Web, is your newsroom free to quote me on your online
site or in your publication?
Every day,
newspapers, broadcasters and online sites of all kinds freely quote from
comments they find on the Web. Sometimes they attribute, sometimes they don’t.
There’s just one
problem: How do you know the person you’ve quoted actually made the
comment? Take what happened to April Branum, for instance. After The Orange County (Calif.) Register featured her in a story, one user posted a nasty comment claiming to be Branum.
Do you need to
verify the comment?
Do you have any
responsibility to try?
Back in April, my
daughter, Caitlin, lost a friend and former colleague in her Lafayette College
theater group. His name was Dan O’Neil.
Dan died in the
massacre at Virginia Tech.
Cait spent the
days following the tragedy with her friends, remembering Dan and mourning his
passing and praying for his family.
A few days later,
a friend told Cait she was on The New
York Times Web site.
Cait, like
millions of people who spend a good deal of life’s important moments at their
computers, had posted a message to Dan’s MySpace page
after his death. It read:
“Dan you were
an amazing person. I hope you know how much you meant to the people who knew
you here. We are keeping you and your family and friends in our prayers. You
will never be forgotten. Love forever.”
The Times included
Cait’s message in its Web package of mini-profiles of the shooter’s victims.
The Times introduced Cait’s message
like this: “Another friend and former classmate at Lafayette, Caitlin Ward,
left a message for Mr. O’Neil on his Web site.”
That was accurate.
So was Cait’s comment. But how did the Times
know that?
No one from the Times called Cait.
Now, when you
click on Cait’s name alongside her message in Dan’s MySpace page, you go to
Cait’s MySpace page. So it’s fair to assume that someone sent the message to
Dan from that page. While there was no specific mention of Dan on Cait’s
MySpace page, her bio makes it clear she and Dan were at Lafayette at the same
time. I guess that makes them classmates.
But ask those who
live in the MySpace world how easy it is to send a message from someone else’s
page, and they’ll tell you it can be done. Moreover, after all of these years
of reporting, haven’t most of us been burned by an assumption we failed to
check out?
I asked Craig
Whitney, standards editor for the Times,
about Cait’s experience and he said the Times,
given the urgency involved in this case, had weighed the risks involved in not
verifying that Cait had been the author of the comment and decided the risks
were low. He said the Times makes decisions
about verification on a case-by-case basis and might well decide differently in
another circumstance.
How about you? Do
you have a policy that states when — or if — you need to verify the identity of
the people whose statements you find in public places on the Web? It’s not as
if this is a new issue, yet many of the journalists I meet have not established
clear newsroom policies for using material that has been posted on the Web.
And what about the
photos of the Virginia Tech victims that media lifted from public Web sites?
How free do we feel to use them? Do we need to verify the identity of the
person in the photo? Do we need to get permission to use photos that we did not
make?
Whitney said the Times, which put together a terrific
package of photos to go with its profiles, is aware that picking up photos “without getting permission from the photographer is also risky, but again,
[we] were influenced by the exigencies and unusual circumstances of the
Virginia Tech story and the unavailability of alternative photography.”
These questions,
of course, do not apply to The New York
Times alone. News organizations all over the world used photos and comments
from the Web during the Virginia Tech coverage — and they do the same every
day.
I’m thinking about
the people who found their comments and photos lifted. I’m wondering — and I’m
certainly not the first person to ask these questions – how people in our
audience feel when they realize news organizations have taken material they
posted on the Web and used it to tell a story. Do they expect to see their
photos published by The New York Times?
Well, they should
know better, you say. Sure they should. I guess. I mean, if you post your photo
in a public place, it’s public. But I wonder if some people are confused by the
difference between a public place and a shared space — I’m not posting this for
the world to see; I’m posting it in a place where my friends have agreed to
congregate.
So when a newsroom
swoops in and grabs my comment or my photo, I just might feel violated. (And if
no one even bothers to verify that the comment was mine, I might begin to
wonder if I matter at all in this whole business. Am I just the source of a
good quote, an available mug shot?)
I’d love to hear
from you on this one. Does it matter to us whether the audience feels violated?
And perhaps the more
important question: Are we really willing to risk even further damage to our
credibility by abandoning traditions as old and honored as verification?
