St. Louis Journalism Review Presents:
Hoping a new media sensitivity might emerge from the Newtown tragedy by Eileen Byrnes, page 6 Beacon-KWMU merger: Journalism re-imagined by Jan Schaffer, page 9
Social media campaign by former P-D writer alleges P-D mistakes in series about mistakes by William H. Freivogel, page 20
Cyberbullying ties schools, students in legal knots by Scott Lambert, page 16
Alton Telegraph newsroom evokes fond memories by Paul Van Slambrouck, page 26
Winter 2014 • Volume 44 Number 333 • $8
‘Democracy Now!’ host to speak at GJR First Amendment celebration in March Gateway Journalism Review will again host a First Amendment celebration on March 29. The event will take place at the Edward Jones Headquarters in Des Peres, Mo. Longtime St. Louis publisher Ray Hartmann will serve as the master of ceremonies, and Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now!”, will be the keynote speaker. Those interested in attending should email GJR at gatewayjr@siu.edu. For more information about Goodman, please read the following official biography from the www.democracynow.org website: Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!”, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named “Democracy Now!” its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize” for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the muckraking journalist I.F. Stone. The Independent of London called Goodman and “Democracy Now!” “an inspiration.” PULSE named her one of the 20 top global media figures of 2009. Goodman’s fifth book, “The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope,” written with Denis Moynihan, rose to No. 11 on the New York Times best-seller list. This timely follow-up to her fourth New York Times best-seller, “Break-
the e v a S date!
Opinion & Columns 3 • O mbudsmen in decline: An ominous trend for American press by William A. Babcock
ing the Sound Barrier,” gives voice to the many ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power. She co-wrote the first three best-sellers with her brother, journalist David Goodman: “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times” (2008), “Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back” (2006) and “The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them” (2004). She writes a weekly column (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting. Goodman has received the American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award, the Paley Center for Media’s She’s
FIRST AMENDMENT CELEBRATION benefiting
St. Louis Journalism Review Gateway Journalism Review
March 29, 2014
6 to 9:30 p.m. at Edward Jones Headquarters in St. Louis featuring
Amy Goodman
Award-winning host of Democracy Now!
Ray Hartmann
Master of Ceremonies Your invitation will follow. Scan the QR code for more information Amy Goodman
Contents Table of
Made It Award and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. She also has received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored. Goodman received the first-ever Communication for Peace Award from the World Association for Christian Communication. She also was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. Goodman has an honorary doctorate from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. g
Do you want to come to our fundraiser? If you would like to attend the Gateway Journalism Review fundraiser, please email us at gatewayjr@siu.edu
4 • Principals say merged news operations will be independent by Charles Klotzer
Community News
5 • R evisiting the Jayson Blair story by Jessica Z. Brown
7 • C hicago’s news from the ’hood’ by John McCarron
6 • Hoping a new media sensitivity might emerge from the Newtown tragedy by Eileen Byrnes 30 • A s TIME goes by: On the passing of an American institution by George Salamon
Merger 9 • B eacon-KWMU merger: Journalism re-imagined by Jan Schaffer 10 • K WMU join forces for the better in St. Louis by Roy Malone
Media Accountability 20 • S ocial media campaing by former P-D writer alleges P-D mistakes by William H. Freivogel
Cyberbullying 16 • C yberbullying ties schools, students in legal knots by Scott Lambert 18 • L imiting social media may curtail cyberbullying by Sharon Wittke
Around the Arch 26 • A lton Telegraph newsroom evokes fond memories by Paul Van Slambrouck 28 • M edia notes by Benjamin Israel
Winter 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 1
11 • ‘ Benign indeterminacy ’ still trumps national shield law by William H. Freivogel 14 • R eporters get ethics and law wrong in vacated murder sentence by Terry Ganey 32 • ‘ Copyright verdict’s lesson: Use online photos with care by Eric P. Robinson
Publisher’s Note: With this edition, three stalwart editors are leaving GJR’s pages. They are Associate Publilsher Sandra Robinson, Associate Managing Editor Sharon Wittke and Lead Designer Christian Holt. Robinson, who received her Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University last May is now an assistant professor at Cal State Monterey Bay. While at SIU, “Sam” was the Managing Editor of GJR and wrote about agricultural and women’s equity issues, among other topics. She helped develop and publish the enewsletter that is distributed to about 2,000 email addresses every Friday. Wittke, a retired Air Force Lt. Col., reworked and improved the GJR website and produced the weekly enewsletter. She has written on the coverage of workers’ equity issues and authored one of the cyberharassment stories in the current edition. Holt, who is finishing her M.S. degree from SIU, redesigned the magazine, making it into a slick, attractive, professional-looking publication. She plans to continue her media career in St. Louis. Both Holt and Robinson will stay on the staff to help plan for the spring Journalism Review fundraiser at which Amy Goodman will be the speaker. Wittke is moving with her husband to North Carolina. GJR will miss their important contributions.
Published by School of Journalism College of Mass Communication and Media Arts Interim Dean: Dafna Lemish School of Journalism Director: William H. Freivogel William H. Freivogel Publisher
Charles Klotzer Founder
William A. Babcock Editor
John Jarvis Managing Editor
Terry Ganey St. Louis Editor
Sharon Wittke Associate Managing Editor
Steve Edwards Artist
Christian Holt Lead Designer
Evette Dionne Graduate Assistant
Aaron Veenstra Web Master
JP Rhea Graduate Assistant
Board of Advisers: Roy Malone, Jim Kirchherr, Lisa Bedian, Ed Bishop, Tammy Merrett, Don Corrigan, Rita Csapo-Sweet, Steve Perron, Eileen Duggan, Michael D. Sorkin, David P. Garino, Rick Stoff, Ted Gest, Fred Sweet, William Greenblatt, Lynn Venhaus, Daniel Hellinger, Robert A. Cohn, Michael E. Kahn, John P. Dubinsky, Gerald Early, Paul Schoomer, Moisy Shopper, Ray Hartmann, Ken Solomon, Avis Meyer, Tom Engelhardt
Page 2 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter Summer2014 2013
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Ombudsmen in decline:
Opinion
An ominous trend for American press One year ago, Rem Rieder in USA TODAY wrote about ombudsmen, the individuals (often called “readers’ representatives” or “public editors”) employed by newspapers to keep a vigilant eye on the paper’s journalism and report the findings to readers. Rieder painted a discouraging picture, noting that just half as many ombudsmen were working in U.S. news organizations as was the case a decade ago – and that more than a dozen media organizations axed the position following the 2008 recession. This, Rieder reported, even though a handful of new ombudsmen positions were being created in newsrooms in other nations. The Organization of News Ombudsmen’s website lists members in 26 countries – 75 “regular” members, 39 “associated” members, 26 “honorary” members and 15 “retired” members. According to ONO, news ombudsmen (or “ombuds,” as they are sometimes called) make up the “regular” membership, with “others from the media, press councils, journalism schools or journalism publications” constituting the “associate” membership. The acronym “ONO” is apt for an organization of public editors who are likely to utter, “Oh, no!” – at the very least – when they first are aware of a problem in their publications. As advertising dries up and circulation numbers dwindle in the United States, most editors here would rather expend tight resources on reporters covering crime or courts or sports – or almost anything rather than on internal watchdogs, most of whom write weekly columns. Increasingly, though, ombudsmen are blogging and tweeting to respond in a more timely fashion to concerns by readers. Whether or not this new-tech focus will stanch the exodus of public editors is unclear. News ombudsmen have been a varied breed, encompassing everything from former journalists to academics to public relations representatives of their newspapers. Before becoming the Washington Post’s ombudsman (1992-1995), Joann Byrd had spent some 40 years on newspapers and had a graduate degree in philosophy (focusing on ethics). Byrd says today the Internet has cut down on the necessity of having ombudsmen listen
to people’s complaints. But she added that the idea of listening to complaints and passing them along is still important. “It’s the whole idea of looking at the paper through the eyes of someone who didn’t do the work,” she said. “It’s important to evaluate the paper from the point of view of one person removed from the process.” During her time at the Post, Byrd said her position was viewed as that of an “internal critic,” a “very independent kind of position.” “What I did (in that job) was ask if the paper was holding itself to proper standards,” she said. “All readers deserve a good paper.” Byrd said she’s unsure that many comments from today’s readers deserve to be printed. “Some are just vile,” she said. Thus, Byrd said she was unsure, in times of tight newsroom budgets, that ombudsmen are always needed. “The first moral obligation of a mainstream news organization is to keep the public informed of vital information,” Byrd said. “I see this as an implied promise. To live up to the newspaper’s promise to keep the public informed, a city hall reporter has to come ahead of, alas, an ombudsman.” She added: “If it could be a position that reminded people that they needed to keep good standards, that would be a good thing.” Geneva Overholser was an established journalist and editor before serving a stint as Washington Post ombudsman. She later served
as dean of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. Overholser said she questions the importance of ombudsmen in an era of instant, newtech feedback from readers. Nevertheless, she said ombuds can raise important issues such as the media’s overuse of anonymous sources, a topic she championed while at the Post. She said the United States seems to be moving into an era where “many journalists don’t see the importance of having people on the record. I think that’s simply a mistake.” Overholser praised New York Times’ Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s public editor, saying: “She (Sullivan) has waded into very complicated and important issues for the paper’s decisions to withhold stories when asked to do this by the government.” Last year the Post ended its decadeslong tradition of employing an ombudsman to critically analyze the paper’s reporting. For a time, its ombudsman position was replaced by a former journalist acting as a part-time readers’ representative. As of this writing, that part-time position is vacant. Some professional ONO members have taken the ombudsmen (or internal watchdog) role in their columns by taking their media employer to task for embarrassing conflictof-interest issues. Others have tended to be readers’ representatives, focusing more on subscribers’ concerns of delivery issues and published grammatical errors. But regardless of how they have operated, there are fewer American ombudsmen today, and there is every reason to believe this downward trend will continue throughout this decade and century. This does not bode well for a press expected by the First Amendment to serve the public responsibly.
William A. Babcock, Editor
Winter 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 3
Opinion
Opinion
Principals say merged news operations will be independent by Charles L. Klotzer The news scene in the St. Louis region has dramatically changed. The primary news source has been the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The merger of the St. Louis Beacon and St. Louis Public Radio KWMU late in November, with a combined news staff of about 40 reporters and many freelancers, offers the potential of a competing news operation. Both are not-for-profit organizations and depend on public support. The Beacon has the backing of key philanthropists, while St. Louis Public Radio depends upon its broad audience. Their combined ability to tap into these different funding sources may provide the foundation for extended coverage, as Margaret Freivogel, editor of the combined operation, hopes “to explore our region’s underlying problems and opportunities and how people are addressing them.” Nicole Hollway, the Beacon’s former general manager, asserted more than two years ago that the major contributions “give us the resources to invest in areas that tie directly to earned revenue.” It seems there has been an implicit acknowledgement that the organization must continue to depend on fundraising as its major source of income aside from raising some commercial revenue. The merger was discussed at a public session of the Society of Professional Journalists featuring Freivogel, University of Missouri-St. Louis Chancellor Thomas F. George and Eric W. Rothenbuhler, Webster University dean of the School of Communications. It was the Beacon that reported in past years on legislative efforts to defund the Sue Shear Institute for Women in Public Life housed at UMSL.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch quoted State Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, saying, “This organization is doing political activity on behalf of liberal Democrat women.” The Missouri House voted to bar any public college or university from offering educational programs – including, but not limited to, the Sue Shear Institute – that encourage women to run for public office. “This is about keeping women barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen and as far away from politics as possible,” asserted Assistant House Minority Leader Tishaura Jones, D-St. Louis, as reported by Jo Mannies in the Beacon. “Situated at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the institute was created in 1996 – and has been a political target almost from the start.” Betty Van Uum, assistant to the provost for public affairs and economic development at UMSL (and a former Democratic member of the St. Louis County Council), said, “They did everything but take away the right to vote. This legislation would mean
It seems there has been an implicit acknowledgement that the organization must continue to depend on fundraising as its major source of income aside from raising some commercial revenue.
Page 4 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2014
every college in the state would have to close if it can’t train women to be leaders.” After a filibuster and strong reaction by the University of Missouri, the defunding of the Sue Shear Institute for Women in Public Life was dropped for a version banning the use of state funds for political activities. The incident revealed that state legislators may not hesitate to try censoring activities they dislike. While considering this question, it occurred to me that Gateway Journalism Review is in exactly the same situation. In addition to some support from contributors and subscribers, it is funded by Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, an organization partially funded by the state of Illinois. Of course, legislators in Missouri and Illinois see the world through different glasses, to put it mildly. But the same principle is at stake. William H. Freivogel, publisher of GJR and the husband of Margaret Freivogel, had this response to my question: “There has been no review of GJR content above my level in the university, nor has any official above me sought to review the content. We said in the agreement transferring SJR to SIU that it was my role to ensure editorial independence. I do. If a well-researched story were submitted that showed that the SIU student newspaper (which I supervise) had acted improperly, we would print it. “I’m not aware of instances where state universities have tried to censor professional news organizations under their control. The ethics of editorial independence are every bit as strong, if not stronger, within public broadcasting as private media corporations. In fact, if a state university were to punish one of its public broadcasting employees for exercising editorial independence in the publication of a story critical of the university or a state official, the disciplined employee could possibly raise First Amendment issues, although I’m not aware of this coming up.” Thus the readers of this journalism review can rest assured of its independence. In view of Margaret Freivogel’s insistence on the independence of the news operation she chairs and UMSL’s successful battle – and it was a battle – to keep the Sue Shear Institute alive, legislative meddling is most unlikely. We look forward to their first exposure of legislative shortcomings, or worse. g
Revisiting the Jayson Blair story by Jessica Z. Brown What prompts a documentary on a decadeold plagiarist/fabricator despite myriad media iterations of the story? Just like some cold cases, this one includes one person who died; lots of unanswered questions; many people paying the price; participants now feeling freer to speak, and new technology that puts the story in a new perspective. That was the collective prompt for Samantha Grant, producer/director, who revisits the Jayson Blair story in her recently released film “A Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power and Race.” The film’s St. Louis debut at the 22nd Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival, in November opened some wounds … at least for the St. Louis community. The story prompts anyone interested in journalism to ask the question, “How could something like this happen at the institution most recognized as the ‘top dog’ in its field?” But the Blair story especially resonates in St. Louis journalism circles because it involves one of its own, the late Gerald Boyd, a multi-awardwinning journalist who had worked his way up at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, distinguishing himself as reporter and White House correspondent. Boyd ultimately joined the New York Times – a dream come true, according to his friends and colleagues – where he gained attention as one of the nation’s leading editors. Ultimately, Boyd became managing editor, the first African-American journalist to do so at that venerable news organization. Fast forward: Five weeks following Blair’s resignation from the New York Times, Boyd also was forced to resign, along with editor Howell Raines. The resignations were a short-term resolution in the midst of an internal and external demand among many for immediate change. Such an exit was unimaginable for Boyd, and for the many people with – and for whom – Boyd had worked. The Blair debacle led to internal investigations, myriad industry roundtable discussions on the subject and continued outrage among news watchers. So, the question to Grant was this: “What can one learn via this long-form treatment of the story that sullied many reputations, ruined peoples’ lives and left much of the public distrusting journalism?” The prompt for her documentary, several years in the making, is worth noting. Grant said she studied the case at the University of
California-Berkley as a graduate journalism student and became fascinated by the many unanswered questions. With no documentary having yet been produced on the subject, she set out to do one. Grant learned that Boyd’s followers and supporters were upset over the stain left on an otherwise extraordinary and distinguished journalism career. “There were a lot of unanswered questions, including: ‘Was he or wasn’t he (Boyd) Blair’s mentor?’ ” Grant said. Following the earth-shaking news of this journalism-gone-bad story, with all its sidebars, there was one idea in particular that focused on the supposed relationship of Boyd and Blair, mentor and mentee, respectively, being perpetuated in numerous media stories and features – and even sometimes written in the context of the role and worth of affirmative action in the workplace (Blair is African-American). Longtime friend and colleague, former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter George Curry, commented on that in a 2007 column he wrote a year after Boyd passed away from cancer at age 56. “Sure, any major story about Gerald Boyd should mention the Blair incident, but that shouldn’t supersede or overshadow Gerald’s accomplishments as a first-rate journalist,” Curry wrote. “Gerald was a victim of Jayson Blair, not his protector.” In 2003, soon after the initial incident, reporter Sridhar Papuu interviewed Blair for a New York Observer story. “To suggest he was my mentor is not a fair characterization,” Blair told Papuu. “It’s an assumption based on race that’s silly. And I don’t like him! How did Gerald become my mentor?” (The full Observer story can be found online at http://observer.com/25th-anniversary/ so-jayson-blair-could-live-the-journalist-had-todie/#ixzz2pd5kGUuL.) But for Grant, the questions – especially this one – lingered, because this story, unlike other plagiarism stories in the journalism annals, destroyed many lives and speaks to journalism in the midst of a new pace in the news cycle. She persevered with the idea of doing a documentary that would speak to an even greater concern for accuracy today. After many months of pursuing Blair, he relented, finally giving her the on-camera interview that makes the story resonate today. Blair’s candor gives the film a wide audience appeal, not just for journalism junkies, and subsequently
helps answer a number of issues, including: • Blair told Grant: “I lied and I lied and I lied,” speaking to the series of incidents for which he also apologized for hurting others. • Blair blamed some of these transgressions, in part, on evolving mental health issues and drug use. • Blair affirmed that Boyd was NOT his mentor. • Finally, Grant also got from Blair an acknowledgement of the media environment that existed during this long, protracted journalism breach. “Jayson was pretty savvy,” Grant said. “He knew how to manipulate emergent technologies. No one knew that he had an online database of photos. He was able to comb the wires and the web of details. ... As the New York Times’ Lena Williams (a reporter featured in the film, too) said in the film: ‘It was more work to do what he was doing than to do the work he was actually hired to do.’ ” When asked about the media environment that existed at the time of the New York Times’ Blair affair, Grant replied: “The shift from print to online journalism put a lot of pressure on journalists, editors and administrators to compete with the online news cycle; it went from being a culture from fixed deadline to a 24/7 cycle.” Grant then asked, looking back on Blair: “Be faster, do more … how much did that pressure to be first, fast and be best factor into the errors?” Speaking on her role of director and having to make decisions of what to include or leave out, Grant responded to a question about the lack of Boyd-related footage, including that of his widow, Robin D. Stone. (Stone, by the way, saw to it that her late husband’s book, “My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times,” was published.) “I had to appeal to a greater audience when I made those cuts,” Grant said. “However, I’m thinking of making a director’s cut that would include some footage that appeared in my original cut.” Grant said she is looking forward to making it to St. Louis, still, after flight problems precluded her visit during the film festival. Maybe at that time it will be a director’s-cut showing of “A Fragile Trust.” Meanwhile, the documentary will play May 5 on the Public Broadcasting System’s “Independent Lens” series. Grant will conduct a robust campus, library and nonprofit tour beginning in February, and she also is producing weeklong theatrical opening starting March 7 in New York and a few other select cities. More information can be found at the website www.afragiletrust.com. g
Winter 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 5
Opinion
Community News
Hoping a new media sensitivity might emerge from the Newtown tragedy
by Eileen Byrnes Soon after tragedy struck a sleepy New England town more than one year ago, residents of Newtown, Ct., vowed the place they called home would be an epicenter for change. There needed to be changes in gun laws, some cried out. Others advocated for a national movement to increase school security. A need for better mental health counseling became a topic of conversation in homes and coffee shops among the town’s 26,000 residents. More subtle and in the undertones, there also were pleas for Newtown to be the epicenter of change in how stories of mass shootings and grief are covered. Just as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting has generated discussion about gun laws and school safety, how the tragedy was covered should also be a topic of discussion and review among media outlets, journalism organizations and in academia. There are so many lessons to learn in how journalists can still do their job while maintaining decency, credibility and sensitivity, but the year following the tragedy has shown there is little interest in the topic. So while there should be a “Newtown effect” in journalism, that sadly has not been the case. There were no mea culpas about the inaccurate reporting that occurred as the Sandy Hook story was unfolding. It was reported the shooter was a parent of a kindergarten student. He was not. It was reported the killer’s mother was a teacher at the school. She was not. The killer was misidentified. It was reported the killer once attended the school, but lived in New Jersey with his father. Only one part of that report was correct. Those are just a few of the inaccuracies reported as fact. Connecticut State Police did not have an official press conference for nearly six hours after the shooting, so reporters on the scene were fed information from their collective newsrooms and social media. Without confirmation, those tidbits were presented as gospel until the newest tidbit of information was presented. No one apologized for the misinformation. A similar scenario was repeated five months later at the Boston Marathon bombing. The need for speed outweighed the importance of accuracy. Nothing was learned from Newtown. While the first day of the Sandy Hook shooting focused on fact gathering, the next day brought out the bottom feeders. Reporters came to the homes of grieving parents who lost children in a gruesome murder, seeking comment or exclusive information. A staffer from CBS gained access into one victim’s home by misrepresenting
While there is never going to be uniformity in how a story of this magnitude is handled, it would behoove the journalism community to review and discuss the Newtown story – the good, the bad and the ugly. herself as a family friend. And when the names were released, victims’ neighborhoods looked like Halloween night – except those knocking on doors were reporters seeking a different kind of candy. An investigation report recently released by the CSP included complaints from parents that reporters were seen going through their garbage. Published news reports quoted one person who knew the shooter as saying bullying was a motive for the killings. Nothing in the CSP report corroborated that conjecture. Before the release of the CSP report, sources were quoted in front-page articles about details in the case. Some of the information was incorrect. In neither case has there been corrections or apologies run. After a legal battle and the eventual release of the tapes from the 911 calls made from the school that fateful Friday in December 2012, editorial decisions on airing the calls or providing links on newspaper websites were varied. Some aired the calls and included the voices of the teachers pleading for the police to arrive; others only aired the dispatcher’s voice; other outlets aired snippets of the calls that included the sound of gunfire. Outlets, both electronic and print, provided a link to all the calls on their Web pages. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was a vocal critic of the tapes being aired. She said it was unfair that the victims’ families and those in the school who are still suffering from the shock of Dec. 14, 2012, might be subjected to hearing them. “The actual audio is of no news value at all, unless you want the thrill of hearing the sound of the actual individual gunshot that might have killed a 7-year-old,” she commented on her show. In May, the Connecticut Legislature passed a bill exempting images depicting a homicide victim from being part of the public record. The bill was in response to the parents who feared that images of their slain children would be published, aired or find their way on to the Internet. If the law had not been passed, would any of those pictures have been published or aired? If one outlet had published those crime-scene photos, would there have been outrage and backlash in the journalism community? Or would there have been an immediate jump on the bandwagon?
Page 6 • Gateway Journalism Review • Winter 2014
“Media” has become an ugly word in Newtown. In the hours and days after the tragedy, town residents understood the role of the media. They may not have wanted the press to be here, but they understood they were doing their job. But as the days wore on, reporters turned the town upside down looking for that one exclusive morsel of information, and as packs of photographers jockeyed for position outside churches during funerals, patience began to wear thin. The day the 911 tapes were released, a sign to the media, lettered in red and black paint on a piece of wood, was nailed to a post. It read: “Vulture Media You Got Your Tapes R U Happy Please Leave.” The only other topic in town that received more condemnation and vilification than the media was that of the shooter’s mother and her parenting tactics. Maddow also raised another question worth debating: Should the media give any consideration to how any story might affect the victims’ families, the children and staff in the school that day, or even the people of Newtown who must live each day in a cloud of raw grief? Should there ever be a point when the consideration for the relatives of the slain children trumps the public’s curiosity or need to know? Surprisingly to many in Newtown, the media listened to the pleas of town officials and stayed away on the first anniversary of the shooting. The story was reported, but segments were done before the anniversary date. Print journalists used the story from the Associated Press, which seemed to be the only working media in town that day. While there is never going to be uniformity in how a story of this magnitude is handled, it would behoove the journalism community to review and discuss the Newtown story – the good, the bad and the ugly. There need to be improvements made in how stories of tragedy and grief are covered, but that will only come through discussion and awareness. All are topics worth discussing, because those who do not review history will certainly repeat it. If Newtown can become a vehicle for change when it comes to sensitivity in reporting on tragedy, it will be a legacy for a town that has come to be identified with such horror. There needs to be a “Newtown effect”. g
Chicago’s news from the ’hood by John McCarron Frustrated that traditional media aren’t covering their neighborhoods and disappointed that Webbased alternatives are dying for lack of a business model, plain folk who never went to journalism schools are taking matters into their own hands. At least that’s what’s happening in Chicago, where community groups are helping teams of teenagers and retirees master the five Ws, gather facts to support opinions and post their finished product on locally focused Web “portals.” This might be disquieting for those who have studied long and hard for the priesthood that was the journalism profession. But be honest. Metro dailies never did a good job covering neighborhood news in the first place. Then, as now, reporters show up for a homicide, especially if the killing involved children or an otherwise sympathetic victim or victims.
Continued on next page
Winter 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 7
Merger
Community News Continued from previous page But the successful parish fundraiser, or a first-place finish by a peewee football team from the local park? Not a chance. Not even when a lot of metro dailies began “zoned” editions in the ’80s. Truth be told, most of those local inserts with their “community events” listings were aimed at affluent suburbs where readers had moved. There have been – and continue to be – magnificent exceptions to this neglect. There were investigative rifle shots such as the Trib’s 1985 “American Millstone” series examining the social pathologies of the city’s impoverished North Lawndale neighborhood. (Not that folks in Lawndale were all that thankful for the attention.) And news columnists such as the Sun-Times’ Mark Brown and the Trib’s Dawn Turner Trice continue to mine humaninterest gold in every corner of the city. Much the same can be said of TV news coverage. There’s no way to “zone” a broadcast signal, and the major stations made little effort to segment their newscasts once cable came along. Local programming was left largely to volunteers on “public access” cable channels provided as part of municipal franchise agreements. So there has been little day-to-day coverage of urban neighborhoods. Not just because the people there lack disposable income, but because Old Media lacked the technical means to delineate its audience. That is, until the Internet came along. The Web has made it possible to target news and information to smaller and smaller audiences … and to tightly defined neighborhoods. Starting in the mid-’90s, there have been several efforts – often led by journalists fed up with, or laid off from, Chicago’s ever-shrinking newsrooms – to exploit the new technology. In 2009, for instance, seasoned alums from the Trib and other papers won a grant from a charitable foundation to create a Chicago News Cooperative. CNC’s Web subscription model even inked a deal to provide copy for a Midwest edition of the New York Times. But, when the foundation grant expired in 2012, so did the CNC. A similar fate befell Chi-Town Daily News, a Web effort powered by a grant from the Knight Foundation, which regularly makes “seed” grants to start-ups hoping they’ve discovered the key to sustainability. But very few have. Exceptions include a news operation called DNAInfo.com, led in Chicago by some former Sun-Times hands. They’re soldiering on, thanks to funding from Omaha billionaire Joe Ricketts, whose family also owns the Chicago Cubs. Then there’s
One emerging strategy has community organizations launching their own newsy websites. Sometimes called Web “portals,” they feature a mix of “neighborhood news, announcements, an events calendar and listings of local businesses that include hours of operation and special promotions. AOL Inc.’s Patch.com. It goes by the motto “Your Neighborhood, Your News” but is reported to be losing money, laying off staff … and leads its “news” page for the half-dozen North Side neighborhoods it still covers with headlines such as, “When to ship your packages for Christmas.” One emerging strategy has community organizations launching their own newsy websites. Sometimes called Web “portals,” they feature a mix of neighborhood news, announcements, an events calendar and listings of local businesses that include hours of operation and special promotions. Six low- and moderate-income neighborhoods have been helped to create Web portals by LISC-Chicago, a nonprofit intermediary through which major foundations channel funds for community redevelopment. (By way of disclosure, I do freelance reporting and writing for LISC, which stands for “Local Initiatives Support Corporation.”) “Traditional media is facing challenges, and it’s obvious there will be fewer resources devoted to neighborhood news,” explained Susana Vasquez, LISC-Chicago’s executive director. “And it frustrates people in our neighborhoods that, when they Google their neighborhood, the first thing that comes up is who got shot.” So LISC has used seed grants from the Knight, MacArthur and other funders, plus a federal/city stimulus grant, to build digital capacity in targeted neighborhoods and to launch locally staffed news portals using an easy-to-load Web architecture. The LISC-assisted portals each have a modestly paid part-time webmaster, but all rely on volunteer contributions of time and effort by community-minded retirees, afterschool students and staff from the hosting community groups. A good example is the Pilsen Portal managed by the Resurrection Project at www.pilsenportal.org. And there’s an overview of all seven sites at www.smartcommunitieschicago.org. “It’s an ongoing experiment,” admitted Carl Vogel, a seasoned freelancer contracted by LISC to train and support the novice journal-
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ists in the neighborhoods. “Sure the portals have a chamber-of-commerce flavor, but some are beginning to take on substantial issues and do it from what we call the ‘removed reporter’ point of view, rather than that of a biased advocate.” Vogel, Vasquez and others familiar with the community portal concept agree that one of the most intriguing prospects is helping people access and interpret the enormous trove of data becoming available on government websites. With a little guidance and the right hyperlinks, residents can use the portals to find how their schools are performing on standardized tests, how many FBI index crimes were committed within their police district, how their neighborhood ranks on health indicators and even who owns the foreclosed house down the street. But whatever the potential, it takes money to equip and train community journalists – and money is in short supply. “The big foundations really don’t want to be committed to producing content that feed civic engagement,” said Thom Clark, co-founder and president of the Community Media Workshop, a pioneering nonprofit that for 25 years has been helping other nonprofits get better press … or, via the Internet and social media, do their own press. Philanthropies generally prefer to “seed” ideas that will, in time, support themselves, explained Clark, who is scrambling to keep CMW afloat. And with few exceptions they’re leery of having their names associated with advocacy-type reporting that might take on City Hall or a powerful institution, such as a hospital or university. All of which suggests that a financial formula for sustaining quality local journalism has yet to be found. What has arrived – with new “apps” emerging every day – are enormously powerful digital tools capable of mining and distributing information crucial to neighborhood well-being. If only someone could come up with a sustainable way to wield them. g
Beacon-KWMU merger: Journalism re-imagined by Jan Schaffer Editor’s note: Jan Schaffer is the executive director of J-Lab, “a journalism catalyst that funds new approaches to journalism, researches best practices and shares practical insights gained from years of working with news creators and news gatherers.” When the St. Louis Beacon and St. Louis Public Radio cinched their deal to merge their two newsrooms in December,, they stepped right into the front lines of how old and new media are re-imagining journalism. The combined news organization (http:// news.stlpublicradio.org), which will have a hefty three dozen-plus editorial employees, promises not only to alter the nature of journalism in St. Louis, but it also will chart new pathways for media entrepreneurs around the country exploring ways to make their startups sustainable. “If we get it right,” Beacon founding editor Margie Freivogel said early last year, “we have the beginning of a blueprint of how to create a vigorous news organization that serves a region and takes advantage of the assets of public media. I think it’s a very important possibility.” Freivogel will be editor of the combined news operation. This merger sets several benchmarks: • It confines its news coverage to a focused portfolio of topics. Unlike legacy newspapers, the as-yet-to-be-named news organization will deploy its staff to concentrate on politics, education, the economy, health and science, race, and arts and culture. It does not aspire to cover crime or sports, the “me-too” mainstays of other local news organizations. Instead, it will build its mission around core elements of the emerging master narrative of St. Louis. • It pioneers a pathway for public broadcasters to beef up coverage of local news, adding value to their national syndicated programming. These “pubcasters” hope to wean themselves off taxpayer dollars. As other local news outlets downsize staff and news content, public radio is uniquely situated to step up to a job that needs to be done: covering local news with powerful “pipes.” • It validates and amplifies local entrepreneurial news efforts. The 6-year-old Beacon already has proven its journalism chops. With the merger, public radio gets a proficient news staff, while the Beacon gets a megaphone so its efforts can reach beyond its base of poli-influential supporters. It’s a win-win for both parties. • It redefines “news” as more than a commodity. Indeed, the new mission statement of the
merged enterprise aspires to do much more than “speak truth to power” or deliver “all the news that’s fit to print.” As SLPR general manager Tim Eby explained in December to a public radio gathering: “The St. Louis region is in the process of reinventing itself through innovation, education and the arts. Through our coverage, we will both describe this reinvention and engage with it in ways that illuminate, investigate, challenge and celebrate what it means to be a St. Louisan.” That kind of aspiration bespeaks a journalism that is more than a product or service. It’s journalism active, a catalyst – indeed, an advocate – for the good of the community. It’s a different kind of journalism than what generally is taught in j-schools – but, when done well, it can exercise the best of participatory and interactive on-ramps to facilitate engagement and momentum. • It builds new opportunities for “events as journalism.” Entrepreneurial news startups are raising revenues and visibility by convening newsmakers and audiences to learn more about key issues. Public radio’s outreach capabilities are perfect for scaling these activities. • It adds value for members and donors. It would take years for the Beacon to grow its membership base to be the size of SLPR’s, and it would likely take as many years for SLPR to grow a newsroom to the size of the merged staff. The new mission has already appealed to significant donors in St. Louis. Women as early adopters Combining St. Louis Public Radio and the Beacon was not the first merger of a pubcaster with an indie news startup, but it was the second
merger last year spearheaded by a woman journalist. Just last January, Rocky Mountain PBS merged with I-News Network (inewsnetwork. org), an investigative news startup launched by former Rocky Mountain News journalist Laura Frank. I-News has done groundbreaking journalism and shared it with media outlets throughout the state. In Colorado, the public television network didn’t have a newsroom. With the merger, I-News became its newsroom and I-News staffers became RMPBS employees. As in St. Louis there are aspirations not simply to cover the news but also “to have a focus on improving civic life,” said Doug Price, Rocky Mountain PBS president and chief executive officer. As well, in San Diego, Lorie Hearn’s inewsource (inewsource.org) in late 2011 physically moved into the newsroom of KPBS. While inewsource has maintained its independence, it is adding hard-hitting journalism to KPBS’s news reports. Hearn is a former editor for the San Diego Union-Tribune. It is notable that three women news entrepreneurs spearheaded these pioneering partnerships. They had founded news startups that broke stories that delivered major statewide impact. However, they were willing to engage in unique collaborations, letting go of their separate sites to help build bigger enterprises with a promise of lasting value for the greater good of their communities. Other kinds of partnerships between public media and traditional news outlets and independent news startups are blossoming across the country. To read about these initiatives, check out our latest report, “News Chops: Beefing up the Journalism in Local Public Broadcasting,” at http://www.j-lab.org/publications/news-chops. g
Winter 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 9
Merger
Beacon, KWMU join forces for the better in St. Louis by Roy Malone Editor’s note: William H. Freivogel, publisher of Gateway Journalism Review, was a founder of the Beacon and is the husband of Beacon editor Margaret Wolf Freivogel. They were major financial contributors. As nonprofit news organizations across the country search for financial sustainability, they will be studying the impact of the merger between the St. Louis Beacon and KWMU Public Radio. The University of Missouri’s Board of Curators agreed Nov. 22 to merge the operations of the University of Missouri-St. Louis radio station with the Beacon, an online news service launched in 2008 by former employees of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The agreement provides the radio station with greater news-gathering resources while the Beacon will benefit from a broader base of financial contributors and the anchor of a state university. Under the new arrangement, 16 Beacon staff members will become state employees who could become eligible for pension benefits. The effectiveness of the merger will be watched by other public broadcast stations and online startups, which may see it as a model for the future. Jan Schaffer, director of the J-Lab incubator in Washington, D.C., said such mergers could help public radio improve its news reporting and help the startups find needed resources. (See accompanying story on pg. 9.) “This is an opportunity to benefit both parties,” she told host Don Marsh on KWMU’s program “St. Louis On The Air.” For the past five years, the Beacon has survived on grants and donations from wealthy individuals and foundations. KWMU, one of four campus radio stations operated by the University of Missouri System, relies on contributions from donors and listeners, with some funding from the university’s operating budget. According to a UM System news release, funding for the merger will come from outside donations. The donors who had contributed to the Beacon up until now included Emily Rauh Pulitzer, widow of Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who with Michael Pulitzer agreed to sell Pulitzer Inc. to Lee Enterprises for $1.46 billion in 2005. She received a payout of about $414 million from the sale. She put up $500,000 in an initial matching grant for the Beacon and has donated about $1.25 million. Other donors, according to published
reports, have been: • William H. Danforth, former chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, $200,000. • Richard K. Weil, a former St. Louis PostDispatch managing editor, $1.1 million. • The Danforth Foundation, $1.25 million. • The Knight Foundation, $90,000. Another donor, listed by the Beacon as giving more than $10,000, is Missouri’s largest political contributor, Rex Sinquefield. The Beacon was one of many new journalism-delivery operations that emerged as newspaper revenue shrunk and staff members were laid off. The idea of merging the Beacon and KWMU as a recipe for financial sustainability and improved journalism grew out of talks that began in October 2012. A consultant’s study found a $3 million funding gap between expenses and resources would take place during a five-year period following the merger. Thomas George, UMSL chancellor, said donors from the Beacon and KWMU had pledged amounts that are nearly enough to cover the difference. The Beacon website, with a slogan of “News that Matters,” had 73,500 unique visitors in November, according to Freivogel. A unique hit counts as one person, no matter how many times the person visits the site during the month. The Beacon focuses on politics and government, education and social issues, and arts and culture, while ignoring crime, sports and local court news. Freivogel was among the panelists who discussed the merger Dec. 12 at an event sponsored by the St. Louis chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She said the Beacon and KWMU had been collaborating on news-gathering projects even before the merger talks began. “We had complementary strengths,” she said. The merged newsroom, which may have about 40 staffers, becomes the second-largest in town, following the Post-Dispatch with about 140. Freivogel will lead the combined news staffs. The emphasis will remain on analysis and in-depth reporting, Freivogel said. Tim Eby, general manager of KWMU, will oversee the news operation. He had said KWMU wanted to improve its news reporting and expand its staff. “We could have taken years to grow the capacity of our news organization.” Eby said. “But the Beacon was sitting here doing a lot of the same things that we were doing.” He said taxpayer funds would not be used to subsidize Beacon employees.
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“Everything we’re doing in bringing in the Beacon is coming from private sources,” he said. Eric W. Rothenbuhler, dean of the School of Communications at Webster University, also was on the SPJ panel. “I want to congratulate the two organizations,” he said. He said the communications industry has been undergoing rapid changes to its business models, and any media organization must have a plan to “get ahead of the curve.” He said the merger benefits the Beacon because “St. Louis Public Radio has UMSL behind it. ... But now we enter the hard part” of combining the separate news reporting cultures and developing other sources of revenue. During negotiations for the merger, a consultant’s report was somewhat critical of both newsrooms, saying: “Neither organization is even close to maximizing the digital experience for users. Both treat their websites as flat, one-dimensional media rather than exploiting possibilities for linking, interaction, and creating multiple experiences through radio, video and data.” At the outset, no name had been agreed to for the merged news operation, which is accessible at news.stlpublicradio.org. So it started out calling itself St. Louis Public Radio and the Beacon. Freivogel said a consulting firm was helping on choosing a name and rebranding. When the Beacon closed its office, in the KETC Channel 9 television building, its employees had to move just one door east to the new KWMU offices at 3651 Olive St. The deal also involves the Journalism School at the University of Missouri in Columbia, which will offer courses to students at UMSL and place students in internships at the Beacon/KWMU. “The cutting-edge new partnership between St. Louis Public Radio and the St. Louis Beacon follows a new model that represents the future of media and journalism, while also providing new opportunities for students and faculty,” said Wayne Goode, chair of the UM Board of Curators. George, the UMSL chancellor, applauded the merger during the panel discussion. When three members of the audience raised questions about how the taxpayer-financed news operation could remain independent, George said KWMU has not had any problems, even when complaints were raised over controversial stories. Questions about how aggressive the news reporting would be if UMSL was threatened with a loss of funds by legislators, prompted Freivogel to say: “We go where the stories are. ... St. Louis Public Radio has a reputation for independence.” g
‘Benign indeterminacy’ still trumps national shield law by William H. Freivogel Editor’s note: This story is based on a speech to the second annual public ethics conference on “The Ethics of Politics and the Press.” It was held at the University of Missouri in St. Louis in November and sponsored by the university’s Center for Ethics in Public Life. Journalism organizations and major news organizations are in almost total agreement that the nation needs a national shield law. But they should take another look. There may be no way to construct a law that can at the same time protect the legitimate government interests in protecting national security while, at the same time, protecting legitimate press interest in disclosing government abuses. It’s like trying to square a circle. There are a multitude of legitimate interests that clash in ways that do not lend themselves to neat legal rules. The bottom line is that journalists will sometimes have to go to jail to protect important confidential sources. Here are some of the conflicting interests: • A fundamental rule of the legal system is that courts are entitled to every man’s evidence. A fundamental norm of journalism is that reporters should protect the identity of confidential sources who have anonymously provided important, truthful information. When the best evidence in a court case is the information a confidential source provided a reporter, the legitimate interests of the law and journalism can come into irreconcilable conflict. The practical outcome can be the legal system sending the reporter to jail. • Similarly, the government is entitled to keep national security information secret to protect military operations, the names of intelligence agents and intelligence-gathering methods. But the press considers it a core watchdog function to expose national security secrets that show the government is lying about its foreign policy or abusing its national security powers. The controversy surrounding Edward Snowden’s leaks about U.S. intelligence operations is a perfect example of how hard it is to square the circle. On the one hand, Snowden clearly violated his security clearance – and, quite possibly, the law – when he leaked secrets about the NSA’s massive data collection, its snooping on Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Kimoon, and its MUSCULAR program sweeping
up hundreds of millions of Google and Yahoo! email files on their way from the public Internet to the cloud overseas. Snowden’s disclosures are particularly problematic as the government spying may well be legal, having been approved by all three branches of government. It was leaked in a way that undercut U.S. interests abroad and seemingly orchestrated to damage U.S. relations with other countries at key diplomatic moments. It also was leaked by a person who sought refuge from the two main countries that can challenge U.S. power and who regularly spy on America – to say nothing of their own citizens. On the other hand, the disclosure of the immense scope of the data collection and spying surprised even those who generally support the programs. Just trying to keep track of the codenames is mind-boggling: MUSCULAR, PRISM, DISHFIRE, TRACFIN, POLARBREEZE SNACKS, GHOSTHUNTER. The disclosures have sparked a legitimate and important discussion of whether post-9/11 surveillance has run amok. Even the man who is supposed to be in charge, President Obama, says he did not know about some of the activities and is proposing changes in the national security spying that his administration has undertaken. Even though Obama initially claimed that the NSA programs averted more than 50 terrorist threats, his own blue ribbon panel concluded in December that the NSA information was not essential to averting even one attack. It is not the first time that a president has exaggerated the damage caused by a leak; President Nixon did the same with the Pentagon Papers. Meanwhile, Snowden published his “Truth Manifesto,” arguing he was a whistleblower, not a criminal, and advancing the appealing (if simplistic) argument that “speaking the truth is not a crime.” The truthful disclosure of national security secrets by a government contractor actually is a crime. But The New York Times editorial page bought Snowden’s whistleblower argument anyway, even though there is scant evidence Snowden tried to fix things internally before flying off to China with copies of about 50,000 secret documents. In the end, a plea deal of some sort may be the best solution.
interests were not enough, the 21st century changes in the media have thrown in additional complications, most surrounding the question of, “Who is a journalist worthy of some sort of shield law protection?” Does Julian Assange of WikiLeaks stand in the shoes of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of the Pentagon Papers, even though Assange has stated his antipathy for the United States while Sulzberger said the Pentagon Papers publication was intended to improve the nation? Are the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, with their advocacy reporting, deserving of the same legal protection as Neil Sheehan, the professional journalist who wrote the Pentagon Papers stories for the Times? Greenwald and Poitras started their research with the preconception that the NSA tactics are illegal and wrong, and that bias has been evident in their public statements and news stories. Does it make any difference that Greenwald and Poitras seem to have helped distribute Snowden’s leaks, and to be orchestrating them in a way that does the United States maximum diplomatic damage? Ask Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, and James Goodale, the New York Times lawyer who defended the publication of the papers, and they will insist that Assange should get all the protections of Sulzberger – and that Snowden is a worthy successor to Ellsberg. But noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who also defended the Times, takes a different view of Assange, saying his avowed goal of harming the United States, combined with his careless disclosure of diplomatic secrets, put him in a category separate from Sulzberger. Abrams told the Los Angeles Times that Assange and WikiLeaks “release so much information that could do harm to national security that I think they shouldn’t be viewed as heroic but as, often, reckless.” Earl Caldwell and “Deep Throat” Most days, this tension between the law and the press plays out without drama on the front pages of America’s newspapers, where important stories about national security and governmental wrongdoing are published regularly based on information obtained from confidential sources. Confidential sources are the lifeblood of reporting in Washington. Almost no one in Washington will tell you something newsworthy on the record.
Who is a Journalist? If all of these competing and legitimate
Continued on next page
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Continued from previous page The year 1972 was important for the reporter-source privilege. It was the year that the most important confidential source in the history of journalism began to leak. That was the FBI’s associate director, Mark Felt, better known as “Deep Throat.” Woodward and Bernstein’s masterful use of Felt and other confidential sources to help bring down a dishonest and corrupt president made the use of confidential sources the “gold standard” of journalism. Young reporters would tell their editors that they obtained the most mundane information from their “sources.” Woodward began meeting “Deep Throat” in a Washington, D.C., garage a few months after the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its most important decision on confidential sources: Branzburg v. Hayes. A five-justice majority ruled that the First Amendment does not protect the so-called reporter’s privilege unless prosecutors are acting in bad faith. Paul Branzburg of Branzburg v. Hayes was a reporter for the Louisville Courier Journal who had witnessed illegal drugs activities with the help of a confidential source and refused to testify about it to a grand jury. But the case is usually remembered as the Earl Caldwell case. Caldwell was the African-American New York Times reporter who had been allowed by the Black Panthers in Oakland to listen in until late in the night to their planning and strategy sessions. He wrote a story that included information about the Panthers having illegal guns and talking about assassinating the president. When the U.S. attorney in San Francisco subpoenaed him to testify, he refused, citing a First Amendment reporter’s privilege to protect sources in order to gather news. Justice Byron White, writing for the fivejustice majority, concluded that reporters have no special privilege unavailable to ordinary citizens to avoid giving grand juries their best information. In a prescient passage, White wrote that granting such a privilege would raise the questions of who is a journalist. Sooner or later, he wrote, “it would be necessary to define those categories of newsmen who qualified for the privilege, a questionable procedure in light of the traditional doctrine that liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as of the large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods.” White went on to say that freedom of the press was a “fundamental personal right,” a phrase that stands out in the “Who is a journalist?” debate. In a confusing concurrence, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. joined the majority opinion but
wrote separately to make the point that there would be First Amendment protection if prosecutors acted in bad faith. Justice Potter Stewart wrote a dissent in which he laid out the outlines of a qualified constitutional protection for reporters. Before the government could force a reporter to testify, it had to show that there was probable cause to think the “newsman” – and that’s the term they used in those days – has information clearly relevant to the specific law violation, that the information can’t be obtained through a means less destructive to the First Amendment, and that there is a compelling and overriding interest in the information. The funny thing about Branzburg is that even though the press lost the battle, it won the war – at least for the next 30 years. Three things happened. First, media lawyers worked overtime to turn their 5-4 loss in Branzburg into a 5-4 victory, persuading a number of federal courts that Powell’s concurring opinion should be read together with Stewart’s dissent recognizing a qualified privilege. For 30 years, they had remarkable success. Second, not only were federal courts recognizing a reporter’s privilege that had not been found in Branzburg, but also states around the country were putting in place shield laws creating a state privilege either through a statute or court decision. A few of these shield laws recognized an absolute privilege to protect a source. Most created a qualified privilege, like the one Stewart proposed. Every state except Wyoming recognized a privilege either through statute or court decision. The third development was that Branzburg was overtaken by Watergate. By the time
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Watergate played out, “Deep Throat” and the confidential source had become institutionalized. Jayson Blair and Judith Miller But just as the events of the early 1970s opened the way for a great expansion of shield laws and the reporter’s privilege, events in the early 2000s did precisely the opposite. There were three main events. One was Jayson Blair’s scandalous fabrication of stories at the New York Times based on fictional anonymous sources. A second was nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee’s successful privacy suit against the government for having leaked information about alleged espionage that it couldn’t prove in court. The third was the way anonymous government sources played Judith Miller of the Times to stir up war fever over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When Miller became involved in the somewhat related investigation into who had outed Valerie Plame as a covert CIA spy, the federal court in Washington, D.C., reread Branzburg and pointed out the press actually had lost – a view that has gained credence among federal appeals courts. Miller went to jail for 85 days before eventually giving up her source, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The unusually long jail time generated support for passage of a national shield law. But just as Congress seemed about ready to approve the bill, along came Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, whom Congress is not about to protect. Obama’s crackdown and Edward Snowden During the past few years, fear of government overreach has reached a new high with
the Snowden disclosures, the subpoenas of the notes and phone records of more than 100 AP reporters and editors, and the criminal investigation of Fox correspondent James Rosen. Add to that the Obama administration’s record number of seven espionage prosecutions, more than twice the three filed by all previous administrations. The developments have led media lawyers such as Goodale to say that Obama is worse than President Nixon for press freedom. Critics have pointed out that Obama had promised to protect whistleblowers, but instead his administration prosecuted seven leakers who said they were blowing the whistle on government overreaching. The Obama administration’s response is that claiming to be a whistleblower, like Snowden, doesn’t excuse a government employee or contractor from abiding by the law against leaking classified information. The administration points out that a whistleblower has to go through internal government procedures for blowing the whistle; the internal critic can’t get whistleblower protections for taking it on himself to leak to the press and bypass the government. In addition, in cases such as Snowden’s where there is a good chance that the government program is legal, the whistleblower designation is unavailable. The Espionage Act is the incredibly broad World War I-era law that makes it a crime to disclose secrets “relating to the national defense.” The law was written at a time of fear and before the Supreme Court had ever declared a law unconstitutional for violating the First Amendment. It is so broadly worded that it would appear to include journalists and news organizations. But no journalist or news organization ever has been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. This is one of the things that worries Abrams about Assange – Assange could be the first self-identified journalist who could be convicted under the law, because he not only disclosed the secrets but did so with the intent of hurting the United States – an important element of the crime. Is shield law licensing? Ironically, all the bad press the Obama administration has received for investigat-
ing journalists led to the Justice Department renewing its call to pass a national shield bill. The administration had supported the bill from the beginning, and and now it became good public relations. But Sen. Charles Schumer, the Democratic sponsor of the bill in the Senate, agreed with Sens. Diane Feinstein and Dick Durbin that the shield should be revised to exempt the likes of Assange. The bill that passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in September makes sure Assange isn’t covered by stating that a journalist does not include a person “whose principal function, as demonstrated by the totality of such person’s or entity’s work, is to publish primary source documents that have been disclosed to such person or entity without authorization.” Nor does the Senate bill include citizen bloggers or groups, such as the Nazis, who publish websites not considered news sites. To be covered, the journalist must have the “primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information” of public interest, or has to be engaged in the “regular gathering, preparation, collection, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting or publishing on such matters.” One critic, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, argued that Congress deciding who is a journalist was akin to licensing – traditionally anathema to a free press. He said, “Any carve-out of particular media for protection and special treatment is, in effect, government licensing of legitimate media.” Another big weakness of the bill is that it wouldn’t apply to most national security stories. It would not protect journalists if the government could show a “significant and articulable harm to national security.” Perfect world versus reality In a perfect First Amendment world – with a Supreme Court comprising nine Brennans – the Espionage Act would be found unconstitutional, the Supreme Court would recognize a constitutional privilege for a reporter to protect the name of a confidential
source, and the United States would not bug the phones of Merkel and other friends. Nor, by the way, would friends try to spy on the United States. But that world does not exist. The limbo of the status quo is preferable to legal certainties that could be even less favorable to newsgathering. If Congress were to set about rewriting the Espionage Act, it might make changes that could put reporters in prison for publishing classified information. If Congress were to pass a national shield law, it wouldn’t extend the shield to Assange or citizen bloggers or other self-styled journalists who did not fit Congress’ mold, nor would it cover national security cases. In a seminal work on the espionage statutes published 40 years ago, Harold Edgar and Benno Schmidt wrote that the nation had lived in a state of “benign indeterminacy about the rules of law governing defense secrets” since World War I. As critical as they were of the Espionage Act and the Nixon administration’s attempt to stop the presses during publication of the Pentagon Papers, they thought the status quo was preferable to the likely changes that could be gotten out of Congress. That may still be true today. Reporters generally have fared well during the long era of uncertainty. No reporter has been prosecuted for disclosing national security secrets in the 200-year history of the nation. When reporters are jailed for refusing to reveal their sources, the incarceration is usually brief and pro forma – and actually can make a reporter’s career because of the publicity. In the end, more decades of benign indeterminacy may be preferable to a national shield law that defines who is a journalist and who is not. And an Espionage Act that isn’t applied to journalists is preferable to one that is rewritten in unpredictable ways. Journalists will sometimes have to apply their personal and professional ethical standards and go to jail to protect sources. There is no way to create a legal structure that can protect them and also protect all of the government’s legitimate interests in protecting national security secrets while, at the same time, obtaining the best possible evidence for the judicial system. g
The year 1972 was important for the reporter-source privilege. It was the year that the most important confidential source in the history of journalism began to leak. That was the FBI’s associate director, Mark Felt, better known as “Deep Throat.” Woodward and Bernstein’s masterful use of Felt and other confidential sources to help bring down a dishonest and corrupt president made the use of confidential sources the “gold standard” of journalism. Winter 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 13
Reporters get ethics and law wrong
in vacated murder sentence by Terry Ganey When Ryan Ferguson was released from prison Nov. 12 where he had been serving time for the murder of a newspaper sports editor, television journalists from across the country swooped down on Columbia, Mo., home of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. The big story provided a teaching moment for one professor, concerned about accuracy, media ethics and the appearance of objectivity. A lesson was to be learned, too, about convergence, and how an event can be transformed or amplified by the various forms of media buzzing around it. Ferguson’s release prompted live television coverage that showed reporters hugging members of his family, Internet postings and blog entries containing inaccuracies, and Twitter-fed debates over whether journalists should be cheerleaders. On national television, a network legal affairs correspondent misinterpreted a Missouri court opinion. “I was appalled really at the media circus that went on after Ryan was released,” said Jim Robertson, managing editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune. “It just made me feel cynical about our profession.” Ferguson spent nearly 10 years behind bars for the murder of Kent Heitholt, a Tribune sports editor who was found strangled and beaten in the newspaper’s parking lot on Nov. 1, 2001. Two years after the killing, an acquaintance of Ferguson’s, Charles Erickson, told police he had “dreamlike” memories of the murder and Ferguson’s involvement. Erickson, who pleaded guilty to armed criminal action and second-degree murder, received a 25-year sentence. After a trial, a jury convicted Ferguson of first-degree robbery and second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. The case attracted widespread media attention. NBC’s “Dateline” and CBS’s “48 Hours” re-examined the case. No physical evidence tied the defendants to the murder. Erickson and another witness later recanted their testimony that had helped to convict Ferguson. On Nov. 5, in response to a habeas corpus petition, a Missouri appeals court overturned Ferguson’s conviction, ruling that prosecutors had withheld evidence that could have im-
In the aftermath of Ferguson’s release, much attention focused on how many reporters reacted so favorably to the outcome, as if they’d been on his side all along. But of greater concern to Joy Mayer, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, were the inaccuracies explaining the court decision. peached the testimony of a key trial witness. “His verdict is not worthy of confidence,” the court said. After Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster decided not to re-file charges against Ferguson, he was released Nov. 12. According to a transcript of ABC’s “Good Morning America” program the next day, Dan Abrams, chief legal affairs anchor, said, “Last week, a Missouri appeals court overturned Ferguson’s conviction, saying, quote, ‘Newly discovered evidence clearly and convincingly establishes that he’s actually innocent.’ ” But Abrams, who according to an ABC news biography is a graduate of the Columbia University law school, apparently did not carefully read the 54-page ruling. Issued by the Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City and signed by Judge Cynthia Martin, the opinion contains no finding that Ferguson was innocent. His conviction was vacated because of the prosecution’s non-disclosure of crucial evidence to his defense lawyers. Abrams and other reporters seized on the opinion’s language that said one way Ferguson could gain his freedom would be if “newly discovered evidence clearly and convincingly establishes that he is actually innocent, thus undermining confidence in his conviction.” But that’s not the avenue the court chose. Instead, it said the prosecution had denied Ferguson a fair trial by withholding “material and favorable evidence.” “Under the facts and circumstances of this case, we conclude that Ferguson did not receive a fair trial,” Martin wrote. In the aftermath of Ferguson’s release, much attention focused on how many reporters reacted so favorably to the outcome, as if they’d been on his side all along. But of greater concern to Joy Mayer, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, were the inaccuracies explaining the court decision.
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Mayer was drawn into a Twitter conversation about coverage of the Ferguson case because of a tweet posted by Scott Charton, a former Associated Press reporter. Watching the live broadcast of Ferguson’s news conference on KOMU-TV, Charton recognized a local television reporter hugging a member of the Ferguson family, and he saw a photographer with a still camera doing the same. Charton thought the behavior was unusual. Reporters are supposed to be impartial witnesses to news events, not cheering participants. “Too close,” Charton said in a tweet recounting that he saw reporters and photographers hugging Ryan Ferguson. A few minutes later, his next tweet said, “Clarifying for record: saw a photographer and a TV reporter hug the dad (Bill Ferguson), did not see them hug Ryan.” Although Charton did not name him, the reporter was Mark Slavit of KRCG-TV, a midMissouri station with a bureau in Columbia. “I was caught up in the emotion of the moment,” Slavit said later in an interview with a reporter for the Gateway Journalism Review. “There was a lot of hugging going on. I hugged Bill Ferguson. I don’t consider him a friend, but he is a news source. I had been working on this story with him for nearly 10 years.” Slavit said if he had it to do over again, he’d be more careful. “I should have done it in a private moment,” he said. The issue might have died, except that Melanie Moon, a reporter for KPLR-TV in St. Louis, later chimed into the “too close” Twitter conversation that Charton had begun. Charton had not seen Moon, and did not know her, but she said on Twitter that, in fact, she had hugged both Ferguson and his father. She posted on her Facebook page a photo of herself standing arm-in-arm beside Ryan Ferguson, both smiling broadly. And those looking at her postings said later that she
encouraged people to contribute to a fund for Ferguson. “In some cases media biases, based in a strong sense of right and wrong, serve the public good,” Moon tweeted. Moon’s response drew more people into the debate over how much distance should exist between journalists and people who make the news. Renee Hulshof, who co-hosts a talk show on KFRU radio in Columbia, said, “So the press is now the arbiters of who is right and wrong? Oh, I missed that lesson in J-school.” Hulshof may have had more than just passing interest in the subject. Her husband, Kenny Hulshof, is a former special prosecutor who has had criminal convictions overturned on judicial review. Mayer weighed in, too. She is the director of community outreach for the university’s newspaper, the Missourian, and she had warned reporters covering the Ferguson case to report on the celebration about his release but not become part of it. When one of Moon’s tweets said the Ferguson case was about “innocence and prosecutorial misconduct,” Mayer posted an essay on the Internet titled “How a St. Louis TV reporter got both ethics and facts wrong.” “The hug wasn’t the point,” Mayer said in an interview. “I think the hug was inappropriate. She got the facts wrong and never admitted the facts were wrong. What bothered me the most
was that she really didn’t understand why he had been released from prison, and also that she was so firmly convinced of his innocence.” According to the KPLR-TV website, Moon studied telecommunications and journalism at the University of South Florida and later graduated from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Moon did not respond to a Gateway Journalism Review reporter’s request for comment. Her tweets on this subject have since been deleted. In a Facebook thread, Moon’s behavior was roundly criticized by current and former journalists, including Amanda St. Amand of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Jodie Jackson of the Tribune; Steve Koehler, formerly of the Springfield News Leader; and Dale Singer of the St. Louis Beacon. “Totally inappropriate for her to cheerlead for Ferguson, then to raise money, too,” said former KSD-TV newsman Mike Owens. “Not much journalism there.” If Moon had not been drawn into the Twitter conversation with Charton over the hugs, the issue would not have gotten so much exposure. But as it was, the Post-Dispatch’s Joe Holleman wrote about it the following day under the headline, “KPLR’s Melanie Moon defends hugging man whose murder conviction was overturned.” “It’s impossible to be objective on this,” Moon told Holleman.” When asked if the flap caused her to rethink her journalistic methods, she said, “I’ll be more careful of what I tweet; I’ll
keep some of those thoughts to myself.” Jaime Mowers, a reporter for the WebsterKirkwood Times and the programming chair for the St. Louis Chapter of SPJ, tried to arrange a panel discussion for Moon and Mayer to go over what had happened. While Mayer had agreed, Mowers said she had been unable to reach Moon, despite leaving her several messages. “I think it could still be relevant if Melanie would be willing to participate,” Mowers said. For Robertson and the other journalists at the Columbia Daily Tribune, the murder of Heitholt remains an open wound. The newspaper covered the Ferguson trial as well as all the litigation connected with his appeal – more than 250 stories in all. But it never beat the drum for his release. Robertson is sensitive to claims that the newspaper has been biased in its coverage, and that it was against Ferguson. He said some people automatically concluded that because the newspaper was writing about a victim who was one of its own. “We always try to be unbiased,” Robertson said. “On this one particularly we played things straight down the middle.” In a recent Sunday issue of the paper, the Tribune, under the headline, “Memories of Heity,” reported on the impact of Heitholt’s murder on his family. “He was really a good guy,” Robertson said. “We still miss him, and he’s not coming back.” g
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Cyberbullying ties schools, students in legal knots by Scott Lambert No group may be better suited to explain the process and the power of online bullying than is a class of college freshmen. Those freshmen survived the brutal years of junior high and high school and enter college as battle-hardened veterans of social media. So a simple question was posed in late October to 60 freshmen enrolled in a critical thinking and writing course at Millikin University in Decatur, Ill.: “If you, as a group, picked one person in this class and started a social media campaign to get him or her to leave the school, how long would it take to
The problem with cyberbullying laws is the line that must be drawn between free speech and bullying. The Internet has opened speech up to new arenas while also providing a new venue for young people to express themselves. How strictly should that expression be monitored? accomplish that task?” The answer: “Three days to a month.” Sure, some said they would be able to withstand the criticism, and there were more than a few who admitted to being bullied online as students in middle school or high school. Some also said that they might just get stubborn and stay if such a campaign were launched. But all of them knew the power of online bullying. “I think a directed social media campaign would be problematic,” said Rachel Sutter, a licensed clinical social worker who focuses on adolescent issues. “I don’t know if the effects would be as extreme as those students said, but I do believe that it could cause some issues with self-esteem, if someone believed that all those people didn’t like them.” The students believe in the power of social media, and many said it’s impossible to get away from. The biggest problem is that friends see many damaging posts and start to talk to the target about what’s happening. So, no matter what a person does, he or she can’t get away from it. Simply turning off social media is almost unheard of with today’s youths, who are so plugged in that tuning out would be akin to social suicide. “It is hard for them to just unplug,” Sutter said. “But one thing a parent could do to help is limit exposure to social media.” The worst part is that the bullied have little recourse from these attacks. Most laws that concentrate on social media bullying are connected in one form or another to schools. The connection to schools makes the job of balancing the need of protection for bullied students with the need to protect the free speech and privacy of students. Most people want laws that prevent cyberbullying. Most people also want to maintain privacy and their rights to free speech. Reporting about both creates a fine line for reporters. The stories On April 7, 2013, 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons died at a hospital after a suicide attempt at her home in Halifax, Canada. Her
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suicide was linked to a rape two years earlier. Someone took a picture of that rape, then posted it online and texted it to others. The young woman was unable to cope with the shame and the harassment from those who attacked her. After her death, two people were arrested for distributing child pornography online. Before her death, police refused to indict anyone for rape, claiming it to be a case of “he said, she said.” There also were no charges filed regarding the picture before her death. During that same month, a story broke in Michigan about a high school student who told her principal she had been sexually assaulted by an athlete. The principal encouraged her not to go public with the charges. When the girl did, she was barraged by Facebook posts attacking her. When the student assaulted another girl, the school then took action. The parents of the boy accused of assaulting the girls sued the school, saying the suspension could affect his ability to get a college scholarship. In October, 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick of Lakeland, Fla., jumped to her death at a cement factory after enduring more than a year’s worth of online attacks via text messages. Two girls were arrested and faced criminal charges, but the charges were dropped. Police said the girls will receive counseling. Media followed all of these stories carefully amid pleas that something be done to stop this madness. A similar plea aired in Missouri in 2007 when Megan Meier hanged herself after a friend and her mother bullied her on MySpace. These stories are no longer shocking to hear, because they have become so commonplace. Each time, writers detail a heart-rending story of the pain of the loss of a child. They point an unbending finger at the social media sites that led to the deaths. They fear for the children. They describe a “Lord of the Flies” scenario in the digital world. With each case, media lobby for strict anti-bullying laws, especially those that deal with online bullying. But those laws run into problems in states such as Missouri, where parts of its anti-bullying law written after the Meier case
were found unconstitutional in 2012 for being too broad and violating free speech. Online protections All states have anti-bullying laws of some sort, and cyberbullying laws are being enacted in more states. New Jersey is one of the latest, with a law making its way through the system that would criminalize online harassment and other intimidation by adults or minors, calling the crime “cyber-harassment.” One difference in the New Jersey law, compared to many others, is that it also targets adults who harass others online. But much of it is similar to those of other states in that it places much of the responsibility for monitoring activities on schools. This added emphasis is difficult for schools, which often are accused of not doing enough to prevent online bullying. One problem school administrators face is what action to take when incidents occur off school grounds. Also, what kind of tightrope must these same administrators walk to balance online protections with students’ freedom of speech? Schools must balance the two carefully. If they intervene too much in the online lives of students, they risk First Amendment lawsuits. If they intervene too little, they face trouble for being lax about online harassment. The current trigger for most schools’ involvement is if a problem becomes a disturbance. But what makes something a disturbance? The problem with cyberbullying laws is the line that must be drawn between free speech and bullying. The Internet has opened speech up to new arenas while also providing a new venue for young people to express themselves. How strictly should that expression be monitored? Another approach for those bullied is civil action. Students could sue for libel. To establish defamation, the accuser must demonstrate that the defendant published a defamatory statement, that the person was identified, that someone else read it and that the accuser’s reputation was affected.
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Limiting social media may curtail cyberbullying by Sharon Wittke The recent suicide of a Florida youth in which cyberbullying was thought to play a role is prompting parents to wonder if they should limit – and better monitor – their children’s online activities. In October, 12-year-old Rebecca Ann Sedwick jumped to her death from a cementplant tower. Two girls, aged 12 and 14, were arrested and charged with felony aggravated stalking following an analysis of Facebook messages they sent to the victim. The charges were dropped in November for lack of evidence. In a November New York Times story about the incident, journalist Lizette Alvarez explained that officials involved in the case said existing laws don’t cover the nuances of cyberbullying, nor have they led to a change in the behavior of online bullies. Furthermore, most online insults don’t warrant felony charges. She wrote, “Experts in bullying said it is difficult to bring charges in cyberbullying cases such as Rebecca’s because multiple factors are often at play in a suicide.” A recent study revealed the amount of time children spend online, particularly on social media sites, may be contributing to an increase in cyberbullying. An American Academy of Pediatrics policy released in October stated, “Young people now spend more time with media than they do in school — it is the leading activity for children and teenagers other than sleeping.” One of the lead authors of the AAP study, University of New Mexico adolescent medicine specialist Dr. Victor Strasburger, wrote that unlimited access to media may contribute to cyberbullying, obesity, problems in school and lack of sleep, and “ ‘many parents are clueless’ about the profound impact media exposure can have on their children,” Al Jazeera reported in October. Reports about the adverse effects of social networking and the role parents should play in
Continued from previous page The problem with this approach is that few lawyers want to take these cases. They involve little money, and many court systems would consider the civil actions of teenagers as frivolous. The same can be said for those
“There are a lot of positives in social media,” Lemish said. “We shouldn’t let this blind us to its positive potential. It’s such a crucial part of children’s lives today. We have to allow them to evolve socially.” monitoring their children’s Internet use can be confusing. A 2012 Pew Research survey showed most parents are concerned about their children’s online activities. Nearly 70 percent of the respondents considered their children’s management of his online reputation; 59 percent have talked with their children about an unfavorable comment or posting; and about half the parents of online teens have used some form of blocking, filtering or monitoring. One solution to curtail online bullying is to hold parents responsible for their children’s online activities, reported CNN legal analyst Mark O’Mara in his October opinion piece, “Should parents be criminally liable for kids’ cyberbullying?” He wrote that, under current laws, a parent’s ignorance of a child’s online bullying activity is not criminal, but “parents need to understand that the technology they give to their children can be used to break the law and inflict harm. Parents need to understand that allowing their children the privilege of going online comes with responsibility and liability.” Dafna Lemish, interim dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University and editor of the recently published book “The Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents and the Media,” said many factors are involved when considering the restrictions a parent places on social media use. “Children are not a homogeneous group, and there is no one solution that fits everybody,” she said. Parents need to consider both the chronological and emotional ages of their children, as well as their temperaments and other
who would try to sue for infliction of emotional distress. With courts already clogged, an infusion of teen-based libel cases would not provide the relief needed for those dealing with cyberbullying. Even with new laws on the books, the effects of cyberbullying may not change for
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individual characteristics, Lemish said. She said parents should be aware of their children’s social networking activity without invading their privacy, and parents should not expect to have access to everything unless there is an indication a child is in danger. “If the child is an adolescent and working on personal boundaries and privacy, I think parents need to respect that if they want a healthy teenager,” Lemish said. “They have the right to privacy, and their rights need to be respected.” Lemish said that when parents suspect a child is being subjected to online bullying, they have the right and the responsibility to intervene since online bullying, with its capability to escalate rapidly, differs from traditional “playground” bullying, which is more limited in scope. She said that because online bullying is constant and intense, its effects are more detrimental than are those of traditional bullying. If parents suspect their child is bullying another child, they need to educate the child about what being bullied means to the victim and how dangerous it is for both parties, Lemish said. Children who both bully and are bullied need help, she added. “Both the bullies and the bullied are experiencing some really serious social issues, or mental or emotional issues,” Lemish said. She said she doesn’t advocate parents banning their child’s use of social media despite the cyberbullying problem. “There are a lot of positives in social media,” Lemish said. “We shouldn’t let this blind us to its positive potential. It’s such a crucial part of children’s lives today. We have to allow them to evolve socially.” g
quite a while. Media will report on the times when they go too far, laws will be enacted to punish those who pushed too far, and the majority who survive those years when online bullying is at its worst will turn into college freshmen who know all too well the power of the Internet. g
Website redesign shows off GJR in new light by John Jarvis Call it online remodeling. If visitors to Gateway Journalism Review’s website, gatewayjr.org, have been paying attention in the past couple of months, they have noticed that someone has been hard at work giving the website an updated look and feel since its launch in 2010. Sharon Wittke, GJR’s associate managing editor, put her online expertise to work in sprucing up GJR’s homepage. Question: What was the reason behind the change? Answer: The main reason was to create a more visually compelling site and to be able to feature artwork by GJR’s talented illustrator, Steve Edwards, as well as photographs that accompany printed articles.
Q: How hard was it to do? A: Planning a website is usually the most difficult part. Since we already had our content, the challenge was in finding a theme for the website that was best suited to the content. Q: Did you have any experience with a website redesign before this? A: I helped redesign the website for Southern Illinois University-Carbondale’s School of Journalism and its “South of 64” program. Q: Did you have any help implementing the redesign? A. Fellow GJR staffers J.P. Rhea and Christian Holt created the concept for the
new header, which features the current print copy of the journal. This serves to better unite the print edition with the website. Q: Have you added any features to the website? What are they? A: The only new feature I added was the tab that allows readers to send in corrections. Basically, I worked with what was already established and just moved it around a bit. Q: Are you done with making changes to the website, or is this just the first step? A: I believe GJR is planning on doing a series of videotaped interviews about current issues facing journalists, which will be added to the website.
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Media Accountability
Social media campaign by former P-D writer alleges P-D mistakes in series about mistakes by William H. Freivogel Editor’s note: William H. Freivogel, publisher of GJR, is a former PostDispatch reporter and editor, and a colleague of Roth’s and Post-Dispatch reporters and editors involved in the series. The “Jailed by Mistake” project published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this past fall had all of the earmarks of enterprising journalism in the public interest. The series grew out of a letter that prisoner Dwayne A. Jackson sent the Post-Dispatch in January 2012, complaining that he had spent three months in jail after St. Louis police picked him up on criminal charges against another Dwayne A. Jackson.
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Media Accountability
Eddie Roth
Jennifer Mann and Robert Patrick reported on the miscarriage of justice against Jackson, then started digging and filing Sunshine Act requests – all the while covering their daily beats. By the time the project went to press Oct. 27, the Post-Dispatch reported that 100 people had been arrested in error over the past seven years and spent a collective 2,000 days in jail. In many instances, one family member with criminal trouble would use the identity of another family member or a friend. The aliases resulted in a welter of police and court records that were hard for police, prosecutors, judges and reporters to sort out. The stories garnered national attention in Slate, which wrote: “The St. Louis PostDispatch has been doing some great work lately reporting on the number of mistakenidentity arrests in that city.” The St. Louis American praised the series and said it should win a Pulitzer. KTRS-AM morning host McGraw Milhaven interviewed Patrick for 15 minutes, saying the stories were “scary stuff” and “great work.” The series seemed to epitomize Joseph Pulitzer’s “Platform,” published every day in the Post-Dispatch, to “never tolerate injustice” and “never lack sympathy with the poor.” But in the months since publication, a former Post-Dispatch editorial writer who went to work for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay meticulously documented what he thinks were mistakes in the series about mistakes. The top Slay administration official, Eddie Roth, has gone about it in an unorthodox way: publishing a series of criticisms on his Facebook page running even longer than the original series.
The Post-Dispatch at first stood by its stories. Then, after Gateway Journalism Review published a story in November about Roth’s questions, the paper acknowledged an error. Cortez Cooper, whom the paper had cited prominently for having served 36 days in jail for a charge against his brother, turned out not to have served time. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce joined the criticism. After auditing 10 percent of the Post-Dispatch’s 100 cases, she concluded that the paper had overstated the days wrongfully served in jail by 550. She said she assumed there were similar errors in the other 90 percent of the cases, which would substantially lower the number of days reported. In a Nov. 26 letter to editor Gilbert Bailon, she called for an independent audit of the stories’ accuracy. Bailon said nothing about an independent audit in his Dec. 11 response. He provided the paper’s timelines on the cases that Joyce had singled out. He said the paper stood “ready and willing to correct any factual errors” but would need to see the documentation of the mistakes. Joyce responded with a letter of her own stating, that she couldn’t make confidential records available to the paper: “…your reporters’ conclusions have a significant potential to be inaccurate … because they lack access to the information required for this analysis. … The Post-Dispatch does not have the legal authority or legal access to the documents needed to verify the accuracy of the documents you are representing to the public.” In one case, Joyce wrote that Jason Thomas was held 117 days on his own “parole hold” rather than for a charge against his brother Daniel, as the Post-Dispatch had reported. Bailon responded by saying that the Department of Corrections said Jason’s parole never had been revoked, so “there was no parole violation to hold him on.” Joyce acidly replied to GJR that she stood by her claim, and that “we understand the difference between a parole hold and a parole violation.” A “parole hold” means a criminal convict is being confined because of suspected parole violations. A person on parole hold can be lawfully detained pending a parole revocation hearing, even if parole ultimately is not revoked. So, Jason Thomas, according to Joyce, was being held on his own problems, not his
brother’s. For their part, Mann, Patrick and their main editor on the series, Pat Gauen, said in an interview at the newspaper’s headquarters in December that Joyce and Roth stonewalled them on records and refused to deal with them seriously on the story. They called Roth’s Facebook venue a “one-sided outlet where you can say whatever you want to say.” The real injustice, said Patrick, is “it seems … you are guilty of being who they say until you prove otherwise.” Lawyer-Journalist Roth is a lawyer and former St. Louis Police Board president who decided a decade ago to switch to journalism. After a stint at the Dayton Daily News, he worked on the Post-Dispatch editorial page until 2011, when he joined the administration of Mayor Slay. He is the mayor’s director of operations. Few newspaper investigations are put under the microscope like this one by a person who knows both the law and the conventions of journalism. Here are the main criticisms that Roth and Joyce have made: • The Post-Dispatch did not talk to most of the 100 people whom the paper said were wrongly jailed. The reporters said they talked to the defendant or lawyer in about a dozen cases. One who wasn’t interviewed, Cortez Cooper, never was jailed as the series stated. • The characterization of the system as “broken” was “false and inflammatory,” Roth said. The paper’s own data show errors to be rare and declining significantly. “The P-D used every trick in the book to obscure that reality,” wrote Roth, who added: “Why? Because a story about a system that works well and steadily improves under difficult circumstances … isn’t big news.” • The Post-Dispatch’s methodology was flawed. Reporters could not get access to relevant confidential documents. The stories were heavily based on police and court records that prosecutors warned before publication would lead to factual errors. • The series accused top city officials of indifference based on statements taken out of context. • The newspaper switched the burden of proof for its story to the city by saying it would report what the public records showed unless the city was able to refute the records.
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Media Accountability Continued from previous page • The one correction that the paper eventually made was grudging. • The newspaper has never reported that Joyce says its numbers are greatly exaggerated. “To this day, the Post-Dispatch has not told its readers that the chief prosecutor for the city of St. Louis has found profound errors and exaggerations,” Roth said. The Numbers Most of the Post-Dispatch’s 100 cases were older ones. Roth said half were five years or older, and only about a dozen related to the past two years. That is out of a universe of 30,000 arrests a year. “The reporters found fewer than one case a month in 2012, and about one case every other month in 2013 – a steady and marked improvement in the system over the five-year average,” he said. Mann and Patrick said one reason there are fewer recent cases is that their Sunshine Act request covered the period up to early 2012, and that the cost of obtaining computer records for 2009-2010 was deemed excessive. Post-Dispatch editors decided not to pay about $750 to $1,000 to obtain some 70 computerized records for that period, even though Mann urged the editors to obtain them. Gauen said he didn’t regret the decision made by other editors not to pay for the records. “I’ll stand by the decision,” Gauen said, adding: “I don’t think they are that important.” He said the project never was driven by the magnitude of the numbers. One factor in the debate over the numbers is a lawsuit pending in federal court on the issue of wrongful imprisonments. The stories reported that lawyers “planning a class action” claim to “have discovered more than 80 wrongful arrest cases with their own research and believe the actual number could be hundreds.” Roth maintained that the “reporters used the specter of a ‘class action’ to create
the impression of a vast trove of cases that might be coming before the federal court. If the reporters knew that the request for class certification had been denied months earlier (and, indeed, had been found ‘futile’ by the federal court) they should have informed their readers.” Patrick said, however, that the lawyers in the case acknowledge they asked for class certification too soon and are planning to file a new class-action case. He and Mann emphasized they were extremely conservative in their investigation and suspected the number of people wrongfully jailed was considerably higher than the 100 they reported. If the city had provided the information they sought, they would have been able to better verify their numbers, they said. At a hearing in early January in the court case, U.S. District Judge Audrey Fleissig said in court that the city had clearly been negligent in the case of Cedric Wright, who spent 58 days in jail in 2011 on another man’s charges. The other man apparently had used Wright’s name as an alias. The city knew that one of three charges against Wright was bogus but didn’t take the next step of freeing him from two related bogus charges. Roth said he couldn’t comment on the particular case but said, “People make mistakes. The mistakes are infrequent. We regret every one of them -- as evidenced by a system that fundamentally is high performing and constantly improving.” On the burden-of-proof issue, the reporters and editors say they didn’t switch the burden to the city officials. They said they simply wanted to give city officials time to respond to their evidence. But Joyce told Bailon: “If the PostDispatch is adopting a standard where such complex and historical data is published as fact unless corrected by this office, I can only believe that such a standard will lead to further inaccuracies.” The Case of Cortez Cooper
Media Accountability Roth points to Cortez Cooper to illustrate several criticisms: the failure to talk to defendants, the absence of attribution for important claims and the grudging approach to correcting errors. The Post-Dispatch’s original story stated without qualification: “Earlier this year, Cortez Cooper spent more than a month in jail because his brother, Cecil Cooper, used his name during a drug arrest before being released pending charges. Despite a fingerprint report within 21 hours showing that the wanted man was really Cecil, an arrest warrant was issued two months later for Cortez. He was jailed for 36 days.” Roth said this statement should have been attributed because it was based entirely on records, and the newspaper had acknowledged in a disclaimer that the records “can be inconsistent or inaccurate.” The Post-Dispatch editorial page contacted Roth the day after the story ran to ask why Cortez Cooper had been wrongly jailed. (The editorial page ended up not writing an editorial.) Roth and Joyce determined that the claim was wrong, and the Gateway Journalism Review brought the Cooper case to Bailon’s attention. By this time, Patrick had made contact with Cortez, who he said he never was jailed. Cortez and his mother went to police headquarters with Patrick tagging along. Police, once again confusing one Cooper for the other, handcuffed Cortez. He was released after a short time when he showed police a court paper explaining the situation. Patrick’s front-page story the next day focused on the problems Cortez had at police headquarters. Under the headline, “Man battles to free himself from St. Louis police paperwork glitch,” Patrick reported the Cortez faced “another episode in the recordkeeping system that contributes to a wrongful arrest problem, outlined in a Post-Dispatch investigation published Oct. 27. The paper reported that at least 100 people had spent
The series seemed to epitomize Joseph Pulitzer’s “Platform,” published every day in the Post-Dispatch, to “never tolerate injustice” and “never lack sympathy with the poor.”
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more than 2,000 days behind bars on wrongful arrests, based on available records over about five years.” The story then included these paragraphs, which Roth views as a grudging, confusing correction: “Eddie Roth, operations director for Mayor Francis Slay, … challenged the story’s characterization that Cortez Cooper had been wrongly held for 36 days in the drug case against Cecil Cooper. “Neither he nor other officials would provide proof to contradict what was otherwise clearly stated in jail records and police arrest logs: that Cortez was arrested and held on a warrant that turned out to be intended for Cecil. “Interviewed for the first time Monday, Cortez Cooper acknowledged that he was never jailed.” The day after the story and correction ran, McGraw Milhaven interviewed Patrick on KTRS radio for 15 minutes. Much of the interview focused on Cortez Cooper’s problems. Patrick did not mention that the series had mistakenly said Cortez was jailed. Patrick explained later that he did not mention the error because Milhaven was interested in the rest of the story about Cortez being handcuffed at police headquarters. Based on Patrick’s on-air account of what happened to Cortez, Milhaven remarked, “It sounds to me like these people were just walking down the street and the cops said, ‘Hey, you, we want to talk to you,’ and they arrest the guy thinking it is somebody else.” This is exactly what St. Louis public officials say is not happening. Susan Ryan, a public relations consultant for Joyce, said in a videotaped interview with the Post-Dispatch before the series ran that it was important for citizens to know that the average person “isn’t driving down the street and being stopped and arrested for something he didn’t do.” She said that, in the main cases the PostDispatch reported, the person wrongly jailed already was in the criminal justice system. Asked if she meant that people with criminal records should be treated differently, Ryan responded: “I’m not saying that at all. I think that all three agencies would tell you that they take this very seriously, and they don’t want anybody wrongly arrested.”
Callous Indifference?
then they are required to is not something that is satisfactory to me.”
The Post-Dispatch cited Ryan’s comment as a sign of indifference. The suggestion of indifference offended Roth from the moment the series hit the street with a front-page read-out headline quoting him saying: “I don’t worry about this.” The quote got a lot of attention. The Huffington Post reported that “of the public officials interviewed for the piece, Eddie Roth, a senior aide to St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, comes off the most callous.” The St. Louis American said Roth looked like a “callous, ignorant jerk.” Later, the American suggested that Roth’s New Year’s resolution should be: “I resolve to start worrying about the fact that the city whose operations I direct has a record of arresting and incarcerating the wrong people, leaving actual criminals at large.” Roth complained immediately to the Post about the quote, and it added a sentence: “He said he has faith in the system’s ability to correct mistakes.” The Post-Dispatch reporters and editors were split on whether to add the sentence. Mann opposed the addition, arguing that Roth would claim – as he did – that it was an admission of error. Gauen decided to add the sentence out of an abundance of caution. “I don’t think it changed anything,” he said. But Roth still thought the paper misrepresented what he said. Here is what he said: “We like stuff done right. And so … we don’t like to see things that might not be right. Even though we can look at this and say the chances of a citizen getting mistakenly caught up in the system is almost to the vanishing point in its rarity, we understand how important this is to the process, and we don’t like any of them. We don’t want there to be any. So, if we see any, we don’t like it. “We take some comfort — I take some comfort — in knowing we have a really excellent system, with really dedicated people. I don’t worry at night, and worry is kind of my main form of fitness exercise. I worry about a lot of things, I don’t worry about this even though I know it is imperfect…. But I don’t like to get any of them wrong, and the idea that anybody would spend one minute more in jail
Misdirection? Gauen called the claims by city officials “baloney” and “misdirection” designed to distract from the serious injustices the paper uncovered. He said he was “flabbergasted there is not more interest in fixing the problem.” Mann added that the city had not yet obtained mobile fingerprint devices for district stations, a step that could address the problem. Said Gauen: “I think that their attempt to spin this thing has embarrassed them, and they are withdrawing. They are very resistant to representing their point in any serious way. … I have the impression that Jennifer Joyce is done … that they have declared victory and left the field.” He added: “These are people who have their own agendas” who take any “shred that we were wrong” as an excuse not to “look any deeper” at the problem because they “don’t want to see anything deeper.” Gauen also said “… the records are wrong. Nobody seems to have an interest in going back and fixing the records. … They never suggested they had any remorse” for giving people like Cortez Cooper a criminal record. Roth responded that “the Post-Dispatch reporters came to us with questions not about errors in records, but about whether people were being jailed by mistake. That’s what the reporters asked about. They called their exposé: ‘Jailed by Mistake.’” Roth said Gauen’s statements were “angry words, not words of a measured, thoughtful editor. This is a major reason why Post-Dispatch readers deserve, as the circuit attorney has recommended, an independent evaluation of the reporting and stories.” He added that “the editors and reporters are offended at having been publicly confronted with their errors and omissions. They also appear to resent how new media gives people aggrieved by flawed journalism a chance to correct the record. They … mount no serious defense to the detailed criticisms of their investigative, reporting and editing methods. Instead, they lash out. … This illustrates how uncomfortable these editors and reporters are with the give-and-take of serious social media.” g
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Media Coverage
Best GJR posts, fall 2013
GJR’s weekly eNewsletter contains original and provocative blog posts covering all aspects of journalism. Included in this article are excerpts from some of the best from the fall of 2013. To read each complete blog post, visit www.gatewayjr. org. Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald’s role in shining the spotlight on the NSA continued to provide fodder for blogs throughout the fall. Following are excerpts from two posts about the subject written by William H. Freivogel, publisher of Gateway Journalism Review and director of the School of Journalism at Southern Illinois University, and George Salamon, a frequent GJR contributor who was a staff reporter for the St. Louis Business Journal and a senior editor for Defense Systems Review: Can Greenwald be trusted with journalism’s future? By William H. Freivogel Every journalist should read this week’s debate between Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times, and Glenn Greenwald, who has written stories in the Guardian based on Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA surveillance. The debate is between Keller’s classical brand of impartial, let-the-reader decide journalism and Greenwald’s brand of advocacy journalism where the reporter transparently discloses his beliefs and asserts facts that support those beliefs. Each thinks his approach is more honest and credible. Keller thinks impartiality is more credible because the reporter puts aside his or her views while marshaling the facts for the reader to decide. Greenwald thinks his activism is more credible because readers know where he is coming from and can trust him not to cater to the government-speak. What journalists aren’t – but could be – debating By George Salamon The debate between former NYT executive editor Bill Keller and NSA revelations celebrated journalist Glenn Greenwald on the pages of the New York Times on Oct. 27 received much coverage, including on
this site (“Can Greenwald be trusted with journalism’s future?” by William Freivogel on Nov. 1). The debate skidded to a highbrow conclusion when heavyweight-thinking journalist John Judis (doctorate in philosophy from the University of California-Berkeley) contributed his thoughts in the pages of the New Republic, where the headline to his Nov. 6 piece proclaimed: “Glenn Greenwald and Bill Keller Are Wrong about Objectivity in Journalism.” Many commentators agreed that the either-or nature of the debate – Keller’s impartiality vs. Greenwald’s advocacy – did indeed render both positions “wrong,” or were at least based on assumptions easily rejected. Judis starts off well, by informing readers that at a conference in Australia he was asked several times “whether I thought journalists should strive to be ‘objective.’ ” He had a simple answer for them; he wrote, “Yes.” The rest of his argument will be much harder to follow for anyone not schooled in philosophical reasoning. Perceptions of media bias surrounding the affordable care act prompted Scott Lambert, an assistant professor at Milliken University and a former managing editor of GJR, to write the following blog: Information doesn’t mean bias By Scott Lambert Perceptions of media bias continue to rise in Americans, and those perceptions aren’t going to change anytime soon. A 2012 Pew Research Center study reported that the number of Americans who believe political news coverage is biased rose 6 percentage points in 2012 as compared to 2008. The idea that media cover news stories from a strictly neutral position is seen as a fairy tale, and the term “lamestream media” is a common phrase on the right whenever a story perceived as negative is presented. The practice of bashing all things media related reached an extreme this week. The Affordable Healthcare Act went into effect Oct. 1, the same day the federal government shut down. Conservative blogs fired up the rhetoric, finding bias everywhere. GJR’s current managing editor, John Jarvis, a veteran reporter, copy editor and editor, wrote the following blog post about a
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journalist’s duty to defend everyone’s rights under the First Amendment: Young journalists grasp meaning of First Amendment By John Jarvis My 26-year journalism career has led to a collection of Facebook friends who either have been, or still are, in the same line of work. Because of this, I came across a post on a friend’s Facebook page a few days ago that grabbed my attention – and the attention of some of my former co-workers, too. My friend’s post noted that the student newspaper at Oklahoma University, the Oklahoma Daily, ran an editorial Oct. 3 titled “KKK rallies shouldn’t be allowed.” The lead paragraph reads: “A Maryland-based Ku Klux Klan group planned to rally at Gettysburg National Military Park on October 5. It’s mind-boggling that KKK groups still have the audacity and will to exist in today’s society, but what’s more surprising is the fact that they were granted a special permit to hold an event there.” The editorial goes on to say that “the KKK should not be allowed to hold rallies for a number of reasons,” including the KKK’s history of hate crimes against blacks and certain religious groups. The editorial ends this way: “The ‘freedom of speech’ line is so abused sometimes, and it’s a poor excuse to allow this type of public behavior. The rallies are unnecessary and do no good for the community. If anything, it’s only ignominious and poorly represents our country.” Tripp Frohlichstein, a former St. Louis Journalism Review contributor who worked for Channel 4 from 1974 to 1986 and is the owner of MediaMasters, offered several critiques about St. Louis television, including the following: Severe weather prompted quick thinking by reporters By Tripp Frohlichstein Commendations to Channel 4 (KMOV) for its performance during the severe weather outbreak last Sunday afternoon. As killer tornadoes formed in the area and noon approached, there was no doubt many football fans concerned their game would not air because of the dangerous
Media Coverage weather. But it did. The main channel, Channel 4, had its meteorologists keeping viewers up to date. But its digital channel (4.2) and alternate on Charter (85) had the game on. Smart thinking – keeping everybody happy. In fact, to make sure people knew where to turn, at one point one of the meteorologists pointed out the game was on digital 4.2 and said it was on Charter, too. Viewers heard him ask, “What channel?” followed by a polite, “Then find out.” Now there is a station that cares about viewers.
national papers – the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – cover the current rift between the U.S. government and that of Israel about the ongoing negotiations on Iran’s development of nuclear power and a nuclear bomb, and the lifting of sanctions on the Islamic Republic if it restricts current progress toward obtaining the bomb?
Good investigative reports aired on St. Louis TV stations
By George Salamon Just this past Sunday, journalism’s unceasing debate on anonymous sources reared its head again. In the Oct. 13 “Sunday Review” section of the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s fifth public editor, wrote about “The Disconnect on Anonymous Sources.” Dan Okrent, first public editor from 2003 to 2005, confronted the same issue during his tenure. Even then, novelist and New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen had already had enough: “The customary righteousness, disingenuousness, futility and wonky tedium of such debates are for me almost unbearable.” Little has changed since Andersen wrote those words in 2005. Sullivan embodies fair-minded and thoughtful journalism, but when she concludes her piece by proposing that “anonymity is granted gratuitously, “that “it’s happening too often” and therefore that “it’s time again to pull in the reins,” she’s talking precisely the kind of high-minded piffle Anderson deplored. While she quotes her paper’s national security editor Bill Hamilton admitting that “it’s almost impossible to get people who know anything to talk,” and even harder to get them to talk on the record, she has no answer to journalists “caught in this dilemma.”
By Tripp Frohlichstein Elliott Davis brought viewers an effective “You Paid For It” this past week as he produced a story (http://fox2now. com/2013/11/13/expensive-deal-costing-stcharles-county-taxpayers-millions/) on what appears to be an inconsistency in how St. Charles County does business. He pointed out that a recent $5 million-plus project had only one bid submitted. Davis went after St. Charles County executive Steve Ehlmann to ask him why the county did not put the bid out again in hopes for more bids to potentially lower the cost. Ehlmann responded that it fell within the expected cost range. Then it was clear that Davis did his homework. The following post by George Salamon discusses the problem media organizations encounter when covering both the Israel-Palestine or Israel-Iran conflicts: Dr. Obama or: How to Live With and Love the Iranian Bomb according to the NYT and WSJ By George Salamon Media coverage can’t please either side on the Israel-Palestine or Israel-Iran conflicts. Once that’s accepted as a given, the differences in stories no longer garner much attention. The “liberal” media reveal bias for the Palestinian cause, and are soft on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and goal of wiping the Zionist entity off the map. The “conservative” press expresses uncritical support for Israel and fails to recognize Iran’s legitimate quest to join the world’s nuclear powers club, which includes Israel. That’s the longstanding mantra of the complaints. So, how did our two prestigious
Salamon focused on the never-ending debate about anonymous sources in this blog: Journalism’s never-ending debate on anonymous sources: Enough already!
The following two posts by GJR editor William A. Babcock and Scott Lambert cover sports journalism: The missed photo that wasn’t By William A. Babcock Dozens of the United States’ best sports photojournalists are not vying today – Friday – to take the Major League Baseball picture of the year. That photo would have shown Terry Francona, the manager of the Cleveland Indians, walking past the “Green Monster”
wall in Boston’s Fenway Park, wearing the most politically incorrect baseball cap on the planet. (That would be the blue cap with a red bill, featuring a horribly stereotyped, toothy red-faced American Indian nicknamed “Chief Wahoo” sporting a large feather in his hair.) Francona – son of Tito Francona, a popular Indians player for a few years in the 1960s – was unceremoniously fired by Boston after the 2011 season despite piloting the Red Sox to two world championships. After spending a year’s purgatory in TV sports, he was hired this year to manage the “mistake-by-the-lake” boys of Cleveland, and in one year he managed to take a team that had lost 90 games in 2012 to the postseason one-game wild-card playoff against the Tampa Bay Rays. Alas, the Rays deflated the Indians’ dream of getting to and winning the World Series – something they’ve not done in 65 years of missed opportunities, low salaries, “The Catch” and the curses of Rocky Colavito and Jose Mesa. The 4-0 score devastated Indians fans well used to such ignominy. And in the process, the Rays deprived photo journalists of the professional joy of elbowing each other out of the way as they positioned themselves to take Terry’s photo as he walked triumphantly into the sports cathedral of his former employer. So much for the missed photo op that never was. But as Indians fans have told sports journalists since 1948, “Wait ’til next year!” Echoes of ‘A Few Good Men’ in Miami Dolphins story By Scott Lambert As the bullying allegations aimed at Miami Dolphins offensive lineman Richie Incognito continue, connections to the 1992 movie “A Few Good Men” become easier to make. In fact, it shouldn’t be long before Miami head coach Joe Philbin says to a group of reporters: “You can’t handle the truth!” In this case, it’s the media playing the role of the courtroom, and breaking stories every day seem to mirror the Incognito situation and the movie. As the story about Incognito and fellow Dolphins offensive lineman Jonathan Martin continues to unfold, media have been racing to make the connections to bullying, to racism and to a culture that may have run amok. Please visit our website at http:// gatewayjr.org/ to read these and other blog posts, articles, news shorts and book reviews.
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Around the Arch
Around the Arch
Alton Telegraph newsroom evokes
fond memories
by Paul Van Slambrouck
I fell in love with the Alton Telegraph newsroom. Who wouldn’t, with its dangling cables, stacks of yellowing newsprint, reference books – that’s right, BOOKS – on cabinets with wheels and reporters’ desks adorned with the bric-a-brac from years of school-board meetings, election nights and city council debates? Founded in 1836, the Telegraph would
watch journalistic history come to this Mississippi River town. Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy moved his newspaper from St. Louis to Alton, where he expected less opposition to his views. Instead, he and his Alton Observer became targets and he was slain by a mob of antiabolitionists. Today’s Telegraph executive editor, Dan Brannan, seated at his desk, let me wander for an hour to take these photographs. I couldn’t help but feel the Telegraph’s struggle to survive. Now owned by Civitas, its news staff has
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dwindled to a handful and its print circulation has declined. Whatever the future holds, newsrooms like this have an ambience not found in the more sanitized digital-news offices of today. Their struggles to survive make their gun-metal gray furniture and abandoned Styrofoam coffee cups all the more appealing – at least to anyone who once sat at desks like these, wheeled backward on squeaky chairs and fiddled with a tangled phone cord while scribbling notes for the next day’s story. g
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Around the Arch
Review Murdoch: An unequaled media mogul for modern times
Media notes compiled by Benjamin Israel KSDK welcomes Danielski KSDK has named Marv Danielski vice president and station manager, according to Media Bistro. Danielski will report to KSDK general manager and executive vice president Lynn Beall. This is is the second time Danielski has worked for Gannett. He last worked for the station group starting in 1999 as a corporate marketing executive. Danielski comes to KSDK from the New York-area office of Frank N. Magid Associates, where he was senior vice president for integrated brand development. He also has served as vice president of marketing and creative services at Hearst Television. Article earns acclaim “Privacy in social media – is it really an oxymoron?”, an article by Mark Sableman, intellectual property, media and Internet law partner at Thompson Coburn LLP, made the list of “10 Popular Reads” at the “Intersection of Social Media & the Law” listed by JD Supra Buzz! In December. JD Supra powers “Legal Updates,” the only legal content application on LinkedIn, is a way for professionals and lawyers to connect on the world’s largest business network. Byrd joins new firm
up from covering the Saint Louis University sports beat to becoming a baseball expert and weekly columnist. Hummel was elected president of the Baseball Writers Association in 1994 and has been named the “Missouri Sportswriter of the Year” three times by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. The Press Club also honored sports radio broadcaster Bob Uecker with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his many decades of bringing baseball to life through his spirited and insightful commentary. Uecker began as a catcher who spent six years in the major leagues, including two years with the St. Louis Cardinals from 1964 to 1965. He was part of the Cardinals club that beat the New York Yankees in the 1964 World Series. He is now the radio announcer for the Milwaukee Brewers. The club also gave Bob Duffy of the St. Louis Beacon a Lifetime Achievement Award. Duffy joined the staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1973 and stayed, with one brief interruption, for 32 years. He served as a reporter, critic, columnist, editorial writer and editor during his tenure at the paper, and spent time in every department of the newsroom except sports. He was a Pulitzer Prizes juror for photography in 1978 and 1979. He has published articles in U.S. News and World Report, Smithsonian and Modernism, and has contributed essays or chapters to several books on architectural and urban-design subjects. Literacy award winners unveiled
Joy Byrd is now director of social media marketing at The Little Gym International Inc. Previously, she was production manager for Liguori Publications in Liguori, Mo. Press club names honorees The St. Louis Press Club named veteran St. Louis Post Dispatch sports columnist Rick Hummel as its Media Person of the Year for his contributions to sports journalism in St. Louis. Hummel has written for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch since 1971. He worked his way
Gateway Media Literacy Partners honored four individuals and one organization with the 2013 Charles Klotzer Media Literacy Awards. Print and broadcasting icon (and longtime revered college professor) Bernie Hayes received the “Educator” honor for his efforts spanning 57 years in print and broadcasting to use media literacy education processes, in addition to using his personal and academic gifts to help dismantle racism, both in the classroom and in the greater community.
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by Paul Van Slambrouck St. Louis Jewish Light editor Ellen Futterman and ESPN Radio’s/The Nine Network’s Alvin Reid shared honors as media professionals for distinguishing themselves for promoting critical-thinking skills on the job and as representatives of their fields out in the community. GMLP also honored KDHX Community Media as 2013’s institution honoree, for its many years of bringing voice to the St. Louis region via a variety of programming content, and for its myriad endeavors to bring media literacy education to the greater St. Louis area, especially among the community’s youth. Merger leads to Coolfire Studios In December, St. Louis-based Coolfire Media and Coolfire Originals announced they would merge with the Digital Marketing division Coolfire Solutions. The combined company now uses the name Coolfire Studios and began operations Jan. 1. Jeff Keane founded Coolfire Media in 2002 as a commercial-production company – making videos, TV commercials and websites. In 2009 he spun off two ventures: Coolfire Solutions, which specializes in mobile apps, and Coolfire Originals, which makes realitytelevision shows – including “Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s” and “Funeral Boss” – most of them based in St. Louis. The reorganized Coolfire Studios has a new senior leadership team. Keane will serve as the new company’s chief executive officer. David Johnson, previously Coolfire Media’s president, will serve as Coolfire Studios’s president. Dan Wacker will be the company’s chief financial officer. Steve Luebbert and Tim Breitbach from Coolfire Originals are now the senior vice president of development and vice president of story development, respectively. Jenny Dibble went from Coolfire Solutions as the new vice president of digital engagement, and Pete Halliday went from Coolfire Media as the vice president of commercial production and post. Jeremy Corray will join the team as the new vice president of digital entertainment.
All we need now is the movie “Citizen Murdoch.” With Orson Welles gone, perhaps Quentin Tarantino could be the director? Tarantino would bring the appropriate theatrics punctuated by violence all the more offensive for its ordinariness. In the case of Rupert Murdoch, the violence would come in the form of jaw-dropping ethical circumventions that seem part and parcel of a media colossus that author David Folkenflik calls “the English-speaking world’s most important media empire.” By “important,” he means “influential.” And it’s hard to argue with that. Over the past five decades, Murdoch has amassed a stable that includes Fox networks, 20th Century Fox movie studios, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Times of London and multiple properties in Australia, where Murdoch was born (and it all began). Is Folkenflik’s term “important?” Perhaps it is as an explanatory tale for anyone who still believes journalism is an honorable profession – and who might be puzzled why much of the public does not believe that, too. Citizen Murdoch is depicted here more as a phenomenon than a person, hovering as a kind of force that spans borders, laws and convention. Britain’s sordid phone-hacking scandal sets the stage in the opening pages, with Murdoch apologizing in a hotel room to the parents of Milly Dowler, a slain British schoolgirl whose voicemail was hacked by Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid. Hacking, buying off the police and paying for information are not new in the arena of British tabloids, but the Dowler case turned into the proverbial thread that slowly unraveled the larger garment. The scandal forced Murdoch to close the News of the World and abandon his long-sought goal of full ownership of BSkyB television in Britain. It poisoned relations within the Murdoch family, where the children jockeyed for favor, and it also yielded an uncharacteristically humble appearance by the patriarch himself before members of the
‘Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires’ Author: David Folkenflik Publisher: PublicAffairs Books, New York, N.Y. Hardcover: $27.90, 384 pages British Parliament. Even stockholders got nervous, resulting in a corporate restructuring that lessened Murdoch’s iron grip on his empire. The author effectively uses this emotional denouement in the face of grieving parents as the setting for the larger theme of the book: Was the News of the World hacking scandal an example of reporters and editors betraying the nature of the media giant Murdoch had built, or its logical outcome? He leaves little doubt it was the latter. The book has all the markings of its author’s skill set as a respected media analyst. Questions of bias and ethics, which have swirled around many of Murdoch’s acquisitions of respected mainstream properties, are tackled here almost as Harvard case studies. Academic content analyses are brought in to decipher if Murdoch’s Australian newspapers really were, for instance, quantifiably sowing public doubt about global warming. The answer: yes – though, oddly, Murdoch at one point makes a pledge to make his company carbon-neutral. And did Fox try to tilt the outcome of the 2012 contest to be the Republican Party’s nominee for president? With all the GOP candidates convinced the network was against them, it would seem as if relative evenhandedness prevailed. While publicly traded on NASDAQ, Murdochs’ News Corp. was run as a family fiefdom, with children jockeying for power, being in and out of favor at various times, and playing out the kind of Shakespearean drama that only a family can provide – particularly through
This is more a profile of the media empire than a biography, and on that level the book succeeds. But it also leaves the reader wondering if Murdoch is really as unappealing or unsympathetic a figure as he seems.
Murdoch’s three failed marriages, including his most recent to Wendi Deng. There is some fun in all this, such as enjoying tabloid headlines. As the News of the World slipped out of existence because of its ugly practices, the Telegraph tipped its hat with a middle finger: “Goodbye, Cruel World.” There are many time switchbacks that make this a read requiring close attention. What was missing is a sense of who exactly Rupert Murdoch is. There is enough history to see some of the possible engines for Murdoch’s outsider, chip-on-shoulder, buccaneer spirit. Principally, there is a father figure that Rupert seems to be perpetually trying to impress. This is more a profile of the media empire than a biography, and on that level the book succeeds. But it also leaves the reader wondering if Murdoch is really as unappealing or unsympathetic a figure as he seems. With the populist sentiments of many of his tabloids, one wonders if he is angry. With Murdoch’s legacy media acquisitions, the reader wonders if they were acts of revenge on some level, proving to a world that might have looked down its nose at him. Or was it all just about the money – just the natural instincts of an entrepreneur to know it is impossible to ever stand still? In that respect, Murdoch brings echoes of William Randolph Hearst. The book suggests Murdoch has even surpassed the Hearst legacy. Comparing the throw weight of Murdoch’s properties favors that argument, but that is comparing apples and oranges. Hearst didn’t have the Internet or satellites. Against that comparison is the fact that Hearst was a successful politician – serving in Congress and mounting a credible run to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president – political feats Murdoch has not matched. Still, there has been no one quite like Murdoch in recent times, and it’s hard to envision his equal anyt ime soon. g
Winter 2014 • Gateway Journalism Review • Page 29
Opinion
Opinion
As TIME goes by:
On the passing of an American institution by George Salamon When Wolcott Gibbs parodied TIME magazine’s famous style (“TIMEstyle” or “TIMEspeak”) in the New Yorker in 1936, he penned the now-famous line: “Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind.” But TIME was much more than a collection of inverted sentences, cheeky puns (“Esther Williams’ pictures are so much water over the dame”) and double-jointed adjectives. TIME was America’s first and best news weekly, read by more than 20 million worldwide, and it may well have “invented mass media.” Gibbs concluded his piece by asking: “Where it all will end knows God.” Now the rest of us have a pretty good idea: “New York (magazine’s) abandonment of weekly publication comes on the heels of Newsweek’s closing, TIME being spun off from its corporate parent as a prelude perhaps, to its moving entirely to the Web … ” is the prediction made in the New Republic on Dec. 3 by John Judis. For him, it’s another sign that “high-quality print magazines and newspapers are slowly but surely passing from the scene,” victims of their membership in a primarily stagnant sector of the economy. (As of this writing, IBT Media planned to relaunch a print edition of Newsweek in March.) If TIME eventually makes Judis a prophet, America will bid farewell to one of journalism’s last surviving institutions from an America that is hardly discernible today and that was last at the core of the country’s values and tastes in Ike’s America of the 1950s. Think of a society with such, by now, “quaint notions as uninterrupted family meals, commerce-free Sundays, unspoiled places” and many adults who followed an inner guidance system for shaping their values and decisions, not the buzz from their peers. For them, TIME provided a window to their society and the world; leading them by the hand to interpret what they saw mostly as the then –essentially WASP establishment from the Boston-to-Washington corridor wanted them to see it. An icon in its heyday
the epitome of his constantly dazzling methods.” How many readers, busy businessmen, physicians, or lawyers understood what the critic was saying here and were capable of agreeing with? Apparently quite a few, because TIME continued to publish reviews like this one, written by Louis Kronenberger, professor of theater arts at Brandeis University. Similar pieces, unintelligibly highbrow by today’s standards in a magazine meant for mass consumption, appear in the “Religion” and “Books” departments. TIME was intended for readers who found knowledge and information in the magazine to lift them above the rest. TIME served a now extinct creature: the general-interest reader, neither intellectual highbrow nor National Enquirer consuming lowbrow. Interlude: America gets niched
Taking a look at an issue of TIME during Eisenhower’s presidency, the issue of Nov. 5, 1951, what was it that its publisher served the “busy man” who “wanted to be “in the know” and could get there in about the two hours it took to read the magazine? In 136 pages, readers found a cover story on Winston Churchill, and a long (pages 46 to 52) analysis of “The Younger Generation,” of which one of the essay’s authors wrote: “It has been called the “Silent
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Generation,” but doesn’t tell us who called it that. (The writer is suspect, because all Googling for the phrase’s source lead back to this issue of TIME.) In the issue’s 17 departments, apart from “Letters” and announcements in “Milestones,” “People” and “Miscellany,” busy readers could make time for a three-column review of George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell” – or, as the reviewer called it, “the essence of Shaw’s highly debatable beliefs … (but) also
A sad consequence of the movements supported by the young and the hip in the 1960s was that their drive for authentic experiences gave consumerism a much bigger market and millions of additional customers. While the kids with the signs demanded purer food and greener goods, marketers sniffed more and bigger markets to meet their demands, and television added a multitude of new channels to sell while entertaining or distracting. The “general interest” publications began their long fadeout (think of LIFE, Look, Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post). The money was there to pursue special interests, from avocations to hobbies to self-help and lifestyles, and the center of the shared experience in America crumbled. The “dominant culture” gave way to multiculturalism, the melting pot to the salad bowl. Now people subscribed to (or bought) magazines not to discover what events or ideas might mean to “us,” but how they might bring a better life or improvement for themselves. The vision of Americans had shifted for the second time: first from that of a nation under God in the colonies to building the nation in the age of industry, and now from national interest to selfcultivation – or, as Andrew Delbanco, director of American Studies at Columbia University, put it, “to the vantage point of the self.” Magazines adjusted to thrive or survive. In doing so, they became narrower and shallower and less serious, reflecting the path of their readers. A recent issue of TIME provides an illustration. TIME today: Thinner and sillier The 64 pages of TIME from Oct. 21
contain three pieces that can be called articles: the cover story about New York mayor Bloomberg, one on “Obama’s Asia problem” and a profile of the creator of “the Singleton” Bridget Jones, Helen Fielding. It’s up-close-andpersonal all the way, with an occasional reference to similar personalities and the crosses they had to bear. The rest of the pages are filled with snippets, pictures and graphs. Eight pages are called “Briefing,” for those reading-challenged or suffering from attention deficit disorder. Among these briefings readers will find a quote by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia about the president’s State of the Union address: “It is a childish spectacle.” What readers gather from inclusion of his outburst, other than that a Supreme Court justice can be capable of a petulantly childish statement, is anyone’s guess. There also are three pages called “The Culture,” with tiny paragraphs about such luminaries as Miley Cyrus (“Got rave reviews for her SNL hosting gig; new album ‘Bangerz,’ topped iTunes chart”) and one telling us that a movie called “Gravity” grossed $55.6 million during its opening weekend in the United States. What any of this has to do with culture, popular or mass, remains a mystery. On the last page, readers find an interview with tennis legend Andre Agassi, who answers question 10 of 10 about his picking up German habits while living there: “I’ve now incorporated into what you would call ‘appropriate conversation’ the word ‘scheisse.’ They use this word in any environment. Somehow they can say s**t in German and it’s OK. Nobody bats an eyelid.” TIME readers can now travel to the Black Forest and the cafés of Berlin and toss “scheisse” around with abandon, making up with cultural savvy gained from TIME for our government’s spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel. TIME was clever once; now its lightheartedness appears to have sunken to the level of “Animal House.” Getting what they asked for As usual, Oscar Wilde said it well a long time ago: “The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.” That includes knowing everything about Britney Spears, but nothing about why our income gap widened and has continued to widen for three decades. That would be too complex to explain or understand; it would take too long to read, and it could make somebody angry. (You can find articles in a few publications on this topic. They are not easy to understand, and they take as
much time to read as does an entire issue of today’s TIME.) Altogether, what does the trip of TIME, from its exalted position as the magazine that informed millions of Americans to one of many publications that contains crumbs of information sprinkled into a stew of entertainment and gossip, mean for journalists and citizens? It’s impossible not to notice what David Sumner, a professor of journalism at Ball State, observed: “In the early 1900s, magazines looked like small books. At the end of the century, magazines look like television screens.” They also deliver reports like television screens: “Whereas television taught the magazines that news is nothing but entertainment, magazines have taught television that nothing but entertainment is news,” culture critic Neil Postman wrote. And that’s why, by 2013, they are so much like each other that each provides similar fare, similarly packaged and similarly lacking serious approach and content. Judis is right that newspapers and magazines, as a result, emphasize shorter, gossipy items over extensive news stories or long features on which print media once focused. But it’s really worse than that. Much has been lost in the turn from serious reporting and thoughtful analysis, including: • A loss of voice. The snippets of today lack any style or identifiable tone. They are the products of typists, not writers. • A loss of stance or viewpoint. They are mirrors of what is, as uncommitted as the characters from Seinfeld. • A loss of context, history and depth. • A loss of thoughtfulness and mindfulness, caving in to the readership’s lowest common denominators of mind and curiosity. The future of magazines, still in print or only on the Web, already is here in the shape of THE WEEK, a 30-page-plus version of TIME, where pictures and graphs and tiny snippets – most culled from other publications – reign supreme. The issue on hand advertises itself as “a multivitamin for your brain, THE WEEK packs the best of the world’s media into one fast, energizing, 45-minute read!” And it promises that reading the magazine will turn you “into the best-informed person in ANY conversation.” A dubious claim, since reading the Nov. 1 issue suggests that subscribers are more likely to utter the shortest sentences in any conversation. The good old New York Times referred to THE WEEK as consisting of “one-hundredword news bites in unadorned prose,” but admits that the publication’s circulation and profits are growing – and that it is read among our “affluent opinion formers.” Now that is truly scary. g
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Copyright verdict’s lesson:
Use online photos with care by Eric P. Robinson In a case that offers a reminder that material found online cannot simply be reused without regard to copyright considerations, a federal jury in Manhattan awarded a photographer $1.2 million in November against a news agency that, without the photographer’s permission, distributed photos he had posted to Twitter. American copyright law provides that a creative work is protected by copyright the moment it is created, and is owned by either its creator or, if the item created was a “work for hire,” the creator’s employer. This copyright protection persists even if the creator makes the work available on the Internet, and even if it can be easily downloaded and copied. Downloading, copying and reusing a work found on the Internet without the owner’s permission is infringement, unless the copying or reuse is covered by the “fair use” principle extended to uses such as news and education, as long as the use is not overly extensive and does not substantially harm the potential commercial market for the work. The New York case, Agence France Presse v. Morel, involved pictures of the Jan. 12, 2010, Haitian earthquake taken by photographer Daniel Morel. Morel, a freelance photographer in Haiti, has a contract that gives the photo agency Corbis the exclusive right to distribute the pictures he sends to that agency. The evening after the earthquake, Morel posted several photographs of the aftermath to Twitter through his account with a service called TwitPic. Shortly thereafter, another person, Lisandro Suero, posted Morel’s pictures to his own Twitter account, claiming that they were his exclusive photos. A photo editor for the news and photo agency Agence France Presse (AFP), searching online for photos of the earthquake, found the photographs posted by Suero and passed eight of them on the agency’s photo “wire service,” crediting them to Suero. Through an arrangement that AFP has with Getty Images, another photo agency, the photos credited to Suero were distributed through that service as well. By the next morning, editors at AFP began to suspect that the photos did not belong
Many photographers celebrated the verdict as a vindication of their right to control use of their works. to Suero. A few hours later, AFP sent a “caption correction” to its subscribers and changed the photo credits on Morel’s photos in its online archive. AFP also sent the correction to Getty and resent the photos with credits to Morel, all of which automatically went to Getty subscribers. But Getty did not change the credits on the photos attributed to Suero in its Web archive. Later that day, Corbis informed Getty – via an email to a Getty paralegal – that Corbis has exclusive rights to distribute Morel’s photos. Getty then removed the photos correctly credited to Morel from its customer website but did not remove the photos by Morel incorrectly credited to Suero. Getty also informed AFP, which on Jan. 14 issued a “kill notice” to subscribers regarding the photos credited to Morel, and removed those photos from its own archive. The AFP kill notice also was sent to Getty’s subscribers. On Feb. 2, Corbis informed Getty that Morel’s photos – credited to Suero – were still appearing on Getty’s website. Getty responded by removing those photos. By this time, several customers of AFP and Getty had published Morel’s photos, credited either to Morel or Suero. These included the Washington Post, NYTimes.com, CBS and ABC. Several of the media entities that published his photos without authorization settled with Morel. AFP sued Morel in March 2010, seeking to prevent him from asserting copyright claims against the agency. He responded by asserting the copyright claims. AFP and Getty then responded to the copyright claims by citing Twitter’s and TwitPic’s terms of service, which state that while copyright owners retain their ownership, by posting to the sites users agree to reuse of the posted material by the sites and other users, which AFP argued included itself. The court rejected this and other arguments, allowing the case to proceed. In January 2013, the court granted partial summary judgment to Morel on the infringement issue,
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leaving it to a jury to determine damages. Following a seven-day trial, the jury found that AFP and Getty had intentionally and wilfully infringed on Morel’s copyrights in the photos, and awarded $275,000 in actual damages – 100 times the customary daily rate for photographers – and $150,000 in damages – the statutory limit – for each of the eight photographs at issue in the case, amounting to $1.2 million. Under the law, Morel had to choose either the actual damages or the statutory damages, so he chose the latter. One juror said that the willful infringement by AFP and Getty was clear. “They wanted to scoop that (earthquake) story,” juror Janice Baker told Photo District News, “and after they had published the images crediting the wrong guy, they said to themselves, ‘We’ll just try to get permission from the real (photographer) later.’ ” The jury also found that the defendants had falsified and altered copyright information, which are separate violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for each of the eight photos – 16 tortious actions in all. But the jury was unclear on the amount it intended to award for these violations, and the matter is now before the court. Morel is seeking the statutory minimum for each violation, $2,500, which would amount to $40,000. Many photographers celebrated the verdict as a vindication of their right to control use of their works. Morel’s attorneys said the verdict was “the first time (that) these defendants or any other major digital licensor have been found liable for the willful violation of a photojournalist’s copyrights in his own works.” While the circumstances of the Morel case may be unique, the case points out that journalists cannot simply use material found online without making sure they have permission to use it. Copyright protects material online, as it does everywhere else – and those who ignore this may face major consequences, such as a $1.2 million verdict for infringement. g
GJR Contributors William A. Babcock Editor of Gateway Journalism Review. He is the senior ethics professor of the SIUCarbondale School of Journalism. Jessica Z. Brown Media literacy proponent, educator and an award-winning communications professional with more than 30 years of experience, including newspaper reporting and photography, television news and feature programming, video production, corporate marketing communications, customer service management and education consulting.
Christian Holt Lead designer for GJR and responsible for the magazine’s new look. She is an M.S. student at SIUC.
JP Rhea A MFA graduate student in Mass Communication and Media Arts at SIU Carbondale. He earned his bachelor’s degree in cinema and photography from SIU and Benjamin Israel has more than a decade of concept Freelance writer living in St. and design experience. Louis. He was a regular contributor to the St. Louis Journalism Review. Eric Robinson Forty years ago he was news Co-director of the Program director of KDNA-FM in St. Louis. in Press, Law and Democracy He formerly covered St. Louis at the Manship School of Mass courts for Bloomberg News. Communication at Louisiana State University. He has taught John Jarvis media law and ethics at the CUNY Managing editor of Graduate School of Journalism, Gateway Journalism Review. He Baruch College and the University has worked as a writer, copy editor of Nevada-Reno, where he was and editor for newspapers in Texas, deputy director of the Donald W. Indiana and Arizona. He is an M.S. Reynolds Center for Courts and student at SIU. Media.
Eileen Byrnes Former newspaper reporter who lives in Sandy Hook, Ct. Her children once attended Sandy Hook Elementary School. Charles Klotzer She was outside of the school with Founder of St. Louis the crowd of reporters on Dec. 14, Journalism Review. 2012. Scott Lambert William H. Freivogel Assistant professor at Publisher of Gateway Millikin University. He is a former Journalism Review and director of managing editor of GJR and worked the SIU School of Journalism. He as a sports journalist and editor for is a former editorial page deputy 13 years. editor for the St. Louis PostDispatch and contributes to the St. Roy Malone Louis Beacon. He is a member of Former reporter for the St. the Missouri Bar. Louis Post-Dispatch and the former editor of St. Louis Journalism Terry Ganey Review. St. Louis editor of Gateway Journalism Review. He has more John McCarron than 40 years of experience as an Contributing columnist investigative reporter and political for the Chicago Tribune and correspondent, and he has worked an adjunct professor of urban for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. journalism at DePaul University.
Jan Schaffer Pulitzer Prize winner for the Philadelphia Inquirer and executive director of J-Lab, one of the nation’s most successful incubators for news entrepreneurs and innovators. Pal Van Slambrouck Former editor of the Christian Science Monitor and a Pulitzer-winning journalist who is an associate professor in mass communication at Principia College in Elsah, Ill. Sharon Wittke Associate managing editor of Gateway Journalism Review. She served 25 years in the Air Force before retiring as a lieutenant colonel.