The trend that I find the most troubling in the field today is the degradation of news quality because news organizations are scrambling to beat each other to post stories-- to get the scoop has become a 24-hour obsession instead of a 5:00 deadline. It seems that news organizations are more interested in quantity and timing than overall quality.
(Although perhaps Capp's Good Enough Tech idea probably works with news articles as well-- they aren't as great as they used to be, but I can follow them on Twitter from my phone, so they're good enough.)
This 24-hour feeding frenzy that technology has enabled seems to have weakened our sense of ethics as well.
I have to wonder if having a deadline be as soon as possible, all the time, makes people forget to step back and look at a bigger picture. How does tweeting from a funeral while it's in session fit into the larger picture of news coverage?
It's the fastest for keeping people up to date.
It breaks the events down into the bite-sized pieces most people seem to prefer these days.
Perhaps it even makes an event more immediate, making a reader feel more connected to a story, maybe humanizing the situation more.
And in this case it's ridiculously insensitive and self-serving.
The media can be invasive enough when it's covering an important issue. There are times when it serves the greater good to go up to a family in mourning and ask the hard questions. But this was a situation where no public good came from up to the minute updates. It just fed consumer voyeurism and benefitted the paper. It was insensitive to the family to make the intimacies of their tragedy into an online spectacle.
Just because a technology is available doesn't mean we should use it whenever we can. There are situations where updating from Twitter could be really great for the public-- like in sports, for example. But issues like funerals need to be handled with more delicacy. General readers could have waited the three or four hours until the reporter could get to a Starbucks, pound out an article and upload it.
Ethics continually evolve. We need to ensure that they evolve as quickly as our technology does. News organizations need to step back and continually weigh the advantages of technology against their potential harms.
Just because you can post it, doesn't mean you should.
I agree that tweeting during a funeral is incredibly invasive and just wrong. There are still matters in this world that need to be treated with delicacy.
ReplyDeleteHowever, even though, we as journalists, can prevent ourselves from tweeting funerals, we can't stop the public.
Is there anything that we can do about it?
Good post, but I think your post could have benefited from a concrete example. Related to that is the relative weakness of the personal voice (lots of "why" room to grow here).
ReplyDeleteI do think the thoughts are good, but you just need to find ways to better contextualize them. Don't leave the reader wondering what you're talking about.
I remember when this happened - before I even knew what Twitter was!
ReplyDeleteI agree that readers didn't gain anything from this use of technology, but I do applaud the Rocky for at least trying to harness social media for reporting purposes. They did it a lot better during the DNC, when they used Twitter to update Web users about all the political and celebrity goings on: www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/aug/27/dnc-news-twitter-feed-archive/