[My] critique is about the tone of unnecessary pictures and videos that show pieces of bodies, dying people, the nudity of people, or the misery/tragedy of people in line for food and water. Seriously, is this cruelty really necessary to mobilize massive humanitarian action?

That’s Valérie Payen-Jean Baptiste, a Haitian elementary school principal discussing the graphic nature of photos published by the New York Times (and others) as quoted by the American Journalism Review.

It’s the age-old question of ethics in journalism: when is publishing a disturbing photo or video cross the line from accurately documenting a scene to being gratuitous and dehumanizing or just plain horrifying?

I remember listening to CNN soon after the World Trade Center attacks. A newscaster explained that they were running the same video clip over and over again because the other clips were just too disturbing to show — video of people jumping to their death or of charred bodies.

I also can’t forget a video clip of the Rwandan genocide that ABC News (“Nightline” if I remember correctly) broadcast one night. I didn’t really understand the horror and the scale of what was happening until I saw that video of bodies — dozens of mostly-clothed human bodies bloated from death — floating down a river.

A dead body or a pile of dead bodies, or a bloodied corpse is hard to look at. But do you get a sense of the human toll by looking at leveled buildings? Do photojournalists have a responsibility to shelter children and the sensitive or tell the full story? And is it possible to tell the full story without graphic images provided those images are an accurate representation of a horrifying, terrifying event?

There’s also the danger of a single story. In good times, Haiti is framed as a hapless country that needs your pity, a stern talking to, and perhaps the international development version of a timeout. The fine line with victim and disaster imagery is that it furthers that narrative.

Also see: how Boston.com handles graphic or disturbing images that it sometimes publishes in its Big Picture feature covering the February 2010 earthquake in Chile.

(Via A Developing Story, a blog that brings together and promotes multimedia from and about the developing world. The site both highlights and critiques photography, video and photojournalism as it relates to coverage of the Global South.)

There are a couple of logistical reasons that may help explain why the mainstream press has not exactly risen to the occasion. The first problem for reporters was the sheer size of the cache — I doubt that many journalists had time to comb through all of the e-mails (most of which, it seems, are quite mundane) before being asked to write about the most controversial lines being picked out by critics and climate-change skeptics. I certainly haven’t. The second major problem is that there are quite a few controversial lines. Figuring out and explaining each and every one of them in a single article is damn near impossible.

However, that is exactly what’s called for — over the course of the coverage, at least — and the press still hasn’t lived up to its responsibilities. With national and international policy on the line, this story deserves more and better coverage. To assess what it has done well and poorly so far, it’s useful to group criticism of the e-mails into two categories: what they say about the science of climate science, and what they say about the politics of climate science.

As Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, wrote Wednesday for The Wall Street Journal — in one of the most sage assessments of the situation yet published — the inability to “disentangle” climate science and climate politics is imperiling both.

From Hacked E-mails and “Journalistic Tribalism” in the Columbia Journalism Review. A long read, but an interesting look at why this has received sparse coverage in the press and the ways in which journalists are and aren’t to blame.

The audience doesn’t care about saving newsroom jobs or keeping journalists in journalism. Nor should it. The people who provide true value to the audience will be the ones who will be able to earn money from that audience. That was true in Walt’s day and remains true today. If people won’t pay for your content online, maybe that should tell you the content you’re delivering doesn’t provide enough value to the audience.

A big reason why the audience is turning to local blogs is because of the hyper-local coverage and sense of community they create. Rather than reprint the same 10 Associated Press headlines and then post them on the paper’s web site, online newspapers would do — or would have done — well to embrace this community model.

The research found that journalism on independent local news and information Web sites is increasingly becoming an act of participation, not just an act of observation. The participatory involvement calls for site editors to collaborate with readers in trawling for stories, unraveling news as it is happening, and ensuring that people know how to engage in community issues and events.

Site editors say they are abandoning what some call “antiquated” notions of dispassionate objectivity to “cut to the chase” and provide news that connects their community, not just covers it — even as they value and adhere to standards of accuracy, honesty, transparency, and sharing.

I wonder how much these entrepreneurs value fairness. Transparency means less if we’re not replacing “dispassionate objectivity” with unfair coverage, or if we’re sacrificing facts — the FUD surrounding global climate change or pre-Iraq War coverage, for example, — for some notion of balance.

The report outlines six themes relevant to hyper-local community sites, all worth reading if you are an old media company looking for ways to become more relevant to your community.

I ask this question after seeing the screen grab (posted above) of this headline from CNN.com (posted on Friendfeed).

That headline is a rare triple-entendre. There’s the first meaning: “juggling balls” as in “attending ten inaugural balls.” There’s the second reading: “juggling balls” as in “throwing actual balls in the air.” Then there’s the pubescent child’s reading: “balls” as in “testicles.”

I found it giggle-worthy and kind of brilliant, precisely because of its three ways of word play. Then I took a closer at the screen shot. See that little t-shirt icon to the right? Yep. This headline was also available on a t-shirt.

This isn’t a new feature for CNN.com. Headline t-shirts have been available since last spring. One of my coworkers, a CNN.com alumnus, purchased one last fall. I bought one myself after Obama’s election victory.

But that particular headline made me wonder: Are CNN.com’s headline writers trying to write t-shirt worthy headlines? And if so is that a bad thing?

Before I continue, I must add this disclaimer: I AM NOT SAYING THAT CNN.com EDITORS TRY TO WRITE T-SHIRT-WORTHY HEADLINES. I DO NOT KNOW HOW OR WHY SOME HEADLINES ARE CHOSEN AS T-SHIRT OPTIONS, though I certainly would like to. Surprisingly, this is not a frequently asked question.

I’ll also add that when I checked CNN’s headline t-shirt store, this headline was no longer for sale.

People being people, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if headline writers didn’t think — at least some times — “Oh man, this would be teh awesome on a t-shirt!” I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

The point of a good headline, after all, is to sell the story. “Sell” in this sense usually means “entice to read or click.” But good headlines — and by “good” I mean “appropriate in tone, reflective of the story, and either emotionally moving, clever, witty, or humorous” — also have the less obvious goal of selling papers and generating ad impressions.

Though sales (of ads and of copies) in the literal sense may not be top of mind for headline writers, I think it’s less than honest to say that “selling” of some kind isn’t a consideration. That’s precisely why I think it’s okay if the folks at CNN.com strive to write t-shirt worthy headlines.

Web site editors will often write or rewrite headlines to generate page views from readers and search engines. In the online world, good headlines = more page views. More page views = more revenue. Selling headlines on t-shirts just removes a step and makes for a shorter equation.

• Lea Donosky, interactivity manager, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Jeremy C. Garlington, publisher of The Garlington Report
• Greg Lisby, professor of journalism, Georgia State University
• David Rubinger, VP, Corporate Communications, Equifax

This panel will be moderated by Dr. John Knapp, Director of GSU Center for Ethics and Corporate Responsibility

I encourage all bloggers to go and be vocal about what journalists and businesspeople do and (sadly) don’t get about online.

But as I was scrolling through the list, I wondered “How many of these schools are in Georgia?” The answer? I don’t know because I stopped looking after the third page.

Now what could Newsweek have done to make this process easier? Answer: sortability and filtering.

We should all know by now that one of the differences between online and offline is the ability to interact and massage data to serve it to us the way we want it. And this list is the precise kind of data that lends itself to interactivity.

Give me the ability to filter results in my state. I want to know how many schools in my state (or better yet, my metropolitan area) are on the list. Order them in relation to each other and to the larger list (e.g., tell me that Lakeside H.S. is the top ranked school in Georgia and that it’s ranked #131 overall).

I want to know how many top-ranked schools have large numbers of students receiving subsidized lunches. If I know my school was included, I want to see where we rank. Let me sort the data alphabetically or by the percentage of students getting subsidized lunches.

Newsweek really missed an opportunity to turn a good data into an excellent online resource. Data uses much of its utility when you can’t manipulate it to extract useful information. Since this is an advantage of the medium, why not put it to full use?

Technorati: online journalism

This is going to sound all hokey and stuff, but this news has made me a little misty. I grew up watching Beutel every night on Eyewitness News. He was charming and engaging on the air. Sometimes he was downright funny. But mostly, he seemed like a genuinely nice guy, and a great news anchor.

Now, this next point is fueled by the fact that Sweetie managed to snag an iPod for me (one of those fancy-pants 20GB photo iPods). But seeing the success of this paid content, I wonder if there isn’t a market for newspapers to deliver news via podcasting.

I’m not talking about just featuring text-only RSS feeds. I mean what if — as radio stations are beginning to do — newspapers hired someone to read their top stories and serve it up as a podcast for pay. Hmmm … does anyone know if any papers are doing this?

UPDATE: And the answer is “Why yes, actually. The San Francisco Chronicle has been doing podcasts for a few months now.

To me most news web sites throw way to much at the user. So much so that it’s hard to sort through the clutter and get to where you want to go.

The California Aggie, a product of University of California – Davis does just the opposite. Never thought a news homepage could look so clean. Even if they added more advertising units, the design would be largely-clutter free.

Now if the big boys could get the message.

They’re all related to the paper’s tsunami coverage. But they bring up an interesting question: How and when should newspaper’s integrate audience-written blogs into their coverage and content offerings?

I’ll spare you an essay on the subject. But obviously this will be the next wave in online journalism.

I think this is a great idea, but I wonder if Wikinews can become a credible source of news on a national and international level. I worry about the effect of editorial decentralization on people’s truth-telling. But then maybe that’s my own bias. I just wonder if wiki-style news doesn’t work better when the coverage area and population served are relatively small.

Related posts

• Why participation and web logs are good things for journalism
• Thoughts on journalism and social software

Other reading

• We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gillmor
• Hypergene Media Blog

• Regret the Error: A
  daily compendium of newspaper and magazine corrections
• FactCheck.org: Correcting
  political mistakes, misstatements, misinterpretations and lies.

Since I took so long to write this, the chronological order is a little bit fuzzy. But what I do remember is that this year’s speakers were downright fabulous. Legal analyst Greta Van Susteren (part of a panel on legal coverage) and sports reporter Christine Brennan (I missed her speech) were two of the bigger-known names (in the States at least).

But I must talk about two of my favorites: Irshad Manji, and Kakenya Ntaiya.

Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith, is a Canadian broadcast journalist. She is also a lesbian and a feminist. I mention that because her identity very much shapes her opinions of Islam.

Irshad is pretty famous up north, but this conference was the first time I had heard of her or her book. I’m quite glad I got the chance. She’s a wonderful, confident speaker who pushes the audience to question what they have been told.

Kakenya Ntaiya was this year’s Eileen Shanahan speaker. She grew up in Kenya, without running water or electricity. Girls in Kenya are not allowed the same access to education that boys are. Yet Kakenya persuaded her parents and village elders to let her continue her schooling, eventually coming to the United States and earning a college degree.

What’s nearly as remarkable as Kakenya’s story is the fact that she has cleared a path for other girls in her village to do the same.

Related

• Back from the beautiful state of Oregon
• JAWS camp part II: Getting to Mt. Hood, Timberline Lodge
• JAWS Camp part III: Day one of the actual camp
• Photos