Surfette

Reporting (tragedies): How to be a better journalist and a better human

Whether you're a blogger who occasionally takes on the news, or a full-time reporter, you can only hope never to cover an event like Monday's shootings at Virginia Tech.

But if you do find yourself in the middle of a situation where peoples' lives are at stake -- whether it's a domestic conflict down the block or an awful accident (think Santa Monica Farmer's Market), do you know how to behave? How do you report responsibly, sans stereotypes, red herrings or risks to your own safety?

College of New Jersey Professor Kim Pearson, whose own campus community recently experienced a media storm around the loss of a student, has written the best primer on reporting tragedies that I've ever read. In "Covering tragedy: Emerging lessons from the Virginia Tech Killings," Prof. Kim asks and answers:

1. Citizen journalists need to know basic safety rules for covering a dangerous story.
2. Watch the headlines.
3. Be careful about the "myths" that can become part of the narrative in a story like this one.
4. Be careful about the experts you choose to interview.
5.Try to stay independent of others' political, and personal agendas.
6. Campus safety issues have their own complexity
7. Watch out for the rumor patrol
8. Be thoughtful about stereotypes.
9. Above all, remember that this is a story about people.

Read it all here

Community guidelines are like jeans: One-size-fits-all just isn't going to fly.

I did a Q&A with Heather Havenstein of ComputerWorld yesterday. She did a good job of fairly and accurately presenting my answers to her questions:

Q&A: Model for O'Reilly blogging code criticizes broad scope of plan

And then David Weinberger (The Cluetrain Manifesto) posted a brilliant essay on the subject. As I often find, he's hilarious and spot-on:

Code? Nah. Codes? Maybe.

Updated: "Theoretically going to be in Monday's NYTimes"

Updated: Here's the story.

One of my BlogHer co-founders, Elisa Camahort, does a great job of describing the interview she and I did with Brad Stone (no relation) of The New York Times. Stone said his focus was the code of conduct recommended by Tim O'Reilly, who invoked the BlogHer Community Guidelines we launched with http://blogher.org on Jan. 30, 2006.

Here are some of my comments that didn't make it into the story: As the author of the guidelines, I told the reporter, I don't believe in an overarching, one-stop-shopping code of conduct for all blogs or all Web sites. Images that are appropriate for a blog devoted to the war in Iraq would never work on a parenting site, for example. They shouldn't have to play by the same rules. And we all know how I feel about the First Amendment. :)

That said, I appreciate the leadership Tim O'Reilly (for the record, I've never met him) is trying to show when it comes to asking people to take responsibility for the communities they create. As I told Brad Stone, "Turns out there's no law against being a jerk. However, there are laws against cyberstalking on the books in 45 states." Don't miss Elisa's eloquent comments in her link above.

BlogHer's community guidelines look a lot like any journalistic code. We don't allow harassment or stalking, libel, copyright infringement, plagiarism, revealing a third-party's confidential information or spam (stupid annoying pointless messages, typically e-commerce and porn). However, we don't screen comments before they go live on our site and it's still your right to violate our guidelines - we just reserve the right to delete your content.

The rest of my opinions on the topic can be found here:

• "Hating Hate Speech: Safety for Kathy Sierra and all women online"
• "What do you do when you're cyberstalked, taunted or abused online?"