The keynote speaker at the New Journalism, New Ethics? conference at UW Madison was Jon Sawyer, director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
“As we create new financial and editorial models of journalism, we are also collectively creating the ethical ground rules for these forms of journalism,” he said
Sawyer talked about how the Center had used the internet to amplify the journalist’s voice, to extend the reach of its journalism.
But for the bulk of the address, he talked about the ethical issues surrounding a specific project: reporting child sacrifice in Uganda published in its Untold Stories site.
The child sacrifice story is not one the Center initially funded. The photojournalist, Marco Vernaschi, was supposed to work on a story on maternal mortality in Nigeria but ended up going to Uganda first.
The Uganda story was eventually funded by the Pulitzer Center, after Vernaschi had already done some of the investigative reporting. But Sawyer said he was confident that the story would have being funded, had it followed the standard funding procedure.
The issue was over photos published showing the violence against children. Sawyer said Vernaschi argued that he was searching for visual evidence to compel public attention and response.
Sawyer said it initially published some of the controversial images on its site. It later removed them following criticism, partly on photo blogs, about the images and the circumstances in which they were obtained.
Despite the controversy over the images, Sawyer defended his decision to publish the story and keep it online. He argued the project was bigger than these controversial images.
“The internet is both blessing and curse, and must be approached as such,” reflected Sawyer. He noted how the discussion on the photos took place on the web.
“The blog debates were useful feedback for us and I want to thank them for that,” he said.
But Sawyer also noted that the blogs were also full of half truths and personal attacks against the photojournalist.
One of the lessons of the Uganda story, said Sawyer was that the Center was short on staff for editorial supervision and should have devoted far more attention to the child sacrifice project.
Sawyer concluded by emphasising that the child sacrifice story fit exactly with the aims of the Pulitzer Center – to shed light on issues that would otherwise go unreported.
He hoped that by being open about the project, the mistakes and what the Center was doing to address these, the focus would return to the main issue: the treatment of children in Uganda.
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