The BBC has e-mailed staff over the use of photos from social networking sites, reports the MediaGuardian. It advices journalists to be cautious about the use of such personal material. The advice goes beyond talking about issues copyright and verification, mentioning the idea of “intended audiences“. The e-mail told staff that: Simply because material may have been put into the public domain may not always give the media the right
PDF The thorny relationship between journalists and social media has once more been propelled into headlines, following the fake Facebook profiles of Bilawal Bhutto. AFP was reported to have barred its journalists from using Facebook or Wikipedia as sources. Or rather, it has told its reporters not to simply to rely on these sites the sole source for a story. Anyone in journalism will tell you that this is just good
The BBC’s Nick Reynolds, currently working on guidelines for personal blogs of staffers, offers an insight into the skirmishes with the Biased BBC blog. Biased BBC is the bane of many editors as it regularly criticises the Beeb, accusing it of all sorts of bias. The article was published in the BBC’s inhouse magazine, Ariel, but Nick has posted the more than 1,000 words on his blog. He urges the
A piece by Slate “outing” Rudy Giuliani’s daughter apparent support for Barack Obama once again raises questions about Facebook. Slate reports that that according to the 17-year-old Caroline Giuliani’s Facebook profile, she’s supporting Barack Obama, rather than her father, for president. The magazine was able to see her profile as it was not locked, meaning that anyone with access to the Harvard or Trinity School networks could see her detailed
The rise of social media poses new ethical dilemmas for journalists. One of these is whether journalists on Facebook should befriend their sources. Adding a source as a “friend” could lead to accusations of bias, but not doing so could risk offending your contact. The CBC has stepped into this ethical morass by instructing its journalists to avoid adding sources or contacts as friends. A policy document distributed to CBC
Here is a link to an analysis article I wrote on the digital dilemmas that social media poses for journalists for the Journalism Ethics for the Global Citizen at the University of British Columbia. It looks at the ethical issues surrounding digital door-stepping, looking at what happened following the Virginia Tech shootings, when students turned to social networking sites to share experiences and express their grief. Here’s an extract: Reporters