15th August 2014
By Stefanie Chernow

Ethical Journalism Newsletter: August 15th, 2014

Ethical Journalism News

The Crass and the Noble Sides of Journalism

This is a turbulent and exciting time in journalism. Traditional media organizations are struggling to adapt to the digital era, while new outlets and new forms of storytelling are emerging, many of them quite promising. In the frantic effort to attract large volumes of traffic, however, and to in turn bring in advertisers, websites often turn to all manner of SEO manipulation and sensational, empty-calorie fare. (via USA Today)

Crimea’s One-Woman Resistance to Russian Occupation

Daria Karpenko, who blogs on LiveJournal as Kelpai and also manages a Facebook page, stands out as a Crimean blogger deeply opposed to the annexation. Karpenko, who’s been writing online for almost 10 years, became a star of the blogosphere for her posts from Simferopol when Russian soldiers seized the peninsula in the guise of ”polite people.” (via Global Voices Online)

HuffPost, Washington Post Reporters Assaulted, Arrested in Ferguson

Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan J. Reilly said on Twitter Wednesday night that they’d been arrested and released while working in a McDonald’s. Both journalists were reporting on the scene in Ferguson, Missouri. Lowery had just filed a piece about the police in Ferguson, where police shot a young man named Michael Brown on Sunday night. (via Poynter)

Reporting Robin Williams’s Death – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The media reaction to the death of Robin Williams is another reminder that when bad things happen to the famous it can have, if only in the short-term, a beneficial public effect. But then we come, of course, to the contentious matter of the reporting of Williams’s suicide. (via The Guardian)

Former Sun Journalist Found Not Guilty After Trawling Stolen Phone for ‘Flirty’ Texts

A former Sun journalist has walked free from the Old Bailey after he was cleared of all charges levelled against him after he looked through the contents of an iPhone that did not belong to him. (via The Guardian)

Recommendations by the Broadcast Regulator an ‘Indictment of Indian Media’

A spectre is haunting Big Media in India — the spectre of transparency. And the latest manifestation of this terrifying spirit is a document issued by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) with the innocuous title, ‘Recommendations on Media Ownership’. (via Quartz)

Was an Accusation of Plagiarism Really a Political Attack?

From the NY Times Public Editor: “There aren’t too many worse things you can suggest about an author than that his or her work is plagiarized. So, after The Times recently published an article that included a plagiarism claim against Rick Perlstein, the author of a new political biography, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, I fielded a number of outraged complaints.” (via NY Times)

Events

African Media Leaders Forum

Johannesburg, South Africa

12 – 14 November 2014: In a year marking two momentous events – 20 years since the end of apartheid in South Africa and 20 years since the Rwandan Genocide – African media leaders and owners will gather in Johannesburg in November to hold frank discussions on how to uphold high ethical standards in the tricky world of politics and business.