Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 17 April 2007 at 14:06
Tags: Ethics, Facebook, Journalism, MySpace, blogging
The Virginia Tech shootings are rapidly becoming one of those milestone stories that periodically highlights the trends emerging in participatory media — and the new questions reporters need to ask themselves when attempting to use these new materials.
The local paper near the Virginia Tech campus is the Roanoke Times, a US regional well-known for online innovation. It jumped into action right away, posting a blog-style rolling story that noted new information as it came in. Within hours, the site featured audio, video, slideshows and interactive graphics.
Virginia Tech’s student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, has also covered the story admirably. It’s web server inevitably crashed under the sudden influx of worldwide interest, but the student journalists quickly came up with a way to redirect traffic elsewhere.
Video footage shot on mobile phones also became a staple of the coverage. Amateur material became available quickly on Flickr and YouTube. CNN used amateur photos and videos from its I-Reports citizen journalism site in its reporting.
Seeking new information during the shooting and afterward, many students posted their experiences on blogs, as well as social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.
On his blog, new media journalist Steve Outing wrote:
When traditional media doesn’t serve the needs of the community — in this case, for people involved in the story because they may have friends or family members at the school to learn the fate of those people — then people turn to services that do. In this case, Facebook.
But these sometimes heartbreaking postings also provided leads for professional journalists scrambling to find new information for their reports on the shooting, so journalists from around the world also began posting on these sites urging their authors to contact them.
The reaction from some other commenters on the students’ sites was highly unfavorable to journalists who acted in this way, suggesting that the reporters’ online approaches to the victims was inappropriate. Some even questioned why any reporter from a faraway media needed to report on what was at that point a very local tragedy.
In a valuable post discussing his own approach to one student, the BBC’s Robin Hamman notes that some Livejournal users were less than impressed by journalists’ “clumsy” approaches:
[Y]esterday’s events, and the ensuing media frenzy in the comments of a LiveJournal user and elsewhere, show that where mainstream media does use - and yes, that word was chosen deliberately - content created by bloggers, that the journalists, researchers and reporters do it with sensitivity.
Think when you link. Understand that some content published in public was never intended to be seen by a mass audience.
Another worrying twist to the story came when unverified assumptions posted online began to wrongly identify one Virginia Tech student as a potential suspect. With little reliable information available about the identity of the gunman, web users attention began focusing on the Livejournal page of a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student said to live in the dorm where the shooting started and whose web site showed him posting with a collection of guns.
The student reports receiving death threats as a result of the insinuation that he was the gunman. He eventually posted a statement on his his blog protesting his innocence. ABC News’ blog The Blotter and Wired’s security blog Threat Level both highlighted the case.
Over at his Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw puts it well. This event highlights trends that will become increasingly common as the generation that grew up with social media ages, and some of the new skills and roles that journalists will have to adopt in covering stories like this one.
