To the Friends of Clark Park news representative, Tony.
Given the shortage of competent ethical reporters in the village, I’d like
to take the opportunity to publish an opinion piece about ethics and
journalism. I think the FOCP/UCD newsletter, The Public Record, would be an
excellent publication in which to publish the work.
I think as a follow-up to the excellent example of your Blackwell thingy,
the timing couldn’t be more serendipitous. What is the deadline for next
week’s FOCP newsletter?
Sincerely,
Glenn Moyer
President, Founder, and Membership
The Village Society For Reestablishing Ethics
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony West" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 11:27 PM
Subject: Re: [UC] Press release or Wendell statement?
This is a fair question. At my company, we take news wherever we find it.
We can't afford to turn good stories away just because somebody already
knows somebody. We make our living by knowing people.
A larger company like PNH might apply rules like what you're proposing,
though. Even there, though, there is more flexibility than you might
think. Reporters get story ideas based on their own real-life involvements
all the time; they just write them out of the story (as I did). You won't
find out about those connections unless you're chatting with the writer.
I also think the smaller the social scale of a news story, the fuzzier
these lines become. University City is too small a world to sustain a
large pool of writers about community issues who are paid full-time to
just study them and report on them. In a small world, people who know
about things and people who do things often are one and the same.
-- Tony West
Bigger question, for me, is the inappropriateness of a reporter
being involved personally in a story he's covering. I thought that was
contrary to journalist's ethics. (Likewise, I thought it odd if the UC
Review was going to get involved in running community meetings on UCD.)
I'll leave it to the constitutional scholars on the list to wonder about
the intersection of free press and free speech rights in the First
Amendment.
Paul
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