Feeding the Beast or Pumping the Brakes

Charles Garverick
cg701315@ohio.edu

Journalists are in a difficult situation. We live in a society today where breaking news has become the focus for news reporters. It's made having to throw ethics out the window when considering if/when to publish information -- something reporters are not a fun of.

“The news cycle is now 24/7 due to the Internet,” said Amanda Lamb, a 20-year crime-reporting veteran at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C. “We no longer work for the next show. We work for the next five minutes on the Web.”

That's why from that article, the pressure is real for reporters to get information out on the internet as quickly as possible and can't afford to wait until their evening newscast. Keeping that in mind is the challenge that people face in newsrooms because they balance out the need to know now vs. making sure that the information they post does not defame or shine a bad light on the victim.

This was very evident over this past weekend with the mass shooting in Pittsburgh. I thought that CBS News did an excellent job with how they posted/reported on the issue. 

In their first intial report with the aid of The AP, they chose to explain as much information they knew about each victim.  As the "theme" of the readings was called "It Bleeds, It Leads," yes, CBS News led with something that had to do with death, but they got quotes of little anecdotes of these people's lives to humanize the story. 

CBS News did its best to respect the victims by telling their life stories. Credit: CBS News

That story was updated in live time throughout the next 90 minutes to provide additional facts that they learned in the field. The next story that proceeded that initial breaking-news story had live feed updates for what was happening with the shooter -- live at the scene. 

That story contained information with authorities -- information they could confirm. It also had information on what was next for President Trump.

Overall, covering tragedies are extremely difficult. From the first article, it mentioned that "when it comes to technology, it almost always wins over tradition." That's  a statement that carries a lot of weight for reporters, but with the example above,  I still think it's possible to do both, you just have to know what you're doing.