With the leaked Rihanna photo, social media allowed us all to play news editors. How did we do?

There’s an interactive you-be-the-journalist game at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. in which you race against another team to pull together the front page of a newspaper by answering sticky questions about what’s ethical and what’s not.

I’m thinking about this game because I’m thinking about the controversial police photo of pop artist Rihanna that leaked two days ago. The searingly tight shot shows Rihanna’s face with welts and bruises that were made, it’s widely speculated, at the hands of R&B star Chris Brown the night before the Grammy Awards.

As with a lot of news these days, I first learned about Rihanna’s beating through Twitter, and when TMZ.com posted its prize photo, I learned about that through Twitter as well, when someone I follow tweeted the link to TMZ.com.

This case offers a striking reminder about how little we need an interactive game at the Newseum to play a journalist, because social media lets us do that in countless ways large and small every day. In the past, the public at large would scrutinize a decision by a media outlet on whether to show the photo. Now, we are faced with a similar dilemma ourselves as we decide whether to tweet, retweet, use a Facebook status update or write a blog post to link to or embed such a controversial photograph.

Gawker addressed the journalistic ethical gray area by outing the publications that ran the photo (outlets that included Gawker), calling the photo a “media ethics lightning rod.” What about the rest of us? Shouldn’t this also be a social media question? I didn’t tweet or retweet the photo, and I’m not linking to it anywhere here — which means I can’t link to TMZ.com at all, since the photo is still on its homepage. But does that matter? I looked at the photo the second I saw that tweet — and if I had read a news story that didn’t publish the photo or include a link, I would have Googled it.

I think it’s also interesting to note that this was not the only controversial image that made headlines this week. The New York Post ran an editorial cartoon that appeared to compare President Obama to a chimp shot dead by police. I was at home sick for three days this week so I watched a lot of cable news shows, and it seems that just about every show invited guests on to talk about the issue — and rightly so. The publication of the Rihanna photo, though obviously widely covered, received far less critical attention. I didn’t see guests brought on to weigh in on the controversy, and I think it was a missed opportunity to discuss domestic violence and how media outlets handle — or avoid — the issue. Were we more interested in seeing this red-hot celebrity exposed in such a vulnerable position than we were in what made a man think he had the right to do that to her?

Earlier this week, a friend of mine tweeted this of the Rihanna story:

I’m really getting tired of intelligent men I know saying, ‘I wonder what RiRi did to set him off like that.’

That’s the kind of honest discussion we need around domestic violence (and MTV News does a fine job getting into it here). It would be nice to see more of it on national media outlets, but if we don’t see enough there, the power of social media is that we can make sure it happens ourselves.

Photo credit: Gawker.com

News cycle

Ellis Island Immigration Museum

The Lunar New Year has me thinking about endings, beginnings — and cycles that don’t really have a beginning or an end.

My career as a newspaper reporter is over, and given the violent contractions that American newspapers experienced in 2008, many believe we’re witnessing the end of an era of the entire industry. Should I be relieved I got out when I did? There are times I can’t help but feel as if I moved out of town just before an earthquake hit.

I always had a love-hate relationship with daily journalism. When it was good, it was exhilarating to have a job that allowed me to learn something new week in and week out, to have the responsibility and privilege of framing an issue or an event. What I loved most was when fascinating people not only let me into their lives, but let me into their lives knowing that I was a reporter and would be writing about their aspirations and their darkest demons.

When daily journalism was bad, it was soul-suckingly bad — the long hours, the loved ones you neglected again and again. And for what? So that you could bust your ass for a story that maybe 25 people read? So that you chose your battles with editors, and still lost the ones that mattered most to you? I saw all the little and big sins committed in journalism — sometimes out of necessity, on occasion probably out of intent, but overwhelmingly because reporters and editors and photographers and copyeditors work on a deadline with limited resources.

I volunteered this year to proctor the writing exam that applicants to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism are required to take as part of the admissions process. The J-School is where I started out in the magazine concentration and ended up being drawn instead to the newspaper track. A newspaper was pretty much the last place I ever saw myself working. I didn’t think I worked fast enough or acted gutsy enough to cut it in the daily grind — and maybe that’s exactly what drew me to the field.

After the final set of applicants took their tests this weekend, I realized I was both inspired and reassured that there are still people out there who want to study journalism. Surely, they’ve read about the unsustainable business models. Given all the layoffs and furloughs, they must know they’ll have greater job security, and can make a lot more money, in another field. And yet…

The applicants shrugged off all the talk about whether journalists will become irrelevant in a world increasingly populated by bloggers and citizen reporters. They refuse to see death when they look at the news industry — what they discover instead is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of a transformation, a new beginning. Even if news is eventually distributed only online and through iPhones, BlackBerrys and Kindles, the impact of the words themselves will still be the same.

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I think “The Bullets in My In-Box,” a piece in the Sunday New York Times about reporting on the latest war in Gaza, beautifully illustrates why we’ll always need good reporting and good writing — why we’ll always need good journalists. Ethan Bronner, who has written about the Arab-Israeli conflict for more than 25 years, walks us through how a war of language complicates a reporter’s ability to tell a story:

No place, date or event in this conflicted land is spoken of in a common language. The barrier snaking across and inside the West Bank is a wall to Palestinians, a fence to Israelis. The holiest site in Jerusalem is the Temple Mount to Jews, the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims. The 1948 conflict that created Israel is one side’s War of Independence, the Catastrophe for the other.

For every example you can point out about irresponsible journalism, there’s an example like this one — a reporter such as Bronner who has devoted his career to understanding entrenched conflicts. He’s a journalist who understands he must scrutinize his choice of who to interview, which telling detail to use, which example to lead with, which name to use. And he knows that no matter how well he does it, there will be someone criticizing him — and his field.

News alert: Fish wrap delivered only three days a week

Fish Rap Live! — the alternative humor paper at my undergraduate campus — might be my favorite newspaper name of all time. It’s brutally honest and spot-on descriptive as far as newspaper monikers go. In the newsrooms I worked in, reporters had no illusions about what the general public seemed to think of newspapers — great as fish wrap, birdcage liner, puppy house-training material. Other than that, newspapers were just the bearer of sensational headlines and the publication that got ink all over your hands. More of a nuisance than anything, really.

I thought about various disposal methods when the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News confirmed today that they plan on ending daily home delivery. It seemed almost anti-climatic, since news of the plan leaked last week and there had been rumors of this type of move well before that. The daily print editions of the papers will continue to be sold at newsstands and in newspaper boxes, but delivery will only happen on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays.

Everyone knows newspapers have no choice but to move toward digital delivery, though I readily admit that I was among the guilty who didn’t think it would happen this quickly. The Christian Science Monitor’s October announcement of its decision to end its print edition entirely had to convince even the most skeptical, however, that it’s just a matter of time.

I watched Detroit Media Partnership’s news conference online today (of course), and to my surprise, I wasn’t sad or even nostalgic. As I’ve written about recently, I am seriously concerned about the scale of layoffs and buyouts in the newspaper industry. But daily home delivery? Though I still like getting the paper, I actually get most of my news online. I always have.

Not too long from now, kids will react to the concept of daily delivery of morning and afternoon newspapers the way I reacted when I first heard about eight-track tapes. Lifestyles change, and the news industry has to roll with it.

Now, figuring out what to wrap those fish bones in when there isn’t any newspaper around — that might take a little more time.

Photo credit: The Horse’s Mouth blog

Shelter from the storm? Not for the newspaper industry as ‘a new front of trouble’ looms

I just received a New York Times news alert in my inbox reporting that Tribune, the Chicago-based media company that used to issue my paychecks, has just hired bankruptcy advisers to try to stay afloat. “It is only the latest — and biggest — sign of duress for the newspaper industry yet,” according to the Times’ DealBook blog. The Wall Street Journal says on its Web site that a possible bankruptcy-protection filing, which insiders believe could come as soon as this week, opens “a new front of trouble for the newspaper industry.”

When Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast in September, I mainly followed developments through a @TrackingIke, a Twitter account constantly updated by reporters of the Austin American-Statesman. I found their updates to be more interesting, more informative, and more poignant than watching the same CNN reporters providing the same updates from the same exact spot hour after hour.

I’ve been tracking the devastation that’s touching down in newsrooms across the country in a similar way — through Twitter and Paper Cuts, a tremendous mashup that plots buyouts and layoffs, along with corresponding news stories and company memos, onto Google Maps.

As a J-School grad, it's painful to see this shifting landscape.

When I followed Hurricane Ike, it was in the way anyone does — out of general concern for the people (and the pets) involved. Tracking the severity and frequency of buyouts and layoffs in the news industry this year has been far more personal for me. Although I work in advocacy communications now, I started out my career in journalism, and spent seven years doing the daily grind in newsrooms in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The Hartford Courant, part of the Tribune chain and the last newspaper I worked at before moving to Michigan and switching careers, announced earlier this year that it needed to cut a quarter of the newsroom. I remember a friend e-mailing me a list of who had taken the buyouts. There were so many names. I just kept scrolling and scrolling, wondering who was left to put out the paper and keep the Web site humming.

The storm — which ended up including buyouts and layoffs — passed through, and The Courant, which likes to remind the public that it is the country’s oldest newspaper in continuous publication (“older than the nation,” as the line goes), kept on publishing. As with any community after a calamity, the people left had to rebuild and move on, and my friends there continue to do great journalism, whether it’s good old-fashioned Fourth Estate reporting or providing the public with data on demand.

In more recent weeks, it seems as if grim news is announced increasingly frequently. In Lansing, Mich., where I work now, the Lansing State Journal was forced to make the difficult decision to lay off a total of 31 employees this past week in response to a weak economy, and as part of parent company Gannett’s national directive to reduce payroll by 10 percent. These layoffs follow cuts at Booth newspapers around Michigan.

When Hurricane Ike did its damage, CrisisWire — an aggregator that pulls content about disasters from Flickr, Twitter, news sites, blogs and other sources — hadn’t been launched yet. But it’s here now, and recently covered the Santa Barbara fires. On some level, I think it would make sense for CrisisWire to expand its definition of crisis and cover the newspaper industry layoffs — it’s a cliché, but true, that good journalism strengthens and protects democracy. The scale of these cuts is should be seen for what they are — a loss to a community as devastating as any storm.