What would you have chosen to do as a journalist in this situation? Because this case study is intended primarily as a teaching resource, a password is required to view the epilogue. The purpose is to encourage readers to pause and think about how they would resolve the difficulty, before learning how the journalist(s) involved […]
Case Studies
10. Epilogue
What would you have chosen to do as a journalist in this situation? Because this case study is intended primarily as a teaching resource, a password is required to view the epilogue. The purpose is to encourage readers to pause and think about how they would resolve the difficulty, before learning how the journalist(s) involved […]
Protected: 8. Epilogue
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
7. The decision point
CBC British Columbia’s editorial staff were faced with a decision: a teenager had been killed and a portion of the attack was caught in a six-second video clip that was already making the rounds on social media. Once the newsroom had received the video by email from a former intern, Burgess was faced with the […]
6. Alternatives to the unedited video
Airing disturbing content doesn’t have to be a matter of airing all or airing nothing. There are always alternatives to showing a video in its full form. Krop’s team, for example, blurred parts of the video when they aired it. In an earlier newscast, they opted to have a reporter describe the video. Still images, […]
Protected: 10. Epilogue
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
9. Decision Point
Hudes, MacDonald and Hood were on deadline and had to make the decision of whether to include information from the Facebook page in the National Post’s June 4 coverage of the shooting. Hudes was working late into the night and it was still unconfirmed whether the Facebook page belonged to the same Justin Bourque whom […]
8. Omitting the Unverified: Joel Eastwood and the Toronto Star
While Hudes and National Post editors were deciding whether or not to include an unverified Facebook page in their story, Joel Eastwood was having a similar debate in another newsroom in the city. [1] Eastwood was working as a general assignment reporter for the Toronto Star in 2014. When reports of a shooting in New […]
7. Balancing Immediacy and Verification
The editors of the National Post faced a classic journalistic dilemma: speed vs. accuracy. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write, “In the context of gathering news, speed is almost always the enemy of accuracy.” [1] While this may be true, journalists should not simply discount speed in economic terms as a means of “scooping” competing […]
6. Poisoning the Well
In April 2013, Sunil Tripathi was wrongfully accused of being “suspect number two” in the Boston Marathon bombing. His accusers were Reddit and Twitter users who spread false information and conjecture that implicated an innocent man all with a few clicks of a mouse. This vigilante digital investigation wasn’t undertaken only by conspiracy theorists and […]