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Reporters always faced two hurdles on the death knock. The rst was
getting over the doorstep. The second was laying hands on the family album.
I never found the second as bad as the rst: if you could only get in the house,
it wasnt so hard to turn the talk to the physical appearance of the late spouse
or child and the question that followed: You dont have a picture, do you? A
few platitudes about the smiling face in the holiday snap and the big moment:
Could I borrow this? Then, with luck, you would be away, job done, trying
not to think about the pain left in your wake.
Nowadays its possible to pick up a picture without going out of the
ofce, thanks to the millions who present themselves to public gaze on the
internet. Helpful quotes are available too. The famous and the unknown put
up their lives for scrutiny on social networking sites such as MySpace and
Facebook, offering photos, diaries and descriptions of their interests and
their friends. If anything should happen that makes them interesting to a
wider public an untimely death, a reported involvement in a crime, some
injudicious email at work those self-portraits and life stories are available to
any journalist who trawls the sites.
This was the journalistic shortcut used after Seung-Hui Cho shot dead 32
staff and fellow students at the American university Virginia Tech in April,
as the media around the world discovered not only that local bloggers were
putting up graphic accounts of what had happened, but also that they could
pull details of some of the dead from the students own web pages, posted on
social sites. As The Daily Telegraphs Shane Richmond explained to website
readers: It should be part of every journalists tool kit. All of us should know
how to search Technorati, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc. But, as Richmond
also acknowledged, this initiative raises questions: is it safe to lift stuff off
Kim Fletcher; DOI: 10.1177/0956474807080945; [2007/6] 18:2; 41-46; http://bjr.sagepub.com
that I, too, am transgressing the rule laid out by Ms Anderson at the start of
her piece. It reads: NOTE: This message is exclusively for Gillians fans who
visit this web site. Please do not publish the contents (partially or in full)
anywhere else on or off the internet. It should be said that this is not a
warning calculated to work with journalists. But Ms Anderson is by no
means alone among web users in believing that websites should be accorded a
private status never granted to the published word elsewhere. The debate
will increase as journalists realise how much information is out there.
users that anything said on such a site should be taken with a pinch of salt or
as light humour. But was the Gazette really taking the dead mans light-
hearted comments about drinking out of context? After all, he did die after
drinking. Perhaps if the information had been gathered in the old fashion
way, friends would have qualied their accounts of his drinking with the rider
that he was no different from many other students. But wasnt the
juxtaposition of website entry and manner of death irresistible to any
newspaper story? I suspect that Brittons friends would have reacted against
any story that raised his boasts about drinking, but the fact that the Gazette
reached for his own words appeared to exacerbate criticism. There is a view
among those writing blogs or using these social networking sites that,
despite their easy accessibility, they are not actually public.
beckoning: Come in, come in. Make yourself at home. I dont know if any of
it is any use to you, but you will nd lots of pictures and some last words and
several tributes from friends. Just help yourself.
Council for the Training of Journalists and a member of the BJR editorial board