After reading the excerpt, here are five tips I came up with to survive as a reporter in the digital age
1. Be truthful. I don’t think this could be stressed any more harshly. If you copy and paste something, make sure that you are not making any alterations to the original work. You could a) violate copyright laws or even worse b) land yourself in a libel suit if the altered material defamed someone. Being completely honest is an important thing.
2. Always credit sources, and credit exactly what they said. In the case where one reporter should have pasted an entire article on e-mail instead of putting parts of it up there, it is important to just let everything be transparent to the reader. It is John Milton’s philosophy of letting the reader decide what is good or bad.
3. Be careful about all the information you put on a website or credit from another website about someone. Internet sites are one of the biggest mediums of mass media today, and any wrong information about something or someone could land you in a terrible place, and not just ethically.
4. Be sensitive about private information about an individual. Once something is put onto the internet, it goes extremely public. Make sure any information you are publishing about someone has been given consent first by the individual to whom you are writing about.
5. Be careful about what you use in a story. Make sure that pictures, especially, are ok to put in a story before you do so. There are a lot of copyrights out there, and people can tend to be very picky about those. Double check with the source to which you get a photo from that it is ok for you to use that for whatever reason in your story.
