Reuters Editors
Our editors & readers talk
Report on Reuters actions after publishing altered photographs
Last August, Reuters published and then withdrew two photographs from Lebanon that had been digitally altered.
At that time, we immediately terminated our relationship with the freelance photographer who took and altered the images and said wed share with the public the results of our internal investigations.
Experienced photo editors and other senior editorial staff went through thousands of images published during the Lebanon conflict. We are satisfied no other images were digitally altered.
We were not satisfied with the degree of oversight that we had that allowed these two images to slip through. We have tightened procedures, taken appropriate disciplinary action and appointed one of our most experienced editors to supervise photo operations in the Middle East.
Stephen Crisp started in this role this month; most recently he managed the transition to Reuters of our Action Images subsidiary. A British citizen, he has run pictures operations in Europe, Asia and globally while working for Reuters since 1985.
His predecessor in the Middle-East role was dismissed in the course of the investigation for his handling of the case.
We called together our senior photographers to strengthen our existing exacting guidelines on ethical issues in photography and wrote a new code of conduct for photographers, appended to this note.
Deadly news
Every year at this season, the statistics come out about the number of journalists around the world who died for the story.
There are a couple of key organizations who make the count; their methodologies vary as do their figures, but the end result is clear: journalism can be a deadly profession, and 2006 proved the point.
The Brussels-based International News Safety Institute, of which Im a board member, on Tuesday called 2006 the worst year on record for news media casualties. It counted a total of 167 journalists and support staff who died trying to cover the news in 37 countries in 2006.
As an organization that focuses on safety, INSI counts all deaths, including accidents.
The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which Reuters also supports, said 55 journalists were killed in direct connection to their work in 2006, and it is investigating another 27 deaths to determine whether they were work-related. The CPJ, which focuses on press freedom issues, doesnt include accidental deaths or count support staff, which is why its numbers are lower than other tallies.
Both organizations detail each case they count on their websites (INSI, CPJ) the lists make sobering reading about brave men and women who died, mostly in their home countries.
Another important tally is by Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based NGO, which we reported on earlier this week. Iraq is a very deadly conflict to cover, and particularly for local journalists.
I know journalists are brave and courageous, but seriously, havn’t we had enough of the violence? Its time to bring our brave young men and women journalists home from Iraq. Please do not question my patriotism because I do indeed support our journalists (while I don’t support their mission.) Its just that they’re in a quagmire over there and after four years, its time that we admitted that we have lost and can no longer get any news from Iraq.
Is news coverage a lottery?
The UNs Jan Egeland bemoaned much world coverage of disasters as a lottery in a keynote speech at the 2006 Newsxchange conference in Turkey last week.
Some disasters get a lot of headlines; others get little attention. Sometimes its easy to guess why one story or another grabbed world attention; other times it is much harder to understand. Reuters AlertNet, the humanitarian news portal run by Reuters Foundation, has a World Press Tracker that follows how a sampling of the worlds press covers disasters and emergencies.
The Tsunami disaster of 2004 grabbed the headlines as it occurred suddenly and shockingly just after Christmas; it affected areas where many tourists had still and video cameras to record the destruction; it hit places well-known as tourist spots.
Emergencies that grind on rather than occurring in an instant or those that happen in areas off the well-travelled news routes have a much harder time making it onto front pages or into top-ten lists.
Thankfully, The Long Tail is a phenomenon that has applicability in news as well there are many places on the web where you can find detailed information about many of the lesser-known, but heart-rending and important disasters. One place to start is this index providing facts and news about many world crises.
So maybe Jan Egeland is half right it is a bit of a lottery to get on the front pages or into the top-10 lists of news stories. But in fact there is a lot of information out there; you just have to look. And you have to be interested.
Like so much in news, coverage of emergencies is both push and pull. News organizations can push the stories we think are important and interesting. But what is really important is for the audience to reach out and read what is important and interesting to it.
Score one for diplomacy, I guess, but Reuters of all places ought to be able to shrug off the notion that coverage is a lottery.
Every correspondent has a story about someone who wanted something covered and didn’t understand why it didn’t rise to a minimal threshold. But however you attack or defend it, news editing philosophy is always based on what consumers want.
Sure, U.S. news consumers are especially parochial and ought to eat more servings of vegetables than dessert. Does anybody seriously believe that there is so little actually going on in the world that MSNBC-TV has had to cover the US election to the exclusion of all else for the past few days? Is it surprising that Gannet’s major strategic shift isn’t toward in-depth coverage of Darfur, but data mining community message boards (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ntent/article/2006/11/06/AR2006110601142 .html)?
Even news professionals have a limited appetite. When I was training American’s Deskers in Washington to post to the original reuters.com which was permitted to have only five (5) stories at a time! each of these seasoned editors, who handled dozens of stories a day, belittled our tiny news hole. I would ask each of them how many stories from the day before they remembered (3 or 4, without exception) and how many of those they still cared about (0 or 1, without exception) and that was the end of that.
So, what should resonate vs. what resonates? Those who respond correctly are apt to be around long enough to help write the history of this next decade of Internet news. Those who do not will soon be writing pious memoirs that people will also not read.
Being there
This weekend I participated in (another) debate about citizen journalism at the Battle of Ideas in London.
With journalism in something of a state of self-doubt (lack of trust from parts of the audience, future of newspapers in doubt, questions over the business model), it seems that a debate about the future interactions of professional journalists with citizen journalists is a feature of conferences everywhere.
In some ways, nothing has changed; in some ways, everything has changed.
In the early 1990s, when I was Reuters bureau chief in China and there was rioting and unrest in Tibet, I couldnt go. None of the reporters in my bureau could go we simply werent allowed in. So how did we report? We endlessly called the various guest hostels in Lhasa and interviewed travellers about what they had seen and experienced, and that became the basis for our articles.
Citizen journalists were on the scene and their reports were vivid and important. So has nothing changed?
Today, in a similar situation, those citizen journalists wouldnt have to talk with me to get their stories out. They could post their words on a blog, they could post pictures on flickr or their home video on youtube. So has everything changed?
The question for me is what role and what value the mediation I provided played.
Newspapers started as highly opinioned, party-oriented machines used to provide a forum for debate. The idea of objective news seems to be slowly slipping away and as the previous commenter suggests, opinion is moving back into the journalism mainstream. The key is that organizations such as Reuters continue to provide objective news to facilitate reasoned opinions. Everyone has an opinion, the critical ingredient is its persuasiveness, based on fact. The era of so-called citizen journalism is upon us, but demand for accuracy and bias-free reporting will steadily increase due to the influx of more opinion based reportage.
It’s all about the conversation
Weve had reporters blogs on Reuters.com for some time; now we want to expand the concept to have regular musings from me and some of our other senior editors on the site.
The reason is simple: we want to encourage much more conversation between those of us who are writing, editing and planning Reuters global news coverage and those of you who are reading and using it.
We want you to understand more about who we are and what we think; we want to know more about whats on your mind.
Journalism today is about enabling and participating in a conversation. It no longer can be just a hierarchical transfer of information. What I as an editor think may be interesting and important; what will make us successful is if that intersects with what is attractive to YOU.
To make journalism relevant for the 21st century we must make sure we experiment boldly with different forms of writing and ways of interacting with our audience while never being cavalier about the importance of journalistic standards and processes. We must marry the intelligence of journalists with the wisdom of the crowds.
I think there will always be a future for journalism that disciplined search for facts and the weaving of a coherent narrative that helps people understand their world. The big question is whether there will be a future for journals, those institutions that until now have hired and paid people in my profession.
Will the best and most successful journalists be the free agents?
To make journalism relevant for the 21st century we must make sure we experiment boldly with different forms of writing and ways of interacting with our audience while never being cavalier about the importance of journalistic standards and processes.
How about being *really* bold and make the switch from outdated soviet era spelling to 21st century spelling protocols when covering Ukraine?
Educated Ukrainian readers have always appreciated “the importance of journalistic standards and processes.” Glad that Reuters intends to catch up soon.
For those who are so strident in their criticism of Reuters, I have just one simple question whose simple answer will, I suspect, be quite revealing.
1)If you dont trust Reuters as a global news organization to give you the hard facts then who on earth do you turn to?
Fox News or Al-Jazeera perhaps? Rush Limbaugh or Gore Vidal maybe? The Pentagon or Xinhua? Mossad or U.N. arms inspectors?
I think that a straight answer to this question would give us some idea of precisely which axe it is these critics have to grind?
Having stumbled across this site, I am baffled by the venom and vitriol with which some people here attack an organization that, it seems to me, at least tries to do the right thing even if it does trip up from time to time.
In a world where language is increasingly spun beyond all recognition, we need to protect and encourage organizations such as Reuters more than ever before and, in doing so, get to the bottom of why some chose to attack them with a ferocity and guile that Goebbels or Stalin, Machiavelli or McCarthy would be proud of.
But then again, it must be very frustrating, not to say unusual, to be confronted by a news organization that does not have a an owner or major shareholder who can be lobbied or bought and whose journalists would presumably work elsewhere if they needed a cause to promote, wanted their names up in lights or hoped to get rich quick.
Yes Reuters screws up occasionally but lets put things in perspective for a moment. I presume that for every picture thats doctored or for every misplaced word thats printed, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, that are not? And at least, unlike some of the critics here, they admit it when they’re wrong and have the courage to nail their relatively neutral colours to the post!