I recently visited one of the most frightening sites on the Web—the place where I look at my shrinking retirement account.

As I calculated the investment loss since the steep decline in the markets began, and particularly since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, some questions arose (in addition to: Will I ever be able to retire?).

–Did we in the media do our job in reporting on the run-up to the crisis?

–Now that an “official” recession has been declared in the U.S. and the depth of the crisis is becoming clearer around the world, are we in the media keeping things in perspective? Should we even be using words like “crisis” or “meltdown?”

On the first question, I can’t help thinking of Claude Rains’ “Casablanca” character Captain Renault, who was “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on” in Rick’s club. In hindsight, given the current state of the financial markets, wasn’t it obvious a problem was brewing?

Not necessarily. And it probably wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone reading online or print coverage or watching television news in the United States.

A look at a study by the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism indicates that, in the United States, coverage of the economy was pretty much drowned out by coverage of the presidential election—at least until the two stories converged in mid-September. Indeed, as the Pew material shows, in the month preceding the week of Sept. 15, which saw the Lehman bankruptcy, the Merrill Lynch sale, the AIG bailout and large drops in share prices, the proportion of the news hole devoted to the economy reached a low for the year, filling only 4.8 percent of the time on television and radio and space in the print and online media. Since then, that focus has shifted, as the presidential campaign narrative became, again, “it’s the economy, stupid,” and as the presidential transition has focused on U.S. economic problems.

Reuters News Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger is skeptical that financial journalists could have done much more to predict the depth of the crisis.

“Journalists do best when reporting what’s happening and giving the news context and analysis,” he said. “We also do well when we look backwards and discuss past events from the perspective of the present. We do least well when we prognosticate. While our reporting and commentary did discuss potential weak points in the economy, we did not — and nor frankly could we — accurately predict the calamitous events of this year.”

Schlesinger worries, though, that there was a certain inevitability to the crisis and that the media played a role.

“I do worry about the narrative lines of reporting that contributed to the crisis,” he said. “To take just one example, much of the crisis was caused by banks taking on excess risks in the pursuit of higher profits. Yet had a major bank president stepped back from that fray and declined to participate, the ‘grammar’ of our results reporting would surely have compared that bank’s results negatively against expectations and against its peers.

“That brave bank president would surely have lost at least his bonus and probably his job. The very fear of that kind of negative comparison helped spur things on — as Citibank’s ex-CEO Charles Prince said (while still in his job), ‘As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.’

“We in the media help play that music, probably exacerbating the highs on the way up and the lows on the way down.”

So did our reporting help change the tune that was being played? Did it raise questions about the factors that contributed to the crisis, including complex financial instruments, subprime mortgage lending and excessive risk?

To fully answer that would require a deeper analysis than we have room for in this space, but there is evidence that questioning notes were sounded.

As early as Aug. 18, 2003, a Reuters story quoted Fed governor Edward Gramlich citing the dangers of “predatory lending” in extending subprime credit. By 2006, the pace had accelerated. A Factiva search of Reuters News found 128 stories that mentioned the phrase “subprime mortgage” that year, including a number in which analysts predicted a deterioration in credit quality. The crescendo came in 2007, when there were more than 10,000 stories that referenced subprime mortgages and when Reuters.com built a special section to house material on the issue. That section developed into the current Crisis in Credit and Housing Market sections.

Still, the overall “music” was loud and infectious and it’s easy to understand why so many couldn’t stay off the dance floor.

Now that the crisis is here, some are accusing the media of deepening the problems. Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, a U.K. employers group and a former editor of the Financial Times, said “careless headlines or injudicious reporting risk becoming self-fulfilling prophecies of a very serious nature.” He urged journalists to be especially vigilant in their fact-checking and called on the press to avoid such words as “panic,” “fear” and “chaos.”

He also suggested that journalists should cut bankers, regulators and politicians a little slack, since “precious few journalists gave any hint at all of what was about to come.”

The FT’s Lex column (Note: subscription required) accused Lambert of shooting the messenger and lamented that some would “seek to clamp down on the fourth estate…, hoping regulation will recreate a golden age when the business press was a tamer, more deferential beast” that “could be hushed up in times of financial turbulence.”

But those days are gone, as Lex put it. “The digital revolution, by lowering entry barriers and intensifying competition, has put paid to all that. It will not return.”

And good riddance. As a card-carrying lover of the First Amendment and the digital revolution, I’m happy those days are gone. But with our freedom comes a sometimes frightening responsibility, especially in troubled economic waters.

As Schlesinger says, “We have a responsibility to be careful, and most of our reporting has been very careful. But we too have played some discordant notes and we need to learn from that.”

What do you think? Did we in the media do our job in reporting on the financial crisis, both before the market collapse in September and since? Are we being careful enough not to sow panic and make things worse? How can our reporting help you weather the storm?

Please post your comments here.

I’ll be using this space regularly to explore issues arising from Reuters and other media coverage of the world and to have a discussion with you. Among the topics I plan to look at: the dangers and rewards of covering religion; the use of anonymous sources; the debate over shield laws for journalists, and much more. I’ll also be providing lots of space for you to have your say.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching that retirement account.

Dean Wright, Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards

One of the side remarks at a debate on journalism I attended was that large British news organisations no longer cover ‘foreign news’. They cover ‘world news’. The argument at a London awards ceremony was that in a globalised world, where a multiplicity of perspectives are available on the Internet, news editors should no longer get correspondents (us) to write about foreigners (them). The belief is that the Us/Them dichotomy reinforces harmful stereotypes and encourages shallow reporting rather than deep and detailed journalism.

Much of the debate was about whether contemporary Anglo-Saxon journalism is doing enough to get beyond stereotyping. Amid that was the nagging fear that audiences do not want to part with their prejudices and that news editors will not give correspondents the opportunity to persuade them. The panel of correspondents lamented the diminishing volume of international reporting in the pages of the mainstream press and on the news programmes of major broadcasters. We know the reasons - competition for viewers and readers, pressure on budgets, an assumption that news from distant places is hard to make relevant to fickle audiences. There was a touch of vocational insecurity to the discussion. Nobody likes to think their profession is changing and is being pushed from the limelight. The panelists were reminded there never really was a golden age for foreign news (if I may be excused the term) and correspondents abroad had always struggled to grab the front page. There was some irony as well to hearing BBC friends worry about the corporation’s appetite for international journalism when, as panel moderator Allan Little pointed out, its roster of foreign correspondents has gone from 10 to over 200 in the last two decades. 

The thornier question was does mainstream English-language journalism deliver an accurate portrayal of the world? Who better to probe the issue than the winners of the annual Kurt Schork award, which celebrates compelling and insightful journalism? Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who won for his bold exposes of human trafficking in his native Ghana, doubted if journalists parachuted from abroad could understand his country effectively. You don’t have the language skills and you don’t have the time it needs, he remarked. Nicholas Schmidle, a young American, won in the freelance category for his stories from Pakistan and Afghanistan on the complexities of the Islamist insurgency. He too spent months on his articles and noted they could not have been done without a network of trusted local guides to help him navigate the issues. 

The BBC’s Bridget Kendall spoke of the tyrannous power of televison images that solidify a cliched view of the world. Print and radio’s spoken word allow more freedom to challenge the settled view. The United States, in particular, was accused of living in a bubble of isolation that its television news programmes rarely challenge with fresh global perspectives. Schmidle said it was not as if Americans did not want to know. “The demand is there, but the demand is not meeting the funds.” 

How else to better reflect the realities of the world? The internet is making space for different views but is mainstream journalism opening the door to seeing things differently? Panel participant Peter Apps, a Reuters correspondent left in a wheelchair by a horrific traffic accident while on assignment in Sri Lanka, called for a more racially diverse workforce in journalism. He recalled being sharply but correctly upbraided by non-white colleagues in South Africa if his articles contained a hint of colonial colouring. Audience members reminded the panel that the BBC World Service does a fine job reporting  Africa from African perspectives. One view from the debate floor was that minority groups within newsrooms have a responsibility to challenge stereotypes.

Schork, who died while on assignment for Reuters in Sierra Leone in 2000, spent his short journalistic career staring at the grimmer realities of the world and trying to strip the layers of obfuscation and deceit from around them. He was always ready to challenge the complacencies and self-deceptions within journalism as much as in the world he reported upon. Good journalism requires that neither challenge stop.

I was in Cape Cod last week to talk about social media – blogs and social networks and all that — at Hubbard One’s ‘Innovation Forum’.  (Hubbard One is a Thomson Reuters company providing website services to law firms.) When first invited I had reservations. I know very little about the legal profession and, while I try not to take this personally, my lawyer friends are openly contemptuous of the media and reserve particular scorn for bloggers. But the organisers said not to worry — they needed someone with “out of industry experience who could stimulate new thinking”. Perhaps sensing my scepticism they added that the guest speaker a few years ago had been a chef.

On the plane from London I was still worrying about how to engage the lawyers (or were they attorneys?) and increasingly discomforted about the idea of following the chef, who by this point had become in my mind a natural entertainer with a slick live show almost certainly involving dramatic knife-work. But then I stumbled across a line in the book I was reading (Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li’s excellent ‘Groundswell’) suggesting that all companies were now media companies since they have to manage complex information flows to both their staff and to customers, and this seemed to offer some hope.

Entering into what I saw as the spirit of the event, I recast my presentation around the motion that law firms are quasi-media companies. And in the discussions that followed I did note at least five ways in which these firms are having to face up to challenges that parallel ours at Reuters News:

1. Struggling to throw off the shackles of the broadcast model
It’s hard to take an organisation used to broadcasting information and to get it to start engaging with customers or readers as individuals.

There was, for example, an animated conversation about whether to allow comments on legal blogs or not. This is relatively limited engagement but even so most of those present didn’t allow comments on blogs. I had to suppress a chuckle when one marketer said one of her blogs had received just a dozen comments in the past year. But I was stunned to then hear that of those 12, four had generated new business for the firm – an extraordinary response. (At Reuters News we struggle to get our journalists to follow up on remarks made in response to their blog posts.)

2. Making content social

Established organisations tend to view their website as the sole focus. Most media companies are gradually coming round to the idea that you need to make content portable so that readers can read it where they want to. That can range from RSS news feeds to links to social bookmarking sites like Digg or del.icio.us. But, with some honourable exceptions, law firms are struggling with this.

Jones Day is one firm to really embrace RSS, attracting more than 60,000 subscribers to its feeds. However, the Australian law firm Deacons was the only legal site fellow presenter Chris Kraft from Hubbard One knew of that had ‘sharing’ buttons (like those at the foot of this post) allowing  readers to bookmark material on social network sites.

3. Confusion over blogging
There’s a term for legal blogs — blawgs. And the aggregator blawg.com indexes more than 2,000. But there still seems to be confusion about blogging. Many legal marketers said their lawyers were troubled by the ethics of blogging and the perceived necessity that a ‘proper’ blog required sharp expressions of opinion.

This chimed with my experience: by far the most frequently asked question from Reuters journalists is how they can write a ‘real’ blog when they are forbidden by Thomson Reuters Trust Principles from expressing personal views. My stock response: look at Technorati’s top 10 blogs and consider how many are information blogs as opposed to opinion-based.

On a show of hands, only half of the legal marketers had come across Twitter – the increasingly popular micro-blogging tool. And while it looks like lawyers as individuals have begun to discover Twitter (the number registered has doubled in the past month) no-one knew of a legal firm using Twitter yet. In fact few could see how a format that limits posts to 140 characters could possibly be used by a profession not known for its economy with language.

4. Growing importance of video
I was struck by how much video is being produced by law firms. They’ve found that lawyers and attorneys who spend all day reading documents find video a much easier way of keeping up with developments.

Most are using full production and editing crews rather than the cheap and cheerful use of mobile phones and YouTube favoured by bloggers (and, increasingly, Reuters journalists and contacts), which means the approach is expensive and slow.

One attendee explained that senior partners saw TV as performance and expected high production values. Another told me the problem was editing – partners speak and write at length and while editing text is straightforward, video remains difficult.

However, Scott Kilburg of Foley & Lardner has been using inexpensive Flip cameras to add video to his site to some effect.

5. Lack of time
We all suffer from this, I suppose. And when I try to persuade Reuters journalists to blog, or to blog more frequently, the most common response is that they are too busy. The legal marketing officers clearly get the same kind of reception. But for them there is scope to make it easier by streamlining the editorial process.  One London-based marketer drew sympathy from delegates when he explained how his firm blogged – a senior partner would dictate his thoughts to an assistant or a secretary who would then write it up, have it edited, then vetted and, some days later,  finally published.

Overall, there was a sense that change was inevitable and that the new generation joining law firms would accelerate the pace. And there was much sage nodding when one delegate said: “Many of our partners and associates are spending time on social media sites already, so let’s just make it easy for them to do it for the firm’s benefit”.

As I listened to the legal marketers I could see that the ‘law firms as media companies’ analogy was a bit of a stretch – law firms hire out lawyers, they don’t sell content. But they do produce lots of content, and working out how best to present it and so engage their customers is forcing them to think, well, a bit like media companies.

Is there a responsibility owed by journalists to the countries we report on?

A big topic, for sure, and one I was thinking about during a debate organised by The Orwell Prize on ‘Is journalism failiing failing states?’ Ostensibly the panel were discussing the adequacy of coverage of places like Congo, Burundi and Afghanistan. Adequacy for what, you might ask, and the discussion revealed a gap between the role some wanted journalism to play in crisis zones and what it actually achieves. Some sense of duty to inform, to shine a light in dark places and to educate motivates a lot of coverage of the world’s trouble spots. Yet the high-minded pursuit of truth is compromised by the impatience of viewers and readers, who respond to human drama rather than deep detail and nuance. It is also compromised by the ego indulgence of reporters who put themselves rather than their subjects at the centre of a story. And it is compromised by the decreasing ability of big news organisations to fund foreign reporting. John Lloyd of the FT and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism suggested we can no longer expect to get in the mass media the complex information needed for deep understanding. We must turn to books, long-form journalism and blogs, he argued, which necessarily have smaller audiences.

So if ‘failed state’ reporting is often flawed, is it still worth doing? By and large yes, the panel agreed. For what purpose, though? That discussion touched on the efficacy of the journalism of engagement versus the school of dispassionate observation. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen recalled the coverage of the Bosnian war was motivated by a burning sense that the injustices and inhumanities of that conflict could not remain concealed. It was derided as ’something must be done’ journalism by the then Conservative government in Britain, but arguably it had an effect on awakening public opinion. Panellist David Loyn of the BBC, who has just published on Afghanistan, wondered if  coverage there since 2001 has actually been unhelpful. Over-simplification, distortions of history, failure to portray the perspectives of ordinary Afghans and unquestioning acceptance of a flawed Western strategy were hallmarks of most reporting on the confict, he argued.

(As an aside, I have just come back from Afghanistan where I was reviewing Reuters coverage. It struck me as the kind of place where our brand of well-informed observation and balanced reporting works well. We may not be writing the definitive history of the conflict but we are having a decent stab at its first draft.)

Panel participant Lord Paddy Ashdown supported the “shining a light” model of journalism, particularly for Afghanistan, where he said Western engagement was on the verge of failing grievously. Ashdown has lengthy experience of trying to fix failing states, having spent nearly four years as the international community’s overseer in Bosnia from 2002 to 2006. He almost took up a similar role in Afghanistan, until the Kabul government took fright at the scope of the powers being envisaged for his post.

Key to success in Afghanistan and in other international politico-military interventions, said Ashdown, was “strategic patience.” That long-term, grind-it-out approach to a crisis is a challenge to contemporary journalism, he argued, with its wish for quick wins and instant fixes.

The Observer’s Peter Beaumont suggested that many failed states suffer not so much from bad journalistic coverage as little coverage at all. That may be true of the mainstream media but does not necessarily mean there is no reporting at all. It might not be visible on newstands but is there for those who seek it, some would argue, in citizen and local journalism. The debate did not explore the value of those avenues of coverage. At least in terms of the impact on mass consciousness in the developed world those journalistic forms would seem limited by the challenges of authentication and the atomisation of the audience.

One issue that was touched upon was the necessity of robust local journalism. If ultimately the rehabilitation of a failed state depends on the support of its citizenry (which international forces reduce in Afghanistan every time they air strike civilians) then the rise of a vibrant local press would seem essential. Is it a pre-condition or a consequence of national rehabilitation? The Failed States Index does not cite lack of a free press as central to state collapse, though it does mention hate radio and harassment of the media as hallmarks of failure. Plenty of charities support local journalism via media training and start-up funding. Should we worry more about doing that well and less about describing state collapse for distant, well-fed audiences?

By the way, Reuters is a sponsor of the Orwell prize, which celebrates sharp and elegant political writing.

Thomson Reuters hosted a speech by the British Prime Minister in London on Monday and we opened up the event to the Web with the help of two advisors  — documentary maker Christian Payne and social media guru Mike Atherton.

These two have helped politicians, business people and even a Hollywood studio to connect with online audiences. Our event perhaps lacked a bit of Hollywood glamour but we had business people and politics in spades and we gave Christian and Mike full access to cover the event as they saw fit.

Christian created an alternative video feed of the proceedings using a Nokia mobile phone, and a wireless connection to the Qik social video platform.

This prompted a conversation in the Qik comments.

And somomething similar happened on Christian’s own site — OurManInside — which also carried a streaming feed and acted as a catalyst for another set of comments.

Meanwhile Mike Atherton ‘tweeted’ the proceedings throughout the event (for the uninitiated you ‘tweet’ when you use twitter , which is like blogging via SMS text message). He attracted hundreds of new ‘followers’ as the buzz about what was going on spread.

Meanwhile I had the more straightforward (but quite compulsive) task of monitoring what others were saying in reaction to Gordon Brown’s comments, picking out what I thought were the most interesting and featuring them on the Reuters website alongside our live coverage.

So, what did we learn from all this?

1. Interestingly, our two social media experts were able to create a ‘buzz’ around the event by keeping quiet about it. Dropping hints that they were involved in something big over the weekend served to raise the interest of their many followers in the social media world. Then going very quiet reinforced the idea that something was up. I’m not a PR expert but I think this is roughly the reverse of our standard approach.

2. It’s a lot easier to get a live video feed from a mobile phone out onto the Web than it is to take a professional video feed and stream it onto a website.

3. We can’t confine our attention to people who come to our sites to discuss our content –  conversations will happen wherever people gather online and we’ll have to learn how to find the nuggets.

4. Finding out what people are saying online is getting easier. But monitoring multiple conversation threads isn’t easy. As I watched Mike Atherton flicking between screens and tapping away at his keyboard it struck me that this is a particular skill that not all of us have.

5. Measuring the success of such coverage isn’t easy. One of my colleagues asked what the impact on site traffic had been. Answer: negligible. But mentions in social media shot up. Is that enough to justify the effort?

6. The technology is still  flaky. Bloggers complained they couldn’t hear the audio from our very own Thomson Reuters video widget.  They were referred to the Qik video stream being provided by Documentally — but this broke down at one point due to connectivity problems.

7. Downing Street is actively embracing social media. It has a very personable ‘twitterer’ in the Communications Office who is using this to communicate with journalists and bloggers and indeed did this in advance of the Reuters event.

8. What social media participants really wanted was to be able to interact with the Prime Minister himself  — that’s not something we’d negotiated with no. 10. But next time…

Mark Jones is Reuters News Global Community Editor

It has certainly been a busy — and historic — week for journalists in the United States. We love big stories, and we got them. We love surprises, and we got them.

In Denver, the Democrats nominated the first African-American candidate of a major party, while orchestrating a clockwork convention designed to show unity after a divisive primary campaign.

Barack Obama had hardly given his acceptance speech in a rock-star setting in front of  75,000 supporters  before John McCain grabbed the headlines and surprised the world by picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the first woman for a top slot in the GOP’s history.

Oh, yes. A major hurricane bore down on New Orleans. Gustav disrupted the script of  the Republican convention, revived memories of 2005’s Katrina and the devastation of a great American city and reminded many of the damage the response to that storm did to the reputation of the Bush administration.

Then on Monday, in a development worthy of a soap opera, the McCain campaign revealed that Palin’s 17-year-old unmarried daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

The story raises a number of ethical issues for journalists, which is why I’m writing today.

First, an introduction: I am Reuters’ newly named Editor for Ethics, Innovation and News Values. One of my missions is to lead discussions on ethics and standards wherever journalism is practiced at Thomson Reuters — and the Palin story seems a good place to start. It raises important issues for journalism: the right of public figures’ families to privacy; the mainstream media’s relationship with bloggers and other media; and the relationship between journalists and the people they cover.

The pregnancy story — like many stories now — got its start in the blogosphere, with liberal bloggers, such as those on the Daily Kos discussing rumors that the governor’s fifth child, born in April, was in fact her daughter’s. Conservative blogs, such as Townhall.com  launched furious rebuttals. The McCain campaign chose to reveal Bristol’s pregnancy on a major U.S. holiday, at a time when much of the public’s attention was still focused on barbecues and beaches and the  media’s attention was focused on Hurricane Gustav.

But the story was neither overlooked by the public nor overshadowed by Gustav.

There was instant debate over whether Bristol’s pregnancy was anyone’s business but hers and her family’s; whether candidates’ children should be off-limits (Obama thought so); whether GOP delegates would stand by Palin (all signs are that they are); and whether the McCain campaign’s vetting process had been less than thorough.

So let’s have some debate (or at least discussion) here. What do you think of the media’s coverage of this story?

–Does the public have a right to know whether Sarah Palin’s (or any candidate’s) daughter is pregnant or not?

–Should the private lives of family members of presidential and vice-presidential candidates be off-limits?

–How aggressively should the mainstream media pursue allegations and rumors in the blogosphere and tabloid media?

–Should journalists have reported the Palin pregnancy story before the McCain campaign’s announcement?

I’m looking forward to your views on this story -and on other stories in the future. Reuters and other news organizations don’t operate in a vacuum. We wouldn’t be in business were it not for you, our customers, clients and users.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Values
 

(Photo credit: REUTERS/Matt Sullivan)

I’ve written before  that a camera is not a weapon, that a journalist is not a combatant, that the pen and the sword should not be confused.

Yet the Israel Defense Forces seem to be putting the camera very much in the category of weapon in a report on the death in April of Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana.

I’ve given a quote to our reporters about my disappointment in the report.

That it does state that the death was a “tragedy” does not counteract the fact that it condoned the firing of two deadly shells at people it admitted had not been identified clearly and whose only crime was to put a camera on a tripod.

Said the report: “Two persons were spotted leaving the vehicle, carrying a large black object. The black object was placed on a tripod above a dirt mound, and directed at the tank…. The tank crew reported the spotting to its superiors. The latter authorized firing a tank shell at the characters, in light of the genuine suspicion that the object mounted on the tripod and directed at the tank was an anti-tank missile or mortar, a suspicion consistent with the characteristics of that day’s hostilities…”

I do understand the stresses of the battlefield.

I do understand that wars are horribly dangerous – Reuters has had close calls in Georgia; colleagues from other organizations have been killed.

I do not understand the deliberate decision to fire on the basis of suspicion and uncertainty.

I wonder how journalists can do their job if doing that job raises such suspicion in the eyes of the Israeli or any other military.

The dangers seem too great.

And yet, the stakes of not reporting a war to the world are too high as well.

“…the tank crew was unable to determine the nature of the object mounted on the tripod and positively identify it as an anti-tank missile, a mortar, or a television camera,” the report said.

To me, killing on the basis of such little certainty makes the death of Fadel Shana much more than just a tragedy.

For a little more investigation, a little more military intelligence, would have shown clearly that he was just a professional doing his job.

And that his camera was a weapon only for the truth.

 Photo:  

Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana looks out of the window at the Reuters office in Gaza City April 4, 2006. Shana, 23, and two other Palestinian civilians were killed on April 16, 2008, in what local residents said was an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip. Picture taken April 4, 2006. REUTERS/Don Pessin

Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote about “Anonymice” and tracked use of anonymous sources in the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Portfolio’s Zubin Jelveh then followed up with a post that included some statistics about Reuters use vs. other news organizations.

In the interest of transparency, I’m posting Reuters basic guidance on sourcing (we also have detailed guidance that expands on the points below):

Sourcing

Accuracy entails honesty in sourcing. Our reputation for that accuracy, and for freedom from bias, rests on the credibility of our sources. A Reuters journalist or camera is always the best source on a witnessed event. A named source is always preferable to an unnamed source. We should never deliberately mislead in our sourcing, quote a source saying one thing on the record and something contradictory on background, or cite sources in the plural when we have only one. Anonymous sources are the weakest sources. …

Here are some handy tips:

• Use named sources wherever possible because they are responsible for the information they provide, even though we remain liable for accuracy, balance and legal dangers. Press your sources to go on the record.
• Reuters will use unnamed sources where necessary when they provide information of market or public interest that is not available on the record. We alone are responsible for the accuracy of such information.
• When talking to sources, always make sure the ground rules are clear. Take notes and record interviews.
• Cross-check information wherever possible. Two or more sources are better than one. In assessing information from unnamed sources, weigh the source’s track record, position and motive. Use your common sense. If it sounds wrong, check further.
• Talk to sources on all sides of a deal, dispute, negotiation or conflict.
• Be honest in sourcing and in obtaining information. Give as much context and detail as you can about sources, whether named or anonymous, to authenticate information they provide. Be explicit about what you don’t know.
• Reuters will publish news from a single, anonymous source in exceptional cases, when it is credible information from a trusted source with direct knowledge of the situation. Single-source stories are subject to a special authorisation procedure.
• A source’s compact is with Reuters, not with the reporter. If asked on legitimate editorial grounds, you are expected to disclose your source to your supervisor. Protecting the confidentiality of sources, by both the reporter and supervisor, is paramount.
• When doing initiative reporting, try to disprove as well as prove your story.
• Accuracy always comes first. It’s better to be late than wrong. Before pushing the button, think how you would withstand a challenge or a denial.
• Know your sources well. Consider carefully if the person you are communicating with is an imposter. Sources can provide information by whatever means available - telephone, in person, email, instant messaging, text message. But be aware that any communication can be interfered with.
• Reuters will stand by a reporter who has followed the sourcing guidelines and the proper approval procedures.

We don’t always get it right. There are times we should have pressed harder to get a source to go on the record with his or her name; there are times when we should have spiked (thrown away) a story because the sourcing wasn’t totally up to our standards.

But I think the record of our 2,500 journalists is on balance a good one: we use anonymous sources judiciously and in the interest of getting important stories. In the end it’s what you, our readers, think that matters - you’re the ultimate arbiter of our credibility.

 (photo credit: Journalists wait outside the Lenval Hospital where U.S. actress Angelina Jolie gave birth to twins in Nice, southern France, July 13, 2008. REUTERS/Chris Serrano)

The Biblical image of alchemy is powerful:They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.

Yet, once again, the alchemy went the wrong way: a soldier mistook a camera for a weapon, fired his real weapon, and a journalist was killed.

Fadel Shana, 24, filming an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip was killed by that very tank on April 16.

Two months later, there are still no satisfactory answers.

What about his camera could have been confused for a weapon?

What about his “Press”-emblazoned car or flak jacket was ambiguous?

What about his peaceful actions filming a news story could possibly have seemed aggressive?

What motivated the tank commander to fire thousands of flechettes, sharp and deadly steel darts, before positively identifying his target and without warning?

Answers to these questions are important. They are important for Fadel Shana’s family and colleagues; they are important for justice; they are important to save the lives of journalists in the future; they are important for all of us who rely upon journalists in places, near and far, safe and unsafe, to bring us the stories that let us know what is really happening in the world.

A television camera is not a weapon; it is a potent tool for truth. A pen is not a sword; its blade separates truth and fiction and empowers readers to judge their world. A journalist is not a combatant; a journalist is an agent for exposing the facts and giving the world needed transparency.

These truths hold in the corridors of Congress; these truths hold in the banking halls of London’s City; these truths must hold on the battlefields from Baghdad to Gaza as well.

The world needs to know. The world’s citizens need to know. And if journalists are killed while doing their job or for doing their job, the world loses a bit of its brightness and transparency, and the truth will be hidden.

The Israel Defense Forces issued a welcome statement immediately after Fadel Shana was killed, saying: “The IDF wishes to emphasize that unlike terrorist organizations not only does not it deliberately target uninvolved civilians; it also uses means to avoid such incidents.”

The best way to ensure these ideals to be realized would be for the IDF and other military to work intimately with news organizations so tragedies like that of Fadel Shana’s death won’t happen again.

A military that has sophisticated intelligence and identification methods can learn to tell a camera from a gun. A military that works hard to prevent deaths of its own by friendly fire can learn to investigate vehicles and garments clearly marked as “Press”. A military that seeks to save “uninvolved civilians” can use restraint with the firing of shells filled with indiscriminate, deadly darts.

And governments and military that understand the role of the press in serving society’s need for truth must learn better to respect the lives of journalists working for that purpose.

This was the title of a panel I joined at the Social Media Influence event earlier this week in London. It was a slightly tongue-in-cheek question from Matthew Yeomans, one of the conference’s organisers, but interesting because it touches on a number of current trends — the phenomenal rise of video usage on the Web, the success of user-generated video sites and the impression that, perhaps, blogging has become a bit passe. Just this week we’ve seen a new study show that online video consumption has nearly doubled in the past year while new social video services are growing very quickly and Youtube recently appointed a citizen video news editor.

This was the full brief:

Okay, we’re joking…..sort of. But be it video-snacking, YouTube resumes, digital video activism or live-streaming to the web from your mobile phone, the world of Web 2.0 is being driven by the moving image. This panel will examine the role video is playing in shaping communication techniques within companies as well as helping reach new consumer audiences.

In a way the event answered the question itself. One of the participants, the BBC’s Robin Hamman, who I had thought was going to be on the panel instead streamed the proceedings live via his mobile phone to Qik where it is now archived. So now I’m thinking why blog about the event when you can see the whole thing on Qik? And, in my case, why write a note to my boss when I can just point him to the full recording and (slightly scary thought) he can make up his own mind on how it went?

In preparing for the event I did a couple of things. First, I thought about my professional experience within Reuters. We’ve got perhaps a couple of hundred journalists blogging on a regular basis but just a handful video blogging. That’s partly because video is still a bit tricky while blogging is relatively easy since, in essence, it’s just a text-based content management system and nearly all our journalists are writing on a very regular basis.

But that’s the view from a mainstream media organisation. What’s the picture in the blogging world? I asked a number of people in the Global Voices blogging network for a perspective. These are people who live and breathe blogging. They deal with the realities of handling content using social media day in, day out and from the four corners of the globe. I thought their answers gave the topic a deeper perspective that I struggled to get across to the London audience.

…there’s definitely lots going on with video, but I firmly believe most people spend so much time in their pyjamas they won’t want to be on video most of the time they spend online. It’s hard enough to get people to use their own names in discussion forms, blog and article comments.Someone sent us a link to this Wordpress plugin the other day that allows people to make comments in blogs with videos. It’s kind of neat and perhaps the kind of thing we’ll be seeing more of soon. It’s complimentary to the Web 2.0 activity that already exists rather than something that replaces it. Personally, I think we’re more likely to see video, still photos, and text mingling more effortlessly on the web, rather than a situation where moving images dominate. The multi-media experience is much more effective for interactive story-telling. Text is just too effective and easy to lose the battle.

Solana Larsen

I think the idea that the world of web 2.0 is being *driven* by the moving image is debatable, especially given the dominance of microblogging platforms like Twitter that are primarily text based. Nor is video as immediately “social” as text. Which is not to say that it’s not an important ingredient in the mix.

I think that as more individuals become versed in multiple forms of media we’re probably going to see them mixing them and harnessing them for various purposes at different times. Online video can be of immense value, nevertheless, in the places where television continues to be very effective - ie in live coverage. Bandwidth and service constraints notwithstanding, the day a live streaming service like Qik is deployed beyond US borders it going to be revolutionary. And unlike TV, this content is instantly archived.

And of course, and perhaps obviously, the existence of cell phone and other small digital video cameras has completely changed the game in terms of security and privacy, both for better (police torture videos in Egypt) and for worse (videos featuring schoolgirls in Trinidad having sex). I was thinking just the other day how difficult it used to be to take photographs in airports, in many of which I think it’s still illegal to do so.

Georgia Popplewell

“As long as connectivity speeds are an issue, videos will continue being food for few. I´m hoping that web 3.0 will make it easier to tag online videos and search them, but so far it is mostly manual labor: sitting through dozens of videos trying to find the ones that have useful tidbits of information. So in countries where connectivity is slow, watching videos online can be torturous at worst and annoying at best. I spend most of my time looking at icons that remind me that the video is still loading, so I know firsthand it can get frustrating. Likewise with uploading content when one has an intermittent connection. Uploading and viewing video has tech requirements that blogging in text doesn´t, so I don´t think it will substitute blogs anytime soon, they will continue growing in tandem, complimenting the other’s content. As long as we depend on typed tagging for videos, videos will still depend very heavily on written context.”

Juliana Rincon

Instead of writing this I could have recorded a two minute ‘piece to camera’ (will we start calling these items ‘pieces to mobile’?) and uploaded it to a social media platform. I haven’t done that because I just don’t think I’d have been able to tell the story as well. I like the flexibility that blogging gives me. I’ve got video here, I’ve been able to link to underlying sources, I’ve been able to use all the media there is. And very quickly.This feels like genuine multimedia production that plays to each medium’s strengths. I just can’t see video alone eclipsing this ability to weave media strands together.

Picture credit: Social Media Influence