Controversy over a Rocky Mountain News reporter twittering a child's funeral: What's your opinion?

Lawyer Edward Wiest alerted me to this story about reporter Berny Morson twittering the funeral of a young child killed in an ice cream store (story includes video). The response of JohnTemple, editor, publisher and president of the Rocky Mountain News to his reporter's twittering: New tech raises taste questions. Excerpt:

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," Dorothy said when she first arrived in Oz.

That feeling of being in a strange new land is a common one for many journalists today.

We're doing things that take us to places that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. And sometimes when we arrive, we find our actions have conjured up their own set of troubles.

That was the case this week when one of our reporters was assigned to cover the funeral of the 3-year-old boy killed after two vehicles collided and crashed into an Aurora ice cream store where he was sitting.
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What was different in this case was that a reporter sent live updates via text message from his phone to our Web site during the service. He did so using a program called Twitter.

Well, let's just say it raised more than a twitter among some journalists and bloggers.

The Poynter Institute, one of the nation's leading journalism training organizations, has a blog it calls "E-Media Tidbits." The blog describes itself rather modestly as: "A group weblog by the sharpest minds in online media."

Sharpest knives might be a better description.

"I think the glitz of technology has taken over common sense," wrote Michelle Ferrier, a columnist and managing editor, online community hubs, for the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Later, in an e-mail exchange with another online writer that was copied to me, Ferrier went farther.

"I think all live coverage of the funerals of private individuals should be banned," she wrote.

Well, when I hear journalists arguing for the "banning" of any kind of speech, I tend to get my back up.

Rest here. More commentary here (The Colorado Independent).

What do you think? Read the funeral twitter and let me know your thoughts. What about the video?

Comments

[Edward Wiest]

After reading the tweet stream, the article ultimately published in the RMN, and the RMN's editor's after the fact comments, two points come to mind:

1. It must be noted that the child's family consented in principle to press funeral coverage. On this basis, one can't oppose Twitter coverage per se on privacy grounds. I was prepared to analogize this new form of "spot reporting" to the controversy over the publication of on-scene photos of identifiable US combat casualties and the arrival of remains in the US, cases in which I believe that real-time dissemination poses serious concerns, whatever the news value of the deaths in general. As there was consent (perhaps not informed) to some reporting, privacy concerns might not have been as important here.

2. It is enlightening to compare the funeral story that the RMN published to the tweet stream. The tweets presented little more than a schematic of a funeral conducted in a specific manner. The published story told you about what happened and the personalities involved. No matter how fast the observer can work, the 140 character limit on tweets make it impossible to paint a picture with the same level of detail—so why bother with the string of tweets at all? An announcement by the RMN writer that he was on scene preparing a story would have served some purpose. What went online did not.

In a world where daily papers no longer publish multiple editions each afternoon and evening, an unedited series of what once were called “short takes” as to what was in front of an observer may present less than meets the eye. Here, what once would have been phoned (and now IM'd) to rewrite went out live. I doubt the raw dispatches enlightened readers in the manner the final story did. Live tweeters in general should think about this before thumbing their smartphones next time.