The point of “the Rosenthal Rule” is not to penalize any one political viewpoint; rather, the cub reporter who wanted to march in a protest has such a strong personal connection to that issue that it made him unsuited to write neutral, fact-based stories on that issue. A conflict of interest is still an ethical problem even if nobody misbehaves and nobody means any harm.
Trump never told People magazine that Republicans are dumb, Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house,” and when Obama said “gotta have ribs and pussy too” in 1995 he was reading a line spoken by a character in his book. Sharing miscaptioned photos that criticize public figures or organizations for things…
Get the brand of the beer, the make, model and year of the car and the name and breed of the dog. Here’s a great story that suggests journalists also “get the brand of the bra.”
We mostly only encounter the phrase “when asked about” in reporting, so when students start writing news reports, they tend to gravitate towards that phrase in order to signal to the world, “I am doing journalism now.” In truth, journalists use that phrase only in very specific circumstances, when omitting it would give a distorted impression of the truth.…
In school, we expect our professors to answer our questions, to return our emails, to invite us in for a consultation, to pay attention what we say and read carefully what we write. One of the important lessons of being a student journalist is learning how to deal with the unexpected. Unfair things happen in…
A newsworthy story is recent (rather than stale), rare (rather than common), affects many (rather than few) people, has weighty (rather than trivial) impact, happens nearby (rather than far away), and involves prominent (rather than ordinary) people.