Social media and an infamous "poll"

A blog submission from a 202er:

Hi Katy,

I apologize for the lateness of this email, but today in another one of my classes we were talking about this story and I thought for sure it would be up on the blog today, but it wasn't. Someone started a facebook poll asking if President Obama should be assassinated!! The questions it poses are many. First of all, should this be considered a threat to the President of the United States by the person who started a poll?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33060855/ns/technology_and_science-security/

Just thought you might be interested in sharing this with our class,

Dan

Ethics and information

What was that she said in lecture about information having a "shelf life"?

Jeff Fisher questions Ch. 5's ethics on 'exclusive' report | tennessean.com | The Tennessean

When I discuss ethics, I often try to frame it in terms of the forces that move us to make bad decisions. I'm going to come right out and say it: using file footage from an unrelated interview question in this way was a bad decision. What kinds of forces would have made the reporter and producer do this?

Celebrities, privacy and ownership

McSteamy Vid Lawsuit? It’s a Copyright Beef - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com
When do celebrities have the right to control dissemination of their own materials? I would have guessed this case to be brought on privacy grounds, so I'm surprised by this novel approach.

Lose tweets sink fleets

Another set of newsroom guidelines on social media use by staff.

KC News Meeting

What's on your mind and in the news this week?
- Iran and a nuclear revelation
- G20 summit
- troop levels in Afghanistan
- arrests in suspected terror bombing plots
- John Edwards and the paternity game
What else should we be watching to stay informed?

Brands and trust

Business Week's global brands issue has an excellent piece on marketing and trust. It's well worth a read.
Also check out their ranking of the 100 best brands. Interesting insights.
What is the balance between a company's obligation to consumers and to shareholders? What social responsibilities do brands have?
For instance, this is "Go Big Read" time, where hundreds on campus are reading Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" and its indictment of food marketing. Kellogg's is Business Week's 34th best brand. What is its obligation to feed children nutritionally valuable products? If they build the brand and make shareholders money by marketing sugary cereals, is that OK? Why or why not? How can consumers influence large brands?

False identities in cyberspace

Had a fascinating chat with a 202 lab this week on social networking identities and journalism ethics. We dove into the tough question of "how accurately does your Facebook profile portray you?" If something happened to you today, would your profile adequately cover your life for purposes of a news story or obituary? Mine wouldn't.
Are social networking profiles real? Or are they more of a "performance space," where you try to be things you're not? Do we only put part of ourselves online?
And what happens when they're purposely manipulated? A new libel case arose this month in Illinois, where four high school students are accused of creating a fake and defamatory Facebook profile for a student athlete. Read the complaint. Harmless kid prank or ruinous to reputation?
Social networking hoaxes are not new. Recall the MySpace hoax linked to a teen suicide.

What should your J-school give you?

Lots of talk these days about journalism programs and how they are (or aren't) adapting to new media environments. I won't bore you again with my take on how YOUR journalism school foresaw coming media changes in launched J202 as a multimedia-rich course waaaaay back in fall 2000.
But much of this talk boils down to technology. I thought this was an interesting take on what else you should demand from you communications education.

Internet Manifesto

Check this out and really read each of the items in the manifesto. What do you think of this? How have "old media" companies approached the Internet? How has that approach served them? What is the value of seeing something as an opportunity, rather than a threat?

"Hit man" journalism

Here's the full piece covered in your most recent "On the Media" podcast. It raises excellent ethical issues. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/media

KC News Meeting

So what happened this week that may appear on the quiz? I'll start you thinking, and you add other items via comments.

- anniversary of Wall Street meltdown
- changes in missile defense plans
- Badgers win
- arrest in the death of Yale graduate student
- Patrick Swayze dies
- premiere of "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" (the biggest news of the week in the Culver household)

Litigation in virtual space

Check out this new suit involving Second Life.
What does it mean to interact in cyberspace? How are marketing and advertising changed and affected when you move out of real life and into Second Life? Is Second Life "real"? What ethical responsibilities do we have in different spaces?

High school students and speech

What kinds of free speech and press rights should high school students have? Lots of censorship issues arise, as students try to learn and practice journalism and administrators try to rein in kids.
What do you think of the balance? How responsible can high school students be? How irresponsible? What subjects should be taboo?

Accuracy, speed and corrections

Social media lit up a bit this week when Howard Kurtz from the Washington Post included a line in a column, referring to Kenya as President Obama's "native country."
As you probably already know, some fringe folks known as the "birthers" question the legitimacy of the Obama presidency, claiming he was not born in the U.S. and thus is constitutionally barred from serving as president. When a reader pointed it out, Kurtz immediately said it was a slip and he meant, "ancestral homeland."
The Post has now appended a correction but many questioned how long it took them to do that (about three days, by my count).
What are organizations' responsibilities when it comes to accuracy? How fast should they correct errors? How does the social media sphere both exacerbate errors (such as the birthers linking to the story) and ferret them out (such as the reader who noted the problem)?

Piles of dough

I don't have anything to say to this story, other than "wow."
Oh, and I suppose I could add, "If you ever make this kind of money in media, could we talk about your funding a new J-School building?" : )

Is "jackass" presidential?

So Kanye pulled a little something at the VMAs that I know you've all heard about.
But it turned into a media ethics question when President Obama and a pool of reporters got involved.
Here's a roundup story of what happened.
Here's the actual audio.
Here's Moran's tweet.
So what's the upshot here? Was it ethical for Moran to tweet this? Can the president ever expect to be off the record? Is "jackass" a term not in keeping with the civility required of the office? We just pummeled a congressman for saying, "You lie." What about "jackass"? Or was this an accurate and precise description worthy of circulation? Does the venue matter?
(Incidentally, this is a pretty funny parody linking the two.)

Viral video consequences

"Viral" has a certain meaning for us amid our spate of H1N1 warnings, but in marketing, the concept refers to getting your message consumed and extended via sharing among users on social networks. Facebook and Twitter matter, but e-mail is still a primary way we set viral messages in motion interpersonally.
A Danish organization learned something about this recently when a fracas erupted over a video "hoax" uploaded to YouTube. Check out the video and some of the reaction.
Some people are asking, "What were they thinking?" Others are saying, "They were thinking there's no such thing as bad publicity. In viral terms, this thing was a monster hit."
What say ye?

KC News Meeting

Welcome to the blog, our newest batch of journalism majors. Each week, I post to the "KC News Meeting" tag on this blog a short list of things that have made the news during this week. This should prompt you to make sure you've prepared for the current events quizzes. But my lists aren't comprehensive or exhaustive. So I want you to post comments to add news items you think are important. I try to draw quiz questions from a combination of my posts and your comments (but any major themes, people or action could be fodder for a question, so don't limit your news diet to just these posts).

So far this week, I'm reading about:
- President Obama's health care speech to Congress
- key players in the political debate over health care
- "You lie!" (if you don't know what that refers to, you need to be digesting more daily)
- female evening news anchor at ABC
- H1N1 and vaccine developments
- former Taiwanese leader sentenced
- concerns about Afghan elections
- Ellen Degeneres joins "American Idol"
- Presidential message to schoolchildren

Use the comments function to to add your ideas on what's brewing currently.

Freedom of expression and truth

The health care debate has given rise to a number of spurious claims, as sides passionately cling to their views.
The most infamous certainly was Sarah Palin's "death panels" assertion. Jon Stewart did an artful job taking on another seller of that spin on the proposed legislation.
The White House got into an interesting kerfuffle over an effort to get people to root out "fishy" information that they could then try to debunk. The plan was a pretty commonplace blogosphere approach. The theory goes: the more eyes watching facts and working on verifying them, the more likely truth will have a chance to emerge.
But what if those eyes are being asked to watch by the government? What does that do to your constitutionally protected freedoms? Was the White House asking people to rat out their friends and family, a la McCarthyism? Or trying to get real answers out into the public sphere in response to flat-out lies? Dig around for updates to this story. What did the administration decide to do?

Passing of a Kennedy

A committed liberal in my life sent me a message last week, reading, "If all this Teddy Kennedy coverage makes ME want to vomit, what must it be doing to people who disagreed with him politically? If these talking heads can even remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne, I bet they couldn't spell it."
The Boston Globe began one of its obit pieces: "TED KENNEDY was not a great man."
So with a figure as divisive and storied as Kennedy, what is the right tone to strike in coverage and how much coverage should we have?
NPR's ombudsman tackles some of the issues.
How much is enough? How does the timing of the death play into coverage choices? Farrah Fawcett's death might have been a fairly major news story until Michael Jackson died unexpectedly shortly after. How do we cover flawed individuals with honesty while still respecting the truth? Did you know what Chappquiddick was or who Kopechne was? Does that matter?

Sensitivity and advertising

Ad agency DDB Brasil is facing outrage over an ad it created that used imagery evoking 9/11 to make a point about the tsunami and conservation for client World Wildlife Fund (this story is a touch confusing, so I recommend watching the ad posted at the end).
A print ad ran once in obscurity, and the agency initially claimed it hadn't created a video that was working its way around the Web. But when the blogosphere lit up, everything came out.
What is the role of sensitivity in advertising? Give me an example of a time a shocking ad might be used to positive effect. Do you think this ad should have been created and run? What cross-cultural issues are at play, given that the 9/11 attacks were against the U.S. but this agency is international?

Conflicts of Interest

My favorite technology writer is David Pogue of the New York Times. He brings a personality and depth of knowledge to his work that surpasses anything else I read. (Plus, my kids know every word to his "I got an iPhone" ditty.)
But he's becoming a brand all his own, which leads people to raise questions about conflicts of interest. Those questions hit the page of the public editor today.
What do you think? In an age when information is so fragmented and people have to innovate and expand to build revenue streams, how do we avoid conflicts of interest? Can we? Is the appearance of a conflict as bad as a conflict itself? What if Pogue weren't writing about tech and instead, say, politics? Would it be OK for him to put out books on different people?