Annotated Bibilography

Technology Challenges Ethics & Integrity of Communication Professionals

The integration of technology has had a profound impact on professionals who work in the communications field, especially as it relates to ethics and communication of the facts in general. As someone who has worked in the PR and marketing field for 25+, I’ve experienced the transition to technology throughout my career. As an undergraduate student back in the late 80’s, there was no discussion of technology in our journalism and PR coursework. The internet was not widely available, our work was created on typewriters, and we learned to use the old-fashion reporting and content creation techniques using the phone and in-person interaction. Reporting and gathering the facts and information, in general, was guided by the truth and the ethical gathering of the truth. Gathering information for news stories was usually methodical and reputable reporters were careful to report the facts. A good example is the Watergate story. Woodward and Bernstein worked diligently to ensure to ...

Journalists & Social Media: Facts Still Matter

What are the expectations of journalists? Above all, the public expresses a desire for accuracy, i.e., for the media to verify and accurately report the facts. Accuracy is ranked as extremely or very important by 87 percent of respondents, far more than any other issue (Project, June 2018). The public has also come to expect that stories are reported in real-time. This puts journalists in a precarious situation as accuracy and speed of reporting does not align. It’s hard to fact-check content in real-time. Reporting the truth is challenging because things are moving so quickly, often content is shared on the social media platforms such as Facebook that the journalist is unsure about in terms of being factual or telling the complete story. The example I used was the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash (Wacc, February 2019). While TMZ reported the story first, many of the facts were inaccurate. This also posed an ethical challenge in terms of informing family members of death prior to pu...

Communication Tech Talk

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