Communication Tech Talk

As a PR professional who regularly creates content for clients and for personal use, I follow the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) Code of Ethics offers nine ethical standards to member journalists. I also require my team to follow the NPPA Code of Ethics and teach them in the classroom. The basic premises of the NPPA's nine standards are (NPPA, November 2017):  1. Accurately represent subjects  2. Do not be manipulated by staged photos  3. Avoid bias and stereotyping in work; provide complete information and context  4. Show consideration for subjects  5. Avoid influencing the actions of the photographic subject 6. Editing should not give the wrong impression of the subjects in the photograph  7. Do not compensate persons involved in photographs or in getting a photograph  8. Do not accept gifts or other favors from those involved in a photo  9. Do not purposely interfere with the work of other journalists  The last two (8...

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...

Facebook has evolved and significantly changed the way news organizations communicate. For all intensive purposes, social media (starting with Facebook) in general has turned the media industry upside down. For example, back in 2004, users could only interact with textual posts. Users can now submit photographs, movies, live material, virtual reality, and 360-degree videos, among other things (Pires Luciano, October 2019).  Phones and cameras allow everyone to be a reporter and social media platforms give everyone a venue to share. For the last 15 years, news organizations have been forced to embrace the use of online news platforms. More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults (86%) say they get news from a smartphone, computer, or tablet “often” or “sometimes,” including 60% who say they do so often (Shearer, January 2021). Traditional news organizations have had no choice but to adopt and embrace social media, with the push first coming from Facebook back in the early 2000s primarily bec...