The advent of the digital age has come with challenges for all of us, particularly journalists. Since the News&Guide began posting articles online in 2000, and especially after we began posting all of our work on the web in 2012, small articles chronicling minor crimes were launched into prime time and preserved on the internet for posterity.
A person’s most embarrassing episode may have landed on the web whether or not formal charges were ever filed and regardless of a case’s final outcome. Employers began routinely Googling prospective hires.
Impassioned phone calls and emails began to trickle in from people who said that an article we had posted online was harming them.
This phenomenon has been happening worldwide. People across the globe are arguing that their right to obscurity outweighs the public’s right to know, especially many years after a transgression. In Europe, the 2014 “Right to be forgotten” law gave people more control over their online reputation by making Google responsible for deindexing content at people’s request. In America, that would conflict with the First Amendment.
Five years ago, the News&Guide began convening a committee to review these sorts of requests. People told us how they had done everything within their power to improve their lives, but information that we published digitally was holding them back.
Our criminal justice system provides for due process before someone is convicted and punished. Just a few short decades ago, once someone served a sentence or was cleared of charges, life could begin to return to normal. But the internet changed all that. By chronicling everyone’s offenses, accusations and comments, the internet gave the public the opportunity to serve as judge and jury for anyone accused of anything.
Although we control only one tiny corner of the internet, we want to ensure that we are doing the best we can to hold people accountable for crimes, but also to hold ourselves accountable for the power we have over their ability to move forward with their lives.
Three members of our newsroom invested 10 months with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies to audit and reimagine our crime coverage, focusing instead on public safety. The result is a public safety reporting policy that can be found on the “About Us” page linked at the bottom of our website.
We are working to improve our lens on justice and focus on trends rather than individual small offenses. What matters more, one person’s petty charge of marijuana possession or the trend of young people with undeveloped brains accessing THC via vaping?
We’ve also reconsidered our use of police mugshots and now use them sparingly.
Teton County Sheriff Matt Carr drew an ethical line in the sand five years ago when he took the popular inmate list and mugshot catalog offline. Thanks to his leadership, people can’t use a mugshot gallery for entertainment, and bots can’t scrape those images and blackmail people to remove them from the web.
Is it really necessary to see a photograph of someone in what could be their worst moment, disheveled and ashamed? In some cases, such as a murder charge or someone accused of crimes against children, those pictures serve public safety. In others, they’re fodder for gossip.
Just because we can publish something doesn’t always mean that we should. In the newsroom, we wrestle with dozens of ethical questions daily.
The News&Guide (and its predecessors) is owned and operated by valley residents who care about our neighbors. We have to update our methods in light of the realities of digital publishing in the 21st century. More than ever, we have to balance two core journalistic principles from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics: “Seek the truth and report it” and “Minimize harm.”
We believe that people deserve second chances.
We’re committed to remaining transparent with our readers as we navigate these small decisions that have outsized impacts on individuals who deserve the chance to move forward in their lives.
As part of our Clean Slate Initiative, our Content Review Council will review requests during quarterly meetings and consider a range of potential solutions. The group is composed of people who own, edit, photograph and report for the News&Guide. At the discretion of our council, we may update existing articles with new information, remove a name or photograph from an article, deindex an article from search engines or decline the request.
As has been our longstanding practice, if we correct or change a material fact within an article, we will include an editor’s note explaining what was changed and maintain internal records of the change.
We will balance the past and present news value of each article or photograph against the request. Factors we weigh include whether a crime was violent; how much time has passed; whether the person is or was a public figure or in a position of authority or power; how the courts have adjudicated an incident; whether the person has served their time or otherwise made amends; and whether and why the person in question was singled out from others who may have committed a similar transgression.
We only will consider modification of articles within our digital control that live on our website at JHNewsAndGuide.com, not the PDF’ed historical print archives from Jackson newspapers published from 1911 to 2012 that can be accessed via Newspapers.com. Original articles still can be found in our print archive.
This relatively new process aligns with the core values of our parent company, Teton Media Works: truth, trust, excellence, reliability and community.
As our profession and our community adjust to the digital age, we remain committed to reflecting and examining the life we share in this incredible place.
