Last week in Sioux City, Iowa, 4-month-old Tryniti Hill died from what medical officials say was likely child abuse. Police arrested her father Paul Hill, 19. Friends consoled her mother, Kayla Hegge, 20. And MySpace became the place that many in the family’s community went to glean information, find comfort and assign blame.
News media in Sioux City struggled with how to respond to the mother’s and father’s active MySpace pages. Last week, Hegge’s status update indicated that Hill had “confessed.” She went on to say that she lost both her baby and her partner that day. On her wall, her friends offered the mother consolation and the father condemnation. “You guys are such good parents,” said one friend.
Hegge added music on her page to match her grief, including Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” Martina McBride’s “In My Daughter’s Eyes” and Mariah Carey’s “One Sweet Day.” She changed her MySpace name to “We will be together again Tryniti One day.” On Monday, she updated her status: “Try to get some sleep. Going to cemetary tm and get autopsy report.”
Last week, Hegge still included Hill, whose MySpace moniker is “Proud Parent!!” among her top eight friends. Over the weekend, he was replaced by Tom, the MySpace guy.
On Hill’s MySpace page, the wall has been active as well. It started with a comment from a friend named bLuE_EyEd_MaMa_Of_a_BeAuTiFuL_bAbY_gIrL, who wrote, “I can’t believe you, man… I just can’t believe you… You’re not the person I thought you were.”
That sparked a wave of defense that continued this week. As details of the baby’s injuries were released in court documents, friends wondered how old rib fractures were not detected on a recent chest X-ray. They posted the story from the Sioux City Journal. Some begged the others not to rush to judgment.
I got a call last week from Dennis Kendall, director of broadcast news for Quincy Newspapers Inc., which owns KTIV-TV, the NBC affiliate in town. He had two questions: Should we link to their MySpace pages? Should we quote the status update that mentions the confession?
After we talked, he had a better list of questions, including:
- How do we know these are really the parents’ MySpace pages? (I suggested contacting friends on the page and asking for interviews.)
- What’s our policy when someone makes an accusatory statement about an ongoing criminal investigation? (In most cases we would edit out the comment, find a more reliable source or immediately follow up by pointing out that the case is still under investigation.)
- If incorrect information is published on MySpace, what is our responsibility if we quote from the page or link to the page? (We are responsible for information we publish if it turns out to be false. When we link to information, we should give our audience a way of evaluating it.)
- What’s the journalistic purpose of using the MySpace pages as a resource?
But that doesn’t mean that all the information on the parents’ MySpace pages is useless. In fact, it is a fascinating window into a group of young adults, many of whom are shown holding infants and appear to be parents themselves. As friends of the family and members of their community, they have a stake in the capacity of the Sioux City Police to investigate and prosecute Tryniti’s death. Their questions and comments are valid and valuable, when placed in proper context.
In fact, Tryniti’s mother’s and father’s MySpace pages are their own form of storytelling. They represent a side of this child’s death that is missing from the stories that professional newsrooms produced. The information contained on those pages expands our understanding of the story. It adds a dimension that cannot easily be contained in our traditional story forms.
That’s why it’s valuable for a newsroom to provide the links. That’s why we’re linking to them here. If you view the stories produced by the local newspaper, or the local television station, you get the story from a distance. When you read the MySpace pages, you get inside the story. Neither version is a completely adequate reflection of the truth. But together, they come closer than either version can on its own.
Finding context, that’s the ultimate challenge. Information extracted from MySpace is by its very nature taken out of context and set in front of an audience that may not have the slightest experience with social networks. Journalists must work, when they re-appropriate that information, to recapture that context. Often that means journalists must add more information gained by contacting the original poster, asking the police for more information or combing through court records.
As a journalistic tool, MySpace does not work when it becomes a cheap shortcut or a voyeuristic window. But when we add it to the full kit of reporting tools we possess, it becomes a new resource for contacting sources, taking our audience to a place they can’t or won’t go and telling a more nuanced truth.
