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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 11/15/2007 4:04:21 PM
Title: Jezebel stirs up a hornet's nest
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From DAVID CROOK: This is complicated, but stay with me for a few sentences. There's a journalism issue here. And one that journalists all over should hear about and discuss.

Jezebel, the New York-based Web site for women (and part of Nick Denton's empire that includes Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo etc.) has stirred up a reader hornets' nest with a couple of stories about the incredibly sad tale of 13-year-old Megan Meier in St. Charles, Mo. Readers are up in arms about the local coverage of her suicide and the events that led up to it.

According to a generally outstanding story by Steve Pokin in last Sunday's St. Charles Journal, two local adults, parents of a former friend of Megan, posed on MySpace as a teenage boy who first befriended Megan and then turned on her. She was so shamed by the adults' false postings--which she thought were made by the boy--that she killed herself. Despite telling the story at great length and in great detail, the local paper declined to identify the offenders "out of consideration for their teenage daughter." The paper is affiliated with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and is owned by Lee Enterprises.

Now, readers and bloggers in St. Charles, St. Louis and elsewhere have taken on themselves the job of finishing the story that the paper started and identifying all the parties in the story. The papers are still keeping the names off their Web site, but the reader furor is deafening.

Here's one typical comment from the local site: "You should be ashamed of yourself for not naming the culprits. Nothing in journalistic ethics suggests you keep them anonymous. Therefore, you are a coward journalist if you protect these cowards. And the girl who you are trying to protect was complicit in this crime. Why protect killers?"

Another: "You say that the Journal did not name the woman because the newspaper did not want to identify her daughter. I have never heard of a newspaper not naming any other criminal, suspect, or figure in a potential civil suit out of consideration for the feelings of their children. "

And here's one from a Jezebel reader: "Every day newspaper journalism as we know it gets one step closer to death, as readers turn to blogs and TV and other media for information. This wimp of an editor, who doesn't have the guts to name the wrongdoers involved, has just hastened our eventual demise by at least another week or two. If a newspaper won't print the whole story, what's the point of reading at all?"

So what do Romenesko readers think about all this? [Permalink]

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