Summer Media Internship

This article really expressed what can go wrong in the using of blogs for news articles.  I feel that Kilgannon was seeking for a new angle to the jazz musician’s, Hank Jones, life which I believe was a great lead to an interesting story.  It is not easy to get a hold of someone who is willing to open the apartment of a music legend who has just past because where one lives tells a lot about their life behind the scenes.  I am not saying that Kilgannon was right in just getting in touch with just the landlord of Jones’ apartment; but as a Times reporter he should have known to get in touch with the family of the deceased before invading the apartment of a man who was very private and kept to himself; it would have shown more respect to the family.  I am sure that the family would have let Kilgannon in with an accompaniment of a family member and him giving more information on what angle he was looking to take the blog story at.

I feel that this blog was taken more to heart because it was written by a New York Times reporter, a well-known paper that has a great name set out there for them.  I wonder if this blog posted by Kilgannon would have been just a gossip column or written by someone from a smaller newspaper or magazine if the family would have felt the same way about it?  Does the standard of the paper leave readers expecting higher standards for all that the papers name contributes to?

It can be very difficult in figuring out what “lines” are being crossed when reporting on certain stories for a blog or even for a printed article, especially ones on celebrities and heartbreaking news.  In this case more background research on getting in touch with the deceased musician’s family should have been done but overall the blog did not seem like it was detrimental to the music legends life.  These “lines” are difficult to claim but news is news and sometimes getting to the truth can mean digging a little deeper than what most people are used to doing.