Summer Media Internship

The problem with blogs is that they’re very fast-paced, very immediate. You write and you post. There’s little room for reflection. It’s like publishing a first draft. Naturally, there are different standards for the content posted on a blog and an article set for print publication. As long as blogs remain a secondary source of information, as long as they serve a different function than news articles but don’t replace them, blogs are fine.
The issue raised by Hoyt in his column has little to do with blogs, though. The fine line between an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know is an issue that all forms of journalism raise. Because of the immediate nature of blogs and their relaxed standards, the issue is somewhat exacerbated, but it is the same issue. The individual’s right to privacy is no less sacred on a blog than in print, and should never be sacrificed in the name of a juicy blog post. Certain standards can be relaxed on a blog, but when you’re talking about a person’s life, if it’s not appropriate to print, it’s not appropriate to post.

I feel as though I don’t know everything about this particular situation, so certain things have to be assumed for this context.

As he said in the article, he was only writing a ‘snapshot’ of the man’s life.  Surely if the article were meant as a full and proper obituary, more information and a much wider scope would have been used.  This particular ‘snapshot’ just happened to go on a blog, a medium that people are still defining and getting used to, so it’s an easy target for being labeled unprofessional.

From the article, he was reporting directly on what he saw from the guys room.  Maybe he used it to make generalizations about his life, but as a smaller, more precisely focused story that’s what he was looking to do.  He offered us a glimpse into the man’s life as seen from his roommate and partial care-taker, and his room.  A reporter tells a story based on what they see.  Yes he didn’t do a lot of digging, but it wasn’t appropriate for this story.  Again, if he was writing a proper obituary, I’m sure he would have checked with everyone the man ever knew.

It still might have been prudent to check with the family, simply because it was recent after the man’s death, but in some ways I can see why he didn’t do that.  After all, if he had checked with the family, the story would not have come out the way it did.  It wasn’t slanderous as it stood, and with the family’s meddling it would have obscured or omitted some of what the reporter saw, preventing him from doing what reporters do.

There appears to be two different kinds of blogs: professional and personal.  Personal blogs are mostly, if not completely, unregulated and therefore largely untrustworthy as news.  These blogs serve countless different functions, however, that are beneficial to the writers and the readers.

The Times blogs are professional and are, or should be, kept to the same standards as their print work.  I’m confident that most major news organizations’ blogs do just that.  It’s not that journalistic ethics get relaxed for blogs, it’s just that blogs serve a different purpose than the bulk of a news organizations’ publishing.  If an article intended for a blog is meant to be short and single focused, a ‘snapshot,’ then it needs to be made clear that it doesn’t cover every angle.  But rarely, if ever, are blogs used to publish full-length and in-depth stories; that is what the paper or main website is for.

People have trouble figuring out what blogs are for.  If the family in this case expected the blog piece to be a full obituary, they were mistaken.  It was meant as a tidbit, and that’s why it was on the blog and not in the paper.

The problem is what people expect out of blogs and bloggers/journalists.  Had that been a regular person and not a Times reporter, this wouldn’t have been an issue.  The trouble is the professional journalists are held to higher reporting standards than citizen journalists, but blogs are still not widely used to report hard news.

Can a professional journalist keep a light blogging habit, or does everything they write have to be done with full length intensity?  Can you be a journalist and a blogger, because the two are very different?

It sounds like he was doing a hit on what he saw at the moment, not a recap of the man’s life.  Maybe it upset the family, but maybe they shouldn’t be so sensitive, after all the man was a well known celebrity.  If that’s what his room really looked like then the story is not inaccurate.

The article states Jones roommate/landlord Ramirez unlocked his room, not the reporter. Kilgannon didn’t pressure the landlord to break into the Jazz legend’s room. Either way, the landlord had to break into the room because he claimed he was sending Jones stuff back to his own family. Kilgannon just reported on what he saw and presented a different side to the Jazz singer.

Yea, Kilgannon should of contacted Jones family out of respect and ask if he could do a piece on the legend. He takes partial blame for limiting his sources to just the landlord. Then again, he’s a reporter, his job is to try and get as much information on the subject. He didn’t trash the legend in the article.

The editor, Jamieson, could of defended journalism better by not stating that a majority of journalism is an invasion of privacy, and that journalists tend to pry o get news. On the other hand, it’s true. Gossip blogs like TMZ and Perez Hilton gain the most traffic when they report celebrities at their worst.

Even before blogs were created, reporters were still digging for dirt and asking the questions that interviewees never want to answer. It’s because blogs are so easily accessible via web and the audience is larger that certain complaints are being brought up concerning the ethics of journalism. The only standards for blogs should involve certain topics such as graphic footage or pictures. Sometimes there is some pretty gruesome or heartbreaking stuff that people don’t want to see. And it seems to be an issue here with this legend’s family.

“The most talented students are going to continue to seek the paid positions.”
-Penny Bender Fuchs
Whilst searching for an internship last spring, I realized that a serious issue was happening around me. I have been working in the Journalism and Public Relations fields all throughout my college career, and consequently have acquired the indispensable skills needed to thrive in both domains. Now, I do not wish to come off conceited, but thanks to the wonderful supervisors and mentors I have met during the last four years, it is safe to say I am much more experienced than many graduates entering these professions. Yet this summer I am “working” (a.k.a. interning) for free. I cannot begin to express my frustration in seeing incompetent and lazy people around me, who fortunately are not part of an internship class, receiving paychecks for their lousy work, while I slave away without any compensation. This is why I completely agree with Penny Bender Fuchs’ commentary on students with talent leaning towards paid positions. I will be honest in this entry, and express my deepest sorrows in having to work all summer and receive no monetary reward. I also find it ludicrous that the CUNY system has the audacity to charge its students tuition for an internship that takes place outside the walls of the school. Though it is clear that my feelings are pro paying internships, I must also state that I have learned a tremendous amount in the short time that I have been interning at the JCH. I too believe that accepting and participating in an internship program is a vital step for college students in gaining not only experience in their respectful professions, but an important way to learn how to manage and succeed outside the safe haven that is college. Therefore, I will sign off by quoting Peter William: “No matter what you do, no matter how stupid, dumb or damaging you judge it to be, there is a lesson to be learned from it. No matter what happens to you, no matter how unfair, inequitable or wrong, there’s something you can take from the situation and use for your advancement.” I believe that says it all.
-Julia German

In a recent column, The New York Times’s public editor raised some good questions about ethical standards. Let us know what you think.

May 28, 2010
A Private Room With a Narrow View
By CLARK HOYT

WHEN the jazz legend Hank Jones died this month, Corey Kilgannon, a Times reporter who lives across the street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, telephoned the musician’s roommate and landlord, Manny Ramirez, to commiserate. Kilgannon said Ramirez told him he was getting ready to pack up Jones’s things for the family, and Kilgannon asked if he could come over. Kilgannon, a jazz fan, said he was curious about how Jones had lived and had visions of the performer — still a master at 91 — practicing on a grand piano in Ramirez’s spacious prewar co-op.

What he said he found was different. Jones had rented a 12-foot-by-12-foot bedroom from Ramirez, where he kept to himself, ordering in three meals a day from the diner downstairs, Kilgannon reported on the City Room blog. Jones, who died in a hospice after a short illness, had left the room locked. As Kilgannon related on the blog, Ramirez took a hammer and a chisel, bashed a hole in the door, reached in and unlocked it.

Inside, Kilgannon wrote, was a cluttered room, with an unmade bed, scattered CDs and sheet music, a book of Sherlock Holmes stories on the cluttered nightstand, sharp suits and designer ties in the closets, and a Yamaha electric piano with earphones lying on the keyboard. Kilgannon, who said he spent about an hour with Ramirez, reported that Jones led “an oddly bifurcated existence,” still actively performing but retreating to “near isolation” when he wasn’t on the road.

Early reader comments expressed gratitude for a small glimpse into the life of a man who accompanied Ella Fitzgerald for years and played over the decades with Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Haden. But then friends and family began weighing in, saying that Kilgannon had painted a false picture of Jones as a recluse and had invaded his privacy by entering his bedroom and taking pictures without the family’s permission.

In the end, the blog post raised some big questions about reporting standards and ethics: Did Kilgannon cross that sometimes hard-to-define line between legitimate reporting and violating privacy? Did he put too much trust in a single source? Does The Times have lesser standards for online journalism than for print journalism? Did a journalistic device — what Kilgannon’s editor called a “snapshot” of one famous life — turn out to be misleading and unfair? How much can The Times satisfy our curiosity about a great artist before it is less like The Times and more like a gossip sheet?

“What next?” asked Miles Morimoto, who maintained Jones’s Web site. “Will The Times go into Lena Horne’s closet and tell us how neat or messy she was?” Jean-Pierre Leduc, Jones’s manager, said the blog had portrayed “a sad, solitary, resigned figure, whereas Hank was strong, vital, focused, forward-thinking and constantly cracking jokes. He wanted to prove he could deliver, and deliver he did.”

Jones, as the blog post said, had recently returned from a tour of Japan. He was booked to play in other countries. George Avakian, a famed jazz producer, told me that he and Jones had talked last year at the Grammy Awards, where both won lifetime achievement honors, about doing a recording together — two men over 90 making youthful music.

Thedia Jones Smith, Jones’s niece, told me the blog post left her with “a feeling of being violated, and I know my uncle would feel the same way. He was a very private person.”

She had a key to his room, she said, but Ramirez never asked her or any family member designated to handle her uncle’s affairs for permission to enter it. Smith and Bruce Jones, her brother, who expects to be the executor of the estate, said they would not have let a reporter go in without one of them there. Ramirez said he had consulted a lawyer who told him he could clean out the room and advised him that it was not even safe to have a locked room in his apartment to which he did not have access.

Kilgannon did not check with the family. He said he knew that Ramirez — whom he had once written about — had been helping Jones for years, arranging hospitalization on several occasions, for example. “I didn’t think this was some old landlord, let’s-go-in-the-guy’s-room,” Kilgannon said. “Manny cared for him.”

Leduc and family members confirmed that Ramirez had been an important support for Jones, but Smith said her uncle had been withdrawing from him recently. Ramirez told me that, with the family living in distant cities — Detroit, Los Angeles and Portsmouth, Va. — he was the one who watched out for Jones. His friend did not stay confined to the bedroom but had the run of the large, three-bedroom apartment, Ramirez said.

Wendell Jamieson, Kilgannon’s editor, said, “We believed he had the family’s blessing.” In retrospect, he said, that should have been checked out.

Kilgannon said: “I’m a reporter, and this is what I’ve done the whole time I’ve worked at the paper: go to where the news is and find out all I can find out.” He added: “I just do what reporters do. I wasn’t ghoulish.” He said that he had tried to be respectful in what he wrote. Andy Newman, who edited the blog post and shared the byline with Kilgannon, said, “We thought we were showing him in a sympathetic light.”

Jamieson said: “A lot of journalism is invasion of privacy. What can I say? If you want to tell a story, you sometimes have to pry if you want to provide the whole 360-degree sense of a person. When you do it to someone who is beloved and well-known and perceived in a certain way, obviously people are very sensitive to that.”

Philip Corbett, the standards editor, said he thought Kilgannon did nothing wrong in entering Jones’s room but said he should have subsequently checked with the family. “If Corey had known or had reason to suspect family members would object to this, he probably wouldn’t have done it,” Corbett said. But he said reporters are not geared to not look for information.

It’s one of the awkward truths about journalism: finding out what readers want to know is often not pretty and involves rude questions and a bulldog determination to get around things like closed doors and yellow police tape. But good journalism also involves judgment about when to charge ahead and when to be restrained. Hank Jones’s room wasn’t a crime scene, and Kilgannon was not there on a breaking news story. Somewhere along the line, someone should have asked if the next of kin had been contacted for permission.

Jamieson said the blog post was intended to be a “snapshot” accompanying the full Times obituary of Jones. But even such short, narrowly focused pieces need to be fully reported enough to make sure they are accurate and fair. This one involved only a scene, a single primary source, Ramirez, and a neighbor who happened by. Family, friends and colleagues say it was misleading.

I asked Jamieson if this was an example of something much discussed in The Times’s newsroom: whether the paper has different journalistic standards for the Web. He said, “I use the same journalistic criteria” for blogs and the printed paper. Corbett agreed.

But I can’t help wondering whether a portrait of Jones in his later years would have been more deeply reported and carefully edited had it been conceived from the start as an article in the paper instead of a post on a blog. It’s an important question. The reputation of The Times rides on both forms of journalism.

It would be nice if every single intern was paid at least a stipend to cover transportation, lunch, and other work-related expenses, but in terms of real-life experience (the primary incentive of an internship), isn’t not being paid a valuable lesson in itself?

This is particularly true of newspaper and magazine writers, but the decision to pursue any career with the written word is also simultaneously a decision to suffer a degree of indigence. The fact that less and less interns are getting paid would be an outrage if the entire field of journalism wasn’t also sinking deeper and deeper into the red; the proliferation of unpaid internships is just one symptom of that decline. While the number of full-time journalists are being cut, the challenges faced by interns will remain trivial.

Journalism at large is experiencing excruciating growing pains as it tries to come to terms with evaporating advertising revenues and a public accustomed to free online content. Until the field can find a means of dealing these two issues, there’s little hope that the plight of interns will get any better.

First, I agree with Angel re: the whole reimbursement for tuition issue. You are basically paying to work for free.  Second, I actually work as an internship coordinator, so I see a lot of these conflicts when it comes to compensating interns. A lot of times, companies are looking to cut costs so they think that they can take on an intern and basically get away with free labor. At my job, we have regulations about this (20+ hrs, interns MUST be paid).   Interns shouldn’t be breaking their backs and doing irrelevant tasks just because the company is trying to be slick and save money. However, an internship is just that; it’s not a job.  If one desperately needs money, then they should look for a job.  I know it’s hard and I know companies are looking to hire people who already have experience, but it is what it is.  An internship is a learning experience; if a company wants to pay their intern, that’s a great bonus. But I think the primary purpose of an internship is hands-on experience in the field.

Theoretically speaking, yes, if you work, you deserve to be paid. But to many people, myself included, who hear the word internship, the first thing that comes to mind is “free labor”. If someone offers me an internship and a stipend/salary, that’s great, but it’s not something I’d expect. You can call it unfair, but, in today’s job market at least, be happy you’re employed. Consider it the price of education.
At the same time, what I do truly think is unfair is when companies use their interns for menial labor that does not give them any job training or useful skills. That is akin to slave labor, in my opinion.

My name is Satomi Yajima.  It is very late posting for introduction, but I am doing internship at the company, called Aloha Rag.  It owns an online-based fashion website, which sells clothing and accessaries to customers living over 50 different countries.  This is not like a publishing or a broadcasting company.  One of my duties is to write an article about each item and a designer that they deal with in order to let customers well understand about them.  Now, they are about to begin their own brand, and I will also help them to write press release.  Writing a bunch of comments for a brand-new website, which will be opened around the end of July.

I agree with the points already posted previous to my post.

I am in an unpaid internship, and while I love almost everything about it, I feel that I should be getting compensated at the very least, by getting the $885 of tuition for the class covered. This is especially true since this is a required course. The internship that I am in, and many of us are in, is a great experience but it is frustrating to have to essentially pay to work.

Unpaid internships are fine if there is a little bit of hours required and/or it is a part time thing, so a student has an opportunity to get a paid job on the side. But if a student is required to put in a lot of work and a lot of hours, or a student is required to take an internship for a class, there should definitely be compensation. I’m going to be interning until August, and work  a lot of hours. Yes, there is a lot of downtime and I am not doing anything that is critical, but every intern is doing something that helps make work easier for many of the staff that is already there full time and getting paid. We should get paid as well.

While I’m sure there will be memorable experiences, I still like and need money as well but I’m not going to be getting any, unfortunately. I don’t have a lot of it in the first place, so getting some money from working is important.