Welcome to the The Weekly Illumination, a JTM newsletter offering a quick look at the week in journalism with a focus on what’s working in today’s news ecology. The Illumination is a curated collection of stories about journalism innovation, notable job opportunities, grants and updates about Journalism that Matters.

The newsletter is distributed to e-mail subscribers, through the JTM Google Group, and posted to the Illuminations blog. In this week’s Illumination we’ll explore the future of journalism education, federal shield laws and the continuing evolution of social media.

On disclosure

In this week’s blog entry, we looked at when a reporter is obligated to disclose his or her relationship to the subject of the article. In the Aug. 30 edition of the New York Times the profile of a white nationalist is written by a black staffer. The writer, John Eligon, shared his thoughts on the experience over Facebook, reports Jim Romenesko. Should the Times have disclosed Eligon’s race in the story?

Re-Imagining Journalism, two years later

Tom Grubisich interviewed JTM Board Member Mike Fancher for The New News, a column in Steet Fight Magazine. Fancher published the white paper Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World in 2011. Two years later, Grubisich caught up with Fancher to ask how things have changed.

Woodward and Bernstein go to J-School

Carl Bernstein is headed to Stony Brook University in the Fall, and Bob Woodward will be at Yale this Spring, reports Jim Romenesko.

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Columbia University is launching a program to breed unicorns at its Tow Center for Digital Journalism, reports the Nieman Lab. Nieman’s Adrienne LaFrance has coined the term to describe another mythical creature: a journalist who can code. Although the program sounds exciting, will journalism be able to hold onto these newly trained programmers or will they head to other industries where they can bring home enough money to live comfortably while paying of their student loans?

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PBS Media Shift continues to report on the state of journalism education as part of its Back to J-School series. This week two journalism professors wrote about how journalism schools must adapt to our digital environment. Cindy Royal, a digital media professor at Texas State University and a member of the 2013-2014 Knight Journalism Fellowship class at Stanford, writes about how schools must adopt a digital-first curriculum. And Gary Kebbel, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, suggests that j-schools embrace a nimble approach focused on the latest developments and new experimentation.

Dianne, look what you did

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s move to only protect some journalists under a proposed federal shield law, which I reported about in a recent blog post, has generated quite a reaction. The Society of Professional Journalists is now considering changing its name to the Society for Professional Journalism, a move that’s partly in response to Feinstein’s actions, reports Jim Romenesko. Numerous reporters, publications and press organizations have spoken out against the California senator’s proposal, including a compelling argument by Dell Cameron in Vice.

News organizations join citizens to open access

The Honolulu Civil Beat, an investigative news site co-founded by E-bay founder Pierre Omidyar, has launched the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest to help groups and individuals access government records, reports Nieman Lab. The program is somewhat similar to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s initiative to create FOIA Machine, an automated tool that will assist people making public records requests. FOIA Machine is currently under development after a successful Kickstarter campaign raised more than $50,000, well beyond its $17,500 goal.

The Medium is the message

What is Medium? Hamish McKenzie suggests in Pandodaily that Medium, a new Web site from Ev Williams who helped create both Blogger and Twitter, has an identity crisis. Medium, and Buzzfeed, are trying to straddle the line between being a publication and an open-platform like Twitter. It’s time for these companies to make up their mind, says McKenzie.

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Meanwhile Twitter is becoming more conversational. A move that Om Malik says will translate into dollars and put the tech company one step closer to an IPO.

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The news that the Huffington Post would no longer allow anonymous comments generated headlines when it was announced last week. Details about the plan have since revealed that existing users will be grandfathered in and that an astonishing 75% of comments on the site are removed because they are spam or violate the company’s requirement for civil discourse.

Postmortem analysis

ESPN pulled out of its partnership with Frontline to produce a documentary on the numerous brain injuries that have resulted from football players careers in the NFL last week. Poynter’s Kelly Mcbride has now examined the articles leading up to the break-up to analyze why the collaboration fell apart. League of Denial, the PBS documentary, is scheduled to premiere Oct. 8.

Job(s) of the Week

The Commercial Appeal is looking for an investigative reporter. “If you can drop into City Hall for a records-driven weekender on spending abuses while juggling an ambitious, long-term investigative project, we should talk,” says the job listing.

Each week, The Illumination will include links to jobs, grants and fellowship opportunities. If you are hiring or know someone who is, send me an e-mail and I’ll gladly list it here. If you’re looking for a job, let me know what kind of work you are looking for and I’ll try to post anything I come across that could be a good fit.

Hangout Sept. 12 to Discuss Future of JTM

For over a decade JTM has hosted unconferences around the country.  We are now looking toward how we can grow as an organization.

Should we continue to focus on hosting physical gatherings? Should we move into online gatherings? Or should we take our energy and nonprofit status and launch a whole new initiative?

Please join us, Thursday Sept. 12 at 1PM Pacific Time (4PM Eastern) for a Hangout discussion on the future of JTM.

It’s been almost 15 years since Oh Yeon Ho, the founder of Korea’s OhMyNews declared, “Every citizen is a reporter.” But every reporter is also a citizen as well. 

While citizen journalists are allowed to freely to engage with the world around them, professional journalists are often barred by their employer from participating in certain civic activities in order to prevent the appearance of bias. But even the New York Times 50 pages of ethical guidelines can’t address every ethical quandary.

Many people see transparency as the antidote to an unyielding battle to exterminate bias — both real and perceived — from reporting, but when should a reporter disclose his or her personal interest? And when can transparency get in the way of telling the story.

James Tully is a reporter and sports anchor for a CBS affiliate in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Last month Tully filed a report about e-cigarettes, an alternative way for people to ingest nicotine without exposing themselves to the carcinogens associated with burning tobacco. Also known as personal vaporizers, the devices use electricity to heat up a coil that vaporizes a liquid that is essentially the same thing used in fog machines, only smaller and laced with flavoring and nicotine.

Tully first reported on e-cigarettes in 2011 while working at a Fox affiliate in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At the time, Tully had a girlfriend who was an opera singer and didn’t like his tobacco habit.

“Girlfriends don’t like cigarettes,” Tully told me in a phone interview. “You understand how stressful things can be with deadlines. … Outside of the restaurant industry, I don’t know any other industry where people smoke this much.”

After his story aired on TV, Tully received an e-mail from someone in the e-cigarette business who offered to show him a bit more about the burgeoning industry. The man offered Tully a deal on the accouterments he’d need to get started and the reporter decided to give it a try.

“That was enough of an incentive,” said Tully. “Two-and-a-half — three — years later, I’m still using them because they are effective.”

With e-cigarettes now surging in popularity and governments at all levels exploring how the products should be regulated, Tully decided to pitch a story for his current station in Pennsylvania.

In his previous story at his old station — when Tully first discovered e-cigarettes — he didn’t disclose that he was a smoker, and he decided not to disclose that he uses e-cigs in his new story after discussing the issue with his producers.

“How important is it that I’m an e-cigarette user in this particular situation?” said Tully. “At which point do I need to make it about myself, if my research is accurate and I’m presenting both sides of the story. … There really wasn’t a situation where I felt that would’ve fit anyway.”

Tully has a point. Would his audience trust his reporting if he told them that he used to smoke cigarettes but now relies on vapor to get his nicotine fix, or would viewers second-guess his experts and suspect that Tully cherry-picked quotes to support his angle?

The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists is a service provided by The Chicago Headline Club, an SPJ regional chapter, that’s available to any working journalist . I decided to ask the advice line if — in their professional opinion — Tully should have been more transparent in his reporting.

“That’s a huge conflict of interest,” said Lee Anne Peck, a professor who teaches journalism ethics at the University of Northern Colorado. Peck is one of four people who respond to the requests. The group is now building a Web site to publish advice culled from the hundreds of calls it has received since launching in 2001. “At first I thought, he should definitely disclose that very basic fact, but then I thought it’s almost like a free advertisement. … So what i came up with is that he should not have reported the story at all.”

Peck said that she didn’t think a smoker would need to disclose their cigarette usage while reporting on e-cigarettes, but someone who is actually using the product should hand the story off to a colleague.

“Which reporter would you rather have doing the story? Me or the person who was just handed the story from the assignment desk at 9 o’clock in the morning,” said Tully. “With this situation, me being an e-cigarette user helped me to understand it, helped me to have my facts straight.”

Peck disagreed.

“If he knows all this, why couldn’t he share that information with another reporter?” she said. “He should not have done the story, he’s too close it.”

In an almost inverse scenario, Michael Siegel a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health and a well-known e-cigarette advocate, has accused a fellow professor of failing to disclose his financial ties to “Big Pharma” in a New York Times op/ed,  which Siegel says is a conflict of interest.  Both professors contributed essays for a “Room for Debate” editorial feature on whether “electronic cigarettes [are] really helping smokers quit or prolonging nicotine addiction.”

Siegel said that Andrew A. Strasser, an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and Harold P. Wimmer, the national president and CEO of the American Lung Association denied readers the full story:

It turns out that the author of the commentary has received funding from a company which manufactures a competitive product to electronic cigarettes. Specifically, he has received research funding from Pfizer, the manufacturer of Chantix, a smoking cessation drug that stands to lose substantial sales if electronic cigarettes become increasingly popular. Therefore, this is a significant financial conflict of interest and I think it ought to have been disclosed in the article.

This is not the only commentary which failed to disclose a significant financial conflict of interest. The American Lung Association offered a commentary which urged smokers not to use electronic cigarettes to quit smoking. This is a devastating recommendation that, if followed, will result in increased smoking, disease, and death as thousands of smokers who would otherwise have quit smoking using e-cigarettes will instead continue smoking.

But the larger problem with the commentary is that it fails to disclose a significant financial conflict of interest: the American Lung Association has received millions of dollars of support from Big Pharma; specifically, from Pfizer.

It’s hard to say if the money from Pfizer changed either man’s perspective on e-cigarettes, or even if the disclosure of this information would have swayed readers opinions. But the accusation itself can be a powerful tool, whether or not someone has actually been unduly influenced.

In 2010, news broke that the son of New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner had joined the Israeli army. Although the decisions of Bronner’s adult son are separate from those of his father, readers sent hundreds of emails to Public Editor Clark Hoyt calling on Bronner to leave his post.

“Ethan has proved himself to be the most scrupulous of reporters,” said former Executive Editor Bill Keller at the time. “[We] see no reason to change his status as bureau chief.”

Hoyt agreed with Keller that Bronner’s reporting was superb, but concluded that the bureau chief should take a new position while his son is serving with the Israeli army. Ironically, Bronner took a stateside job with the Times sometime after his son left the army and moved to the US to attend college.

If every article Bronner wrote from the Middle East included a disclaimer that his son was serving in the Israeli army, then the validity of every article would have been called into question. While it’s certain that his son’s status shaped his reporting in some way, it’s unfair to assume that its impact would be more profound than that of any bias his replacement may happen to possess.

Transparency is important, but so is clarity, and news stories should generally not focus on the person telling the story. When Patch first launched, editors of each site uploaded lengthy bios that included their political and religious beliefs as well as their opinions about local hot-button issues. The company has since abandoned this approach.

Do you know of any publications that have an innovative or effective approach to transparency and disclosure? 

Should Tully have found someone else to report the e-cigarette story?

Does the New York Times have a responsibility to point out the conflict-of-interest alleged by Siegel?

What are some ethical dilemmas you’ve experienced and how did you resolve them?

By looking at what’s working today, we can get a glimpse of what the future of journalism will look like and play a role in shaping that future.

This column has reported on the successes of both for-profit and non-profit journalism organizations, advances in media technology and new legislation to protect the reporter’s privilege.

But I want to know what’s working for you and to share it here so that we can collaboratively sketch out what’s effective and assess why some approaches succeed while others falter.

What new tool or process adopted at your work environment over the past year could you not imagine living without?

What most excites you about how sources of news are changing?

“We’re trying to create more and better journalism,” said Mike Fancher, a JTM Board member and retired editor of The Seattle Times.  “What would make people want to participate? Who knows something that I don’t know? And what do I know that they would want to know?”What most excites you about how sources of news are changing?

On behalf of Journalism that Matters, I invite you to join in a conversation about these questions. You can either leave a comment or you can post your response as a blog entry on Journalism that Matters.