By ADAM TEMPLETON
J Alumni News staff
Steve Buttry
When an earthquake rocked Jakarta, Indonesia, journalists around the world clamored to cover the disaster, putting a premium on firsthand accounts.
Journalist Steve Buttry found dozens of stories, live from the scene, and he didn’t have to leave the country or pick up the phone to find them. He didn’t even need to get up from his computer chair. Twitter provided all the necessary information, recording the chaos in a series of cogent, one- or two-sentence bursts.
Buttry, C3 innovation coach at Gazette Communications, shared his experience on merging traditional journalism and social media networks with more than 150 students, faculty and professionals at a UNL workshop in November. The Ethics and Technology Journalism 2.0 workshop was co-sponsored by CoJMC, the Nebraska Press Association Foundation, the American Press Institute and the Ethics and Excellence Journalism Foundation.
The daylong workshop included segments on social media, blogging, breaking news and visual journalism ethics in the Internet age.
“I get accurate information from Twitter (a social networking and blogging service) on almost every story,” Buttry said. “Are you going to make mistakes involving using Twitter? Yes, but we made a mistake yesterday using a press conference with a general,” he added, referring to the initially inaccurate reports that the gunman in the Nov. 5 Fort Hood shooting had been killed during the rampage.
“It’s a matter of the value of the information outweighing the potential for inaccuracy — you want to get it accurate, whatever tools you’re using.”
Buttry talked about the quality of sources obtained from social networks, credibility on blogs, speed versus accuracy in breaking news and the ethics of photo manipulation. In each session, he broke participants into small groups to work through relevant real-world scenarios.
Of the four topics, Buttry expressed the most fondness for social networking. Given the ubiquity of social media, he said, it has become an ever-present issue in today’s newsrooms. If editors and reporters know where to look, they can find everything from eyewitness descriptions of school shootings to up-to-the-minute reports of ongoing trials.
“Social media are a tremendous new issue in the business,” Buttry said. “Newsroom leaders have been covering breaking news forever. At its heart, social networking calls on that experience but puts it in a new context. (Those leaders) are much less comfortable and less experienced and less knowledgeable in that area than with traditional breaking news.”
Katie Stearns, a senior news-editorial major at UNL, attended the seminar as an extra credit assignment for class. She echoed Buttry’s embrace of social media.
“Obviously it’s going to be a part of journalism,” she said. “It’s just a matter of how we’re going to handle that as reporters.”
Buttry also talked about the importance of attributing facts to credible sources, especially as the Internet swells with rumors, shoddy reporting and outright lies. Authority figures aren’t always correct, and reporting a falsehood as a fact instead of an unverified piece of information severely undermines credibility.
“If I’m getting it from the mayor, if I’m getting it from police, then I need to attribute it to them because sometimes they’re wrong,” Buttry said. “It adds authority.”
Alexis See Tho, a sophomore news-editorial major, agreed with Buttry on attribution especially after last fall’s balloon boy hoax.
“I kept up with it, and then (major news sources) said it was a hoax,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘What were their sources?’ With places like CNN, we think that we can rely on them, but it turns out, yeah, sometimes we can’t. I don’t think quoting another news source is reliable at all — they’ll try and run it as soon as possible.”
But if a new fact comes to light and passes standard newsroom scrutiny, then there’s no better way to disseminate it than Internet, Buttry said. Online stories can be updated piecemeal with bits being added, removed and corrected as the facts present themselves.
“If you only know one fact at that time, that fact is important to that audience, so, yes, get it out there if you’re sure of it,” he said “Breaking stories can unfold one or two sentences at a time.”
Overall, most students said they enjoyed the workshop, taking away at least a few valuable lessons. For Jaclyn Tan, a senior broadcasting and news-editorial major, the seminar was a chance to get a leg up on the competition before she ventured out into the real world after graduating in December.
“I thought the exercises we did were great. We used real-life situations, and you can’t really apply all these principles unless you’ve been in those situations and know the facts and factors that come into play,” Tan said. “Instead of just learning about the principles, it’s good to know how to actually apply them in the newsroom.”
Although older generations tend to look upon Facebook and its ilk as guilty parties in a pantheon of high-tech time-wasters, Buttry believes social media to be an invaluable tool in a journalist’s never-ending pursuit of the truth.
“We want to use social networking in a variety of ways,” he said. “We want to use it to report. We want to use it to gather information. We want to use it to connect to sources.”
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