All We Are and We Hope to be We Owe (This Week) to Tiffany Maleshefski

Which is to say that distinguished USF graduate Tiffany Maleshefski supplied the dilemmas below, all based on her own experience. She will be monitoring the comments and will make a final comment.

In the future, I will be asking other friends of USF journalism to moderate this blog for a week.

Volunteering is allowed, of course; actually volunteering is encouraged.

Your Starting Salary Will Probably Be Less Than $30,000 a Year

Here are some dilemmas:

• You are a theater critic for a big-city newspaper. You have built relationships with publicists, especially those at the smaller theaters where the companies are struggling to make ends meet but are really trying to give young directors, young playwrights, young actors a chance. One of these companies presents a play that is really terrible; it deserves to be ripped apart. But a city needs small independent theaters. Also, the publicist has made sure you were at the front of the line for various premiers and galas related to this, and other, theaters. She has put you in the best seat in the house for the past five shows by this particular company, and you have panned four of them. And here’s another stinker. What do you do?
• You are a lifestyle writer at a big-city newspaper who has been assigned to do a story on day spas in San Francisco. Your budget for the story is limited – and then seven out of the 10 days spas you are writing about offer you a free day of treatments. If you don’t take the treatments, you are going to have to write a story that’s based on the spa websites, on the spa press releases and on the spa PR people. What do you do?
• You are a lifestyle writer etc. etc. doing a story on chocolate shops. When you visit the chocolates shops, each one offers you samples. What do you do?
• You are etc. doing nightlife stories. You tour four or five hip new bars and attractive bartenders in tight-fitting garments offer you free cocktails. Seriously, three of the bars give you first-class treatment, generous with the Grey Goose martinis, while the other two offered you only a glass of ice. What do you do?
• You are a writer/editor at a music magazine that has a limited travel budget. The magazine is repeatedly offered free junkets to see a new violin shop open in Italy or to follow a famous performer on tour. As part of an invitation to review a summer jazz camp, you are offered a luxury cruise to Alaska. What do you do?
• You are a writer for a music magazine etc., and you are offered free tickets to many local musical performances, far more than you could possibly review. What do you do?

Put Your Head under the Blanket. Turn on Your Flashlight. Discuss.

From the Financial Times:

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, said he believed “freedom of the press should always be exercised in a way that fully respects the religious beliefs and tenets of all religions”.

The dispute began on September 30, when Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s biggest newspaper, published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, a move considered blasphemous in Islam. One of the cartoons showed the Prophet with a bomb under his turban. The Danish newspaper later apologised but the row escalated this week after several European newspapers reprinted the cartoons to assert the right to free speech.



Here's a link to the cartoons.

An Ethics Problem? A Shopping Tip? Or Something Else....?

This shopping tip from wonderful "Regret the Error."

Ethics students: You don't have to comment on this. But you might want to.

The Case of the Purloined Parking Permits

About ten years ago a student in my advanced reporting class was faced with this situation: Since parking is tight on our campus, daily parking passes are at a premium. At the time, our office of Public Safety apparently had a box of passes -- signed by a public safety officer but otherwise blank and therefore "negotiable" -- to which student employees had access. My student observed a classmate, who was also a casual acquaintance, selling and sometimes giving away these blank passes to which he, a student employee in Public Safety, had helped himself. The student reporter wanted to turn this into a story for the Foghorn but was not sure how to proceed because even though this activity was taking place in front of him in another class -- there was nothing clandestine about it -- the student selling, and sometimes giving away, the passes knew and trusted my student and apparently did not think of him as a student journalist. To test the waters, my student bought one of the passes for a dollar.

The questions at the time were: Should he go forward with the story? If so, how? If not, why not?

Yeah, Well I Don't Trust Pollsters

This from a 2005 Gallup poll. The numbers indicate the percentage of those polled who give these groups a high or very high rating when it comes to ethics.

Nurses 82
Druggists/Pharmacists 67
Medical doctors 65
High school teachers 64
Policemen 61
Clergy 54
Funeral directors 44
Bankers 41
Accountants 39
Journalists 28
Real estate agents 20
Building contractors 20
Lawyers 18
Labor union leaders 16
Senators 16
Business executives 16
Stockbrokers 16
Congressmen 14
Advertising practitioners 11
Car salesmen 8
Telemarketers 7
________________________________________

Vrinda Writes, Writes, Writes Some More

She recreates a scene to establish a human connection. But she also works in the short form, here and here.

"This business attracts assholes like flies flock to poop."

http://blacktable.com/daulerio051208.htm

When What Happens in Vegas, Doesn't Stay in Vegas

Posted by Steve Outing 11:16:40 AM

Is That E-mail Blogable?In the last e-mail I received from fellow E-Media Tidbits blogger Fons Tuinstra (who lives in China), I noticed an interesting addition to his signature. It read:

This e-mail is: [ ] blogable [ ] ask first [ ] private

That's great idea. Each time you send an e-mail, of course, you need to put an "x" in one of the boxes.Why is this necessary? Well, in a world where everyone, it seems, has a blog, it's worthwhile to make it clear when something you've sent in an e-mail is meant to be private. It just might save some embarrassment and hard feelings if a recipient of your e-mails decides to blog what you hadn't intended to be shared with the world.

Lia Steakley Causing Trouble

I like the way Lia describes this story. She says:


today I'm either a hero or the devil depending on who you ask.
lia

And I say that for a journalist that's a very good day.