The folks at @dailycamera had to sit down & ask themselves if it was ok to announce the name of this HighSchool player. They didnt know. Something in their gut didnt feel right..they decided to go w/it. It's sensational! https://twitter.com/mitchellbyars/status/1197931047381372928

It’s a very interesting case for people interested in journalism. What #Boulder’s @dailycamera did is no different from the tradition. But that they stopped to ask is what is important. THREAD

What they stopped to ask about wasn’t the story, per se. In terms of story standards, we think of questions about how a story is put together, and if it’s true, balanced, etc.

In this case, what they questioned was the tactics they should use to report this instance. There is a difference between the story and the tactics of putting a story out.

Each day, they feel it is important to report to the community - not just what is already public, but to intentionally put in front of everyone - every single arrest of every person in Boulder who is accused of a ‘significant enough’ crime, according to @mitchellbyars.

Though, many of those people will be found innocent. But despite their innocence, & even sealing of their case, every single one - bar none - will be smeared for life with an amplified report that carries massive google SEO authority they prob won’t be able to compete with.

Let that sink in. Every single person in Boulder who is arrested, including every innocent person ever or to be, will have this scar for life.

So really what the folks at the @dailycamera were doing was asking themselves if it was okay to ruin this high school kid’s life, definitively, once and forall in this very moment, forevermore. Was he old enough to ruin?

No one at the Camera can be accused of wanting that for anyone, and it was compassion that brought them to question it, considering the young man’s age in life.

Sadly, they decided to error on the side of FRONT PAGE ABOVE THE FOLD!!!!!!1

Why? Well, because this man is more popular than others so they feel he should be singled out and treated differently from the others in the community. These tactics work really well for business because it’s measurement for success is tied to virally.

What’s worse is that they try to get the affidavits of everyone and as you may know, affidavits are one side of the story, purposefully designed to sound as bad as possible.

And even though a significant percent of affidavits are comprised of hearsay and not at all true, and many people will be found innocent despite them, The Camera wants to get that one sided story (true or not) out there as soon as possible on the front page.

The business tactics are tied in here, obviously for one sided stories of a crime accusations is not ethical jounslism.

I have almost no critique for the practice of jounalism. Tried and true jounalism is here to stay. Look no further than the ethics policy of the @ColoradoSun to understand what is important and timeless that the tradition has worked out.

And I do not have any comment on the accused or his status or anything related except to say that the type of crime is awful at any age. Yet he, the victims, and the crime itself is not my focus here.

Consider a few different approaches for this report which break with tradition but might be considered better for the community, which would be better for business:

1. What if they made the difficult decision to move fwd with the report, but instead of making it the BREAKING NEWS FRONT PAGE OMG!!!SZtZoRY! they instead placed it in the same position they place other like-stories of non popular people in our community.

2. What if they decided this was more of an issue that the high school community should work out for themselves, and reported that someone from the school was arrested for such a crime but because he was a HS student, they decided it wasn’t their place to report more for now.

3. What if they went further and decided not to report ANY arrests, but only reported on the outcomes of arrests and cases that actually go to trial.

There is opportunity in jounalism business to lean into and become closer with the community as opposed to using age old tactics and then justifing them based on what was done in the past.

When we remove the measurement of virality and the need for a bottom line, we become free to explore what a better product could be like. Though counterintuitive, that’s usually what leads to the better business in the long run.