It was a Gannett-owned newspaper that received near-universal condemnation in December 2012 when it built an online map that made it easy to find the addresses of people who had gun permits. The complaints came from all sides — gun owners and others worried about privacy, lawmakers who closed loopholes in New York and elsewhere, to people who simply saw it as bad journalism.
So it’s good to see that another Gannett-owned newspaper has moved away from the “let’s-do-it-because-we-can” approach to content. The Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader dropped its online mug shot collection because, as newsroom leader Paul Berry said, the galleries had little news value and were “little more than a place for people to gawk at those who have been arrested.”
In terms from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which he didn’t mention, it’s about not “pandering to lurid curiosity” and remembering that “legal access to information differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast.”
Gawking at mugs is a thing on the Internet, ranging from the silly and sillier at TheSmokingGun.com to the sillier still of Fark.com, to history, and to the evil business of charging people to remove their mugshots from sites. The News-Leader site, like most other journalistic sites with mugs, didn’t go as far as poking fun of mugs.
But missing, Berry wrote, was the context of what led to an arrest, whether formal charges were filed, and the judicial outcome.
Or, more simply put, missing was the journalism.
Now to the next logical thought in not printing mugshots because they provide incomplete information: publishing names of people arrested without following up on the outcomes. Information about arrests is news, and it seem antithetical to American justice to limit public access to arrests and mugshots.
Journalists publish information about arrests because it’s news — and because it’s easy to collect. A trip to the courthouse or jail, or even to the courthouse or jail’s website, makes collection easy. (It was easier still for the News-Leader, which only stopped collecting information after its automated retrieval system failed.)
But it’s harder to publish information about outcomes of arrests because the results play out across time, in different judicial venues, and usually in plea deals or ways that do not make for automated or easy collection. As staffs shrink, publishing automated news is easier and far cheaper than chasing news.
So here’s a challenge to media who display mugshots: If you’re going to embarrass people by publishing their mugshot, then you should feel obligated to following this new section to the SPJ code: “Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story.”