In a Huckleberries post by Idaho bureau blogger Dave F. Oliveria is a press release that names a suicide victim at North Idaho College.

The Spokesman-Review has a policy of naming suicide victims and rape victims, and not covering suicides as news events unless the suicide is very public. This posting brings up a lot of questions.

Such as why the newspaper would post a name this time - the newspaper through a blogger who works for the newspaper - and such as whether this case counts as a very public suicide. There's also a news brief on page B1.

"DFO [Dave F Oliveria] is us - That blog is The Spokesman-Review. We cannot separate it," said Carla Savalli, senior editor for local news.

Editors generally agreed that the standards for suicide victims, at least, should be the same between online and print. The online edition and the extra online components, which includes the S-R's thirty-some blogs, are an "extension of the printed brand," Savalli said.

According to The Spokesman-Review's latest ethics code draft, any staffer-- full time or part time, extra board or correspondent-- who makes posts to a Spokesman-Review blog, is to uphold the same ethical and journalistic standards as exist in print.

"When does a journalist ever pick up a press release and run it verbatim?" asked long time reporter Kevin Graman.

Business editor Alison Boggs believes that there is a process for standards; what happened yesterday was a mistake. whatever ethical decision is made, there at least should be a discussion about it beforehand.

(p.s. What if a reader posts the name? The post would be removed. And in the spirit of transparency, an editor would explain why the post was removed, editors agreed)

Discussions about this elsewhere: The Falls, News is a Conversation

Wait, does that mean editing blog content?

Yes and no, editor Steve Smith and managing editor Gary Graham essentially said. Here's why:
• You just can't edit all of the blogs... (assistant city editor Dan Hansen)
• We choose not to (Savalli).
• Technically it's possible to task some copy editors to online content, like other newspapers do, but consider the sheer volume of it (Graham)
• Readership could drop if readers perceived more control over a blogger (Paulman)
• It slows down the immediacy (Smith)
• Editor Steve Smith said he's not about to replicate an entire editing operation to blog content.
• S-R blogs are edited, kind of, through a different process. Editors look at postings all the time, although blog postings are not edited word-for-word before they launch. (Smith)
• Sports editor Joe Palmquist also pointed out that common sense still applies - staffers maintain common sense and know to pull in a second person any time a situation gets ethically hairy.

The general defense of total blog freedom is that blogs are immediate and mythically rule-free, and applying similar standards as for print journalism would stifle the casual discourse (and in the case of Huckleberries, high readership).

But Savalli said it's easy to forget that the online journalistic 'platform' makes it easy to forget that newsroom standards still apply.

Notes about document release

The web brings print journalism to a strange transition point, emphasis on vitality and page views and spontaneity in virtual conversation, but also public documents.

Features editor Ken Paulman remembers the Joseph Duncan documents that went public online. There are still stacks and stacks of them. They were scanned and made available to the public, and were public records.

Editors said they do not want to go redacting/censoring parts of a document before releasing it, e.g blacking out the name of a suicide victim in a document. (Any redaction is only done by the agency releasing the document)

Freedom of information

Which brought folks to the question of competition - with a medium that provides more information than the print version. Should The S-R publish the name of a suicide victim because everybody else published it (online)?

That fact doesn't change our standards, Savalli said. There have always been other news outlets that publish or release information that The S-R does not, because the newsroom stands by its ethics policy.

Here's the full meeting for those who want to watch

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