The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (JMC) hosted the 15th annual Poynter KSU Media Ethics Workshop focused on activism with Parkland shooting survivors and activists Eric Garner and Melissa Falkowski as keynote speakers.
The day-long conference was hosted by the Media Law Center for Ethics and Access in JMC and the College of Communication and Information. Kelly McBride, senior vice president at The Poynter Institute was the primary moderator and facilitator. The event featured panels that focused on the ethics of activism, reporting during May 4, 1970, and advocating for journalism and public relations.
Falkowski and Garner, teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where fatal shootings took place in 2018, were the keynote speakers who discussed their experiences with the shootings and student journalism.
“Something was not right, there’s something wrong...we heard them [students] barricading the door,” Falkowski said. They described their actions when reporting on this subject and how their students turned to journalism to recover and regain strength.
“The journalist inside me is my foundation, but there’s also being a teacher,”Garner said. “If I would’ve grabbed my camera, I would’ve lost the room. I had to become a dad to 54 people in that room.” The Washington Post followed the teachers a month later, creating a 20-minute documentary on how they would move forward.
“There is a fine line of participation and reporting,” Falkowski said. “The New York Times and The Washington Post take a stand on an issue, you can too. They [students] said, ‘We want to be taken seriously and we want to hear from other voices too,’ which I thought was very mature of them.” They took to journalism by writing pieces that focused on those they loved and lost, humanizing the victims in their school newspaper, The Eagle Eye. Their publication received special recognition at the Pulitzer Prize ceremony in New York in 2019.
“They have empathy and insight in a way some national reporters would never have,”Falkowski said of her journalism students. “We chose the ‘no notoriety route’ to serve our readership.” They opted to not spotlight the shooter and learned to divorce their passion from their journalism.
The Poynter KSU Media Ethics Workshop included panels that featured journalists including Howard Ruffner on why activism mattered on May 4, 1970 and Michelle Everhart, Andrew Meyer, Tim Smith and Bruce Winges on the Akron Beacon Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the events of May 1970.
Panels also highlighted activism and advocacy for journalism and public relations with journalists Jim Crutchfield, Laura Evans Manatos, Mike Shearer and Chad Painter. Another session was a “What Would You Do?” modeling exercise that challenged students to talk through a crisis story, mediated by Patti Gallagher Newberry, national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and lecturer for the Journalism Program at Miami University.
Next year's Workshop topic may be related to ethics and political reporting because of the 2020 election.
Jan Leach, JMC professor, organized the event and said she found the topic of activism important to cover and discuss, especially when shining light on a topic that holds many ethical dilemmas.
“Last year (2018), after we did opioids, I didn’t want to do a subject-specific workshop, but a topic-specific workshop that has something to do with journalists and what they face now,” Leach said. She thought about how reporters had to think of ethical situations on the fly throughout the development of her thesis, which focused on media ethics.
This resulted in her developing ethics training through the Poynter KSU Media Ethics Workshop. The workshop was originally meant for local professionals and educators, but through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the event has been free for students for about 10 years.
“They get an opportunity to think about the work they are going to do after graduation that involves everyday ethical questions” Leach said. “I appreciate the dean and professors here who recognize the value of thinking about and supporting the idea of ethics and that students should attend.
Watch the recap of this year's conference and stay up to date on future Workshops at https://mediaethics.jmc.kent.edu/