So I’d like to share with you a conundrum we face in the news department at The Morning Star.
Since December, there have been a handful of fatalities in the Okanagan. One is being treated as a murder. Three were workplace deaths. One man fell to his death.
We reported on each but never reported the victims’ names, mainly because the names had not officially been released by either the coroner or the RCMP. Except in the last case of the man whose body was found on a very rural road in Vernon.
We reported his name but only after it was released by the RCMP, who gave us the name because the man’s death is being treated as a murder and they’re continuing their investigation. We were among the last of the local media outlets to put the name out there.
Police, in a non-criminal investigation, will not release a name. They defer to the coroner’s office if the coroner is asked to investigate.
The coroner used to investigate, contact the family, get permission to release the name, and then issue a release with the victim’s identity once all next-of-kin had been notified.
Those days, for the time being, are gone. At least the part about identifying the victim.
The coroner has refused to release the name in these local cases due to privacy rights of the deceased and because they have been dealing with legal issues surrounding the release of victims’ names.
Enter social media.
In each case mentioned above, online tributes have been made to the victims. Friends, maybe even family, have mentioned the victims’ names.
Because it’s online, it is available to media. And the media then will release the name, using the safe “sources online have identified the victim as…”
And therein lies our conundrum.
How do we know those offering tributes are next-of-kin? Do we know the family has given permission to release the name? Do we know if all of the family have been notified? Would YOU want to find out a loved one had perished through social media?
In the past, The Morning Star may have found out the name of the victim of an accident or homicide through our sources, but out of respect to the victim’s family, we never printed it or posted it online until we officially had the name confirmed and released either by the police or coroner.
Now, however, other media outlets, i.e., our competitors, have revealed names, citing online sources and using pictures of the victims from Facebook accounts. Not going to lie: we’ve taken Facebook pictures, too.
But we’ve always waited for the name to be officially released. In doing that, though, it puts us behind other media outlets. The optics make it appear like either we’re not doing our jobs, we’re very slow or we’re copying other media.
The race to be first with the news is very real, so this is what we face. Do we continue to do what The Morning Star has done since its inception in 1988, respect families’ privacy and maintain our integrity and morals as trusted community reporters? Or do we join the current style of “get-it-out-there-get-it-out-now?