Centerpieces

If I post a comment or a photo on the Web, is your newsroom free to quote me on your online site or in your publication?

Every day, newspapers, broadcasters and online sites of all kinds freely quote from comments they find on the Web. Sometimes they attribute, sometimes they don't.

There's just one problem: How do you know the person you've quoted actually made the comment? Take what happened to April Branum, for instance. After The Orange County (Calif.) Register featured her in a story, one user posted a nasty comment claiming to be Branum.

Do you need to verify the comment?

Do you have any responsibility to try?

Back in April, my daughter, Caitlin, lost a friend and former colleague in her Lafayette College theater group. His name was Dan O'Neil.

Dan died in the massacre at Virginia Tech.

Cait spent the days following the tragedy with her friends, remembering Dan and mourning his passing and praying for his family.

A few days later, a friend told Cait she was on The New York Times Web site.

Cait, like millions of people who spend a good deal of life's important moments at their computers, had posted a message to Dan's MySpace page after his death. It read:

"Dan you were an amazing person. I hope you know how much you meant to the people who knew you here. We are keeping you and your family and friends in our prayers. You will never be forgotten. Love forever."

The Times included Cait's message in its Web package of mini-profiles of the shooter's victims. The Times introduced Cait's message like this: "Another friend and former classmate at Lafayette, Caitlin Ward, left a message for Mr. O'Neil on his Web site."

That was accurate. So was Cait's comment. But how did the Times know that?

No one from the Times called Cait.

Now, when you click on Cait's name alongside her message in Dan's MySpace page, you go to Cait's MySpace page. So it's fair to assume that someone sent the message to Dan from that page. While there was no specific mention of Dan on Cait's MySpace page, her bio makes it clear she and Dan were at Lafayette at the same time. I guess that makes them classmates.

But ask those who live in the MySpace world how easy it is to send a message from someone else's page, and they'll tell you it can be done. Moreover, after all of these years of reporting, haven't most of us been burned by an assumption we failed to check out?

I asked Craig Whitney, standards editor for the Times, about Cait's experience and he said the Times, given the urgency involved in this case, had weighed the risks involved in not verifying that Cait had been the author of the comment and decided the risks were low. He said the Times makes decisions about verification on a case-by-case basis and might well decide differently in another circumstance.

How about you? Do you have a policy that states when -- or if -- you need to verify the identity of the people whose statements you find in public places on the Web? It's not as if this is a new issue, yet many of the journalists I meet have not established clear newsroom policies for using material that has been posted on the Web.

And what about the photos of the Virginia Tech victims that media lifted from public Web sites? How free do we feel to use them? Do we need to verify the identity of the person in the photo? Do we need to get permission to use photos that we did not make?

Whitney said the Times, which put together a terrific package of photos to go with its profiles, is aware that picking up photos "without getting permission from the photographer is also risky, but again, [we] were influenced by the exigencies and unusual circumstances of the Virginia Tech story and the unavailability of alternative photography."

These questions, of course, do not apply to The New York Times alone. News organizations all over the world used photos and comments from the Web during the Virginia Tech coverage -- and they do the same every day.

I'm thinking about the people who found their comments and photos lifted. I'm wondering -- and I'm certainly not the first person to ask these questions – how people in our audience feel when they realize news organizations have taken material they posted on the Web and used it to tell a story. Do they expect to see their photos published by The New York Times?

Well, they should know better, you say. Sure they should. I guess. I mean, if you post your photo in a public place, it's public. But I wonder if some people are confused by the difference between a public place and a shared space -- I'm not posting this for the world to see; I'm posting it in a place where my friends have agreed to congregate.

So when a newsroom swoops in and grabs my comment or my photo, I just might feel violated. (And if no one even bothers to verify that the comment was mine, I might begin to wonder if I matter at all in this whole business. Am I just the source of a good quote, an available mug shot?)

I'd love to hear from you on this one. Does it matter to us whether the audience feels violated?

And perhaps the more important question: Are we really willing to risk even further damage to our credibility by abandoning traditions as old and honored as verification?