"The great quote question"

I visited a lot of websites related to journalism and ethics when I was doing research for the JOUR 420 paper. One of the websites I found was from Indiana University's School of Journalism. I referred back to it a lot but unfortunately, never cited it in my paper.

I just thought I'd share it with anyone who would be interested; it's a compilation of articles about different journalism ethic cases from different reporters. The articles are separated into various categories such as "Sensitive news topics," "Handling sources," "Invading privacy," and "Getting the story."

One of the articles relevant to our class was written by Doreen Carvajal, titled "The great quote question." In it, Carvajal questioned whether or not it was ethical for reporters and editors to clean up quotes in order to make them more grammatically correct.

The problem, Carvajal notes, is when cleaning up quotes takes away from the essence of the story and from the character of the source.

Several newspapers have guidelines about this type of thing, such as USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times. Most of the guidebooks instruct reporters and editors not to change the quote unless it's ungrammatical. Reactions to these rules have varied. For example, The St. Petersburg Times received angry reactions from readers who were upset that a story quoted a black athlete speaking in "black dialect," while Eskimos asked an Alaskan newspaper to keep their "broken English" because they didn't want to appear white-washed.

This just provides insight into one of the many issues copy-editors have to deal with. There are so many factors to consider, such as the group of readers you may or may not offend and the tone of the article. If I was put in that situation, I'm not really sure what I would do. Obviously, as copy-editor, my first priority would be to make sure the story is as grammatically and factually correct as possible. But, what happens if doing so changes the whole tone of the piece?

This is exactly why Indiana University's website is so great; reading all of their articles helped me think about what I would do if I was put in those scenarios. It makes for an interesting read.