Why news outlets are rethinking the way they cover police and crime

Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe has an interesting story exploring why many startup local news organizations are taking a different approach to how they cover police news. Rather than running the police log verbatim, including the names of people charged with minor offenses, they’re taking care to focus only on crime stories that have a real impact on people’s lives. He writes:

As longtime newspapers in Massachusetts and across the country continue to disappear, a new crop of online news sites are looking to win over audiences and reimagine how they share police log information. Some have continued the news industries’ tradition of publishing police logs to give people information about public safety, but limit what details they share. Others have decided not to post the logs in an attempt to move away from a reliance on unchallenged police accounts and avoid potentially contributing to a misperception about crime in their communities.

This is an issue I’ve been following intermittently since the 1980s, when I worked for a small paper whose editor-owner would not publish the names of people who’d been arrested for minor offenses. All of us younger reporters in the newsroom thought he was wrong, but I later came to see the wisdom of his approach. After all, “minimize harm” is one of the four principles contained within the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.

Here are three pieces I’ve written over the years that expand on Ryan’s reporting. I hope you find them of some interest.

• “A murder, a media frenzy, and the rise of a new form of local news,” Nieman Lab, June 5, 2013. An excerpt from my book “The Wired City,” which is primarily about the New Haven Independent, a digital nonprofit founded in 2005. Among other things, I explore founder Paul Bass’ decision not to identify a “person of interest” named by police in the murder of a young Yale lab technician.
• “A Teenager’s Video of George Floyd’s Murder Changed The World. It Should Change Journalism, Too,” GBH News, May 26, 2021. I analyzed the news media’s traditionally unskeptical reliance on police sources and observed that some news outlets were beginning to move away from such practices as regurgitating police press releases and publishing galleries of mug shots on their websites.
• “How an escapade on a frozen pond led one newspaper to reform its crime coverage,” Media Nation, Sept. 26, 2022. An account of how The Keene Sentinel, in southwest New Hampshire, had changed its approach to covering police news by eliminating accounts of minor incidents, focusing on major crimes and trends, and giving people a chance to have their misdeeds removed from Google search — something a number of other papers, including The Boston Globe, have also done.