The Only Way is Ethics: The paper’s readers and users of our website want different things

Print newspapers rarely now break the news of major outrages, while news websites are all about imparting immediate updates

Will Gore
Sunday 21 December 2014 21:35 GMT
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Pakistani volunteers carry a student injured in the shootout at a school under attack by Taliban gunmen, at a local hospital in Peshawar
Pakistani volunteers carry a student injured in the shootout at a school under attack by Taliban gunmen, at a local hospital in Peshawar

It was a bleak time in the world last week. The siege in Sydney brought home the reality of terrorism to Australian people. The utter depravity of the Taliban’s child murderers in Peshawar took the grotesqueries of religious extremism to new depths.

Some of the questions that the two tragedies raised for journalists were fairly obvious: how much to report (especially while the siege remained ongoing), for example; and which images to employ, bearing in mind that many of those available were deeply unsettling.

One reader queried whether The Independent treated the atrocity in Pakistan with the seriousness it warranted, noting that, by late afternoon on the day the killings were carried out, the story was no longer the top item on our website.

Yet, in the next morning’s paper, the story naturally filled the front and several other pages. Where, then, did our priorities lie?

The expectations of newspaper readers and web users differ significantly. Print newspapers rarely now break the news of major, global outrages. Our job in print is to give a full and considered account of what has happened, to analyse the information available, to illustrate words with the best images, to provide a commentary and reflection.

News websites, by contrast, are all about imparting immediate updates on events as they happen. As stories develop, we revise, we improve; we look for a different angle. When a completely new story emerges, it may for a time lead the agenda – not necessarily because it has greater intrinsic significance but because, being less widely known, it is likely to be of greater interest.

A newspaper arrives through the letterbox and provides a comprehensive snapshot of important things that have happened. And, as a reader, you might well return to your paper hours after you started it, but you don’t expect it to have changed. If you visit a news site online at five o’clock, having previously logged on at midday, you would surely be surprised to see all the same stories that you had skimmed through at lunchtime.

Like all online news providers, we have the advantage of knowing in real time which articles on our website are engaging people. This means that we can also tell when a particular item has, in effect, run its course: if visitors to the site are no longer clicking through, the chances are it is because the story is not new to them.

We do not decide which reports to run online purely on the basis of what will be popular. It is important to pique readers’ interest; and judgements about publication and prominence should also be made on the basis of sound analysis by editors as to the intrinsic merits and importance of a story. In that respect, online and print publishing are not so very far apart.

The right response to horror

Wednesday’s front page in print included a photograph of a student being carried away from the scene of the Peshawar school attack. It was not clear from the information available to us if the boy was alive or dead; his face was not visible and there seemed no way in which he could be identified.

It was a graphic image and was included only after some deliberation. A bad wound on the pupil’s abdomen was clearly visible, although it was not necessarily the element of the picture that most naturally drew the eye.

We received no negative feedback from readers but I remain intrigued: was that the result of the detail not being immediately apparent; or did it reflect your positive agreement with our decision not to shy away from this horror?

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