‘Power ≠ Permission’ to examine journalistic accountability and social media

A panel titled “Posting ≠ Permission: Methodology, Power, Journalistic Accountability & Social Media,” will take place at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15 in Rm. 309 of William L. Harkness Hall, 100 Wall Street. The event is free and open to the public.

The featured speakers will be Gabrielle Bellot, a staff writer for Literary Hub, and Eunsong Kim, co-author of “The #TwitterEthics Manifesto — Model View Culture.” The event is co-sponsored by Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Digital Humanities Lab @ Yale.

The panel discussion will examine emerging ethical considerations and journalistic protocols that are required to respond to shifting media practices. Questions for discussion will include: What is “public” and “private,” on social media? Who counts as a “source”?  What responsibility do journalists bear in protecting social media sources? What happens when a journalist publishes social media content out of context? What harm can come when a social media user’s postings “trend”? And: What ways has the field and profession of journalism shifted with an ever- expanding field of popular, accessible, user-generated ‘reporting’?

Bellot’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, Lambda Literary, Slate, Guernica, The Toast, Huffington Post, Small Axe, VIDA, Autostraddle, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral candidate in fiction at Florida State University and is working on her debut novel. She is the author of “On Being Queer in the Caribbean” (New York Times).

Kim is a doctoral candidate at the University of California-San Diego. She works with local and national youth arts organizations such as Urban Gateways to develop and teach critically based digital art and writing programs. Her essays on literature, digital cultures, and art criticism have appeared and are forthcoming in: Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, Scapegoat, Lateral, The New Inquiry, Model View Culture, AAWW’s The Margins, and in the anthologies “Poetics of Social Engagement” and “Reading Modernism with Machines.”

The Poynter Fellowship in Journalism was established by Nelson Poynter, who received his master’s degree in 1927 from Yale. The fellowship brings to campus journalists from a wide variety of media outlets who have made significant contributions to their field. Among recent Poynter fellows are Anna Broinowski, Daniel Karpowitz, and Maziar Bahari.