News-media roundup: Dealing with immigration status and crime-scene photos; Native joins SPJ board; defunct paper's digital archive gone; tornadoes spark journalism students

If an undocumented immigrant is involved in your reporting on a largely unrelated topic, there are ethical considerations about revealing the person's immigration status. Margarita Birnbaum, health-equity topic leader for the Association of Health Care Journalists, interviewed Marc Ramirez of USA Today about how he handles such situations.

Mass shootings have reopened the debate about whether grisly photos of crime scenes are worth the trauma they cause because of the change they may prompt, Kaiser Health News reports.

Jodi Rave Spotted Bear and Peter Szekely

Jodi Rave Spotted Bear, executive director of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance, has been appointed a director of the Society of Professional Journalists. The SPJ Board of Directors named Peter Szekely, former president of The News Guild of New York, to the other appointive seat at its Dec. 7 meeting. Based in Bismarck, N.D., IMFA is a non-profit that focuses on freedom of information and the need for more independent news media operations among indigenous Americans. Spotted Bear recently completed a John S. Knight Community Impact Fellowship at Stanford University and is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Bush Fellow for leadership. For more than a decade, she covered American Indian issues for Lee Enterprises and won many awards. Szekely retired after more than 40 years as a correspondent for Reuters, mostly in Washington, D.C.

Journalism students at nearby Murray State University have helped keep the weekly Mayfield Messenger going since the West Kentucky town was devastated by a tornado a year ago, Lexington's WKYT-TV reports. And they have done stories throughout the region about tornado damage and recovery, compiled on their 270 Stories website, named for the region's area code.

The Hook, which was a beloved weekly in Charlottesville, Virginia, "closed a decade ago but its archives lived on — until its 22,000 stories were suddenly taken offline in June," The Washington Post reports. "Former staffers have theories about its mystery buyer. . . . They think someone paid to kill it. Their evidence, while circumstantial, is intriguing. There’s the mystery buyer who purchased the Hook archive from its longtime custodian a few months before it went dark. There’s the reluctance of people involved in that sale to say much about it. Then there’s the flurry of copyright complaints apparently filed by the new owner in the days and weeks after the sale."

The Associated Press says it will put "additional resources into covering democracy in the U.S., with the goal of helping an increasingly polarized public better understand their government." With money from several foundations, "AP aims to improve civic literacy and combat misinformation by bolstering its explanatory journalism and providing information and tools to local newsrooms to aid their coverage. AP will also deepen its reporting on the impact of elections and election-related policy on communities of color. The effort . . . is focused on providing solutions-based journalism rather than merely highlighting problems and extreme voices."

A record 533 journalists are detained worldwide, 13% more than a year ago, according to the annual roundup of violence and abuses by Reporters Without Borders (which uses its French acronym, RSF). "The number of those killed has increased again this year, to 57, while 65 journalists are being held hostage and 49 are missing," RSF says. "RSF has also never previously seen so many women journalists in detention. A total of 78 are currently held, a record-breaking rise of nearly 30% compared to 2021. Women now account for nearly 15% of detained journalists, compared to fewer than 7% five years ago. China, where censorship and surveillance have reached extreme levels, continues to be the world’s biggest jailer of journalists, with a total of 110 currently being held."