I think about this a lot. My first reporting job involved doing the weekend police blotter at a paper that at the time barely had a website. It was a lively blotter (this was a heavy industry town in the meth years) but it honestly seemed very low stakes, bc it wasn’t online.(1/) https://twitter.com/alecmacgillis/status/1352996611627036674

People read it in the paper, remembered it for a week and then forgot about it. I was also a bartender at a bar whose customers appeared in the blotter... often, which could be awkward, but more than once someone brought a copy to the bar as a trophy. Again, low stakes. (2/)

I’m not sure I could in good conscience do that job now that all this stuff is online. Not just because people don’t deserve to have minor convictions (or even just charges) hanging over them forever but because of the imbalance in what kind of crimes get reported on or not. (3/)

You’re effectively punished for living in a small town with a good paper, a city with w good metro section, or a state (like Florida: https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/florida-man-news.php) with strong public information laws. And of course no one wants to read about petty white-collar crimes. (4/)

I don’t think the solution is to just not report on crime. Crime reporting is important! It’s just yet another example of how our society and, really, species was just not built for the information technology that has been imposed on us in the past couple decades. (5/)

The permanent-but-not-readily-accessible information architecture (Nexis, PACER, etc) is hard to defend on principle, but practically it does seem like a not-terrible compromise. Anyway, I don’t think journalists have adequately wrestled with the real moral dilemma here. (/end)