911 -- Identification

Probably the hardest thing about this exercise for you was identification. You had competing interests at work here.

First, you should have been operating under the general journalistic premise that we do NOT name rape victims in almost all cases.

All of you respected that premise. Good job.

Then, there is the concern of making a virtual identification; that is, giving so much other information that it is easy for anybody to identify the victim.

None of you named the victim's daughter. A daughter only has one mother, right? So that would be real easy to narrow down who the victim was if you gave the girl's name. Also, none of you listed the exact home address. Only one family lives in a home, right? Again, you avoided virtually identifying the victim.

Even though an exact address would expose the victim, don't readers still deserve to know where a crime took place? I mean, a story is much more relevant if it happened on your street or in your neighborhood than if it didn't. Some location is necessary to establish relevance.

Many of you handled it in a smart way: you simply said the incident happened on Wilson Avenue. No street address included. That gave readers enough information to better set proximity, without giving away the victim's home and creating a virtual identification.

I also thought important to the story was noting that Caspinwall was a neighbor of the victim. Readers need to know if this crime was totally random or if there was some sort of link between the victim and attacker. Readers have more reason to worry if someone is willy-nilly breaking into random homes, as opposed to attacking a neighbor, right?

But many of you failed to note the link.

Also, there was something else that I think you owed the reader: an explanation of why you weren't naming the girl or listing her exact address.

Even though you're following journalistic rules, your readers probably don't know those rules and may simply be wondering, why the hell aren't there any names or exact addresses in this story? It wouldn't have hurt to have a simple background sentence somewhere in the story, like this:

The names of the girl and victim and the exact address where the crime occurred is being withheld to protect the identity of the victim.

That way, you are being transparent with readers about why they're not getting the level of information that other non-rape stories would include.

Admittedly, this was a confusing exercise. You had many different factors tugging at you. It's really a tough situation for a young reporter to find himself or herself in. In a real-world setting, you'd definitely want to bring an editor in the loop to help make the best judgments that give the readers the most information while at the same time minimizing harm to the victim.

But here, I wanted to test your judgment and see how you responded. And I figured you''d appreciate the lesson much more if we did it this way, as opposed to just lecturing about it.

This is how I would have handled it: I WOULD name the victim or the girl. I WOULD name the suspect and even use HIS home address. I'd say the victim lived nearby, but I wouldn't specifically say they were direct neighbors.

That way, readers know who did this (and know exactly where the sicko lived) and the general area where the crime occurred and that it wasn't a random crime, while at the same time limiting the ability to identify who the victim was.