Say you are a journalist, one working in a famous and heralded newspaper. You have been assigned to write an interview about an hostess who enjoys selling her body as a second job. Now, your article would surely attract more attention if you add a nice picture, wouldn’t it? Too bad you forgot to take a photo of your interviewee and to ask her permission for publishing.
Hell, who cares, Internet is so easy… Let’s try to Google for generic hostess images. You feel lucky and the first hit is this wonderful girl on a Portuguese blog. She’s darn beautiful, she is an hostess on a plane and has this glamorous smile. Can you resist? It looks like the perfect picture!
Ok, you have no right to publish this picture, you don’t even know who she is. As a good journalist you are supposed to ask permission, at the very least, and then maybe pay back some quid. But hell, you have no time. After all, nobody will ever discover where this image comes from, right?
I’m sorry bad journalist, we’re in the 21st century and the Internet is way smarter than you. Blogs connect people and they found the original picture in a matter of days. This innocent Portuguese girl was probably accused of being an whore. She was probably going to sue the newspaper for illegal use of the image. At end of the day the newspaper had to publish apologies and remove your article.
Now, I can understand when similar mistakes are made by unknown bloggers, people who write just for hobby or for fun. But a journalists does it for a living, it’s his profession and he is supposed to be professional. This is the kind of errors that make a journalist deserve to be fired.
