Paper's Decision to Twitter 3-year-old's funeral

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5790930&page=1

The Rocky Mountain News utilized social media by tweeting an up to date description at a 3-year-old's funeral. While twitter has become a useful tool for many journalism outlets this reporter was allowed in the funeral under strict circumstances that no photos would be taken. However, since the reporter could access twitter on his phone throughout the service, he was seen tweeting or what looked like typing or texting on his phone. While tweeting has somewhat been in competition with traditional reporting because of how fast it is to publish there is a time and place for that. In the article about the technology conference an up to date tweet was deemed appropriate however, with a funeral being such a personal affair having a reporter take notes every once in a while and having a reporter tweet on his phone through the entire service are completely different.

This example has brought upon not only obvious ethical questions but brought up the question of appropriate use of social media within the journalism field. The family was OK with reporters covering the boy's service but the tweets were morbid and inappropriate another difference between social media and traditional journalism. The reporters final tweet on the service was "family members shovel earth into grave." To me that is not only completely inappropriate but with new technology there should be some sort of ethical code developed just as print and broadcast journalists have their own ethical code.