Cautionary Cyber Tale

There is a lesson to learn in the Miami Herald/ Miami-Dade County School Board scandal that has news blogs buzzing. It is about more than the journalistic tenets of fair and objective reporting or walking the reporter-tightrope of maintaining professional yet somewhat casual relationships with sources.

This is a cautionary cyber tale.

The plotline: an alleged romantic relationship between a former education reporter and school superintendent. E-mails from the protagonists helped write part of this story.

The characters could be innocent in the end because nothing has been proven true. Because the so-called evidence is electronic, this tale deviates from the traditional theme of reporter-beware-not-to-get-too-close-to-sources. The message, instead, is more the millennial: Delete-doesn’t-mean-deleted.

PDF versions of racy e-mails exchanged are bouncing from satellites to computer screens across the globe thanks to the Internet. At first, the superintendent said the wording in the e-mails was doctored. The reporter won’t comment.

Whatever the truth, this incident will dog both of their careers in this w-w-w-dot world. It has become part of their permanent cyber-foot-print. Google both their names and articles about “an improper relationship” pop up.

So, the warning for online journalism students: Be careful what you put in writing, be it published in a newspaper, hand-written in a letter, text-messaged or e-mailed. You never know what stayed in the bowels of a Web server.