The advent of newspaper websites and social media has forever changed the industry in which I work.

Though I never knew the industry without these new tools, I know and accept that it is the world in which we must now operate.

Friday, I attended an online webinar, or simply put a class, which spelled out that Facebook is the single most important tool to get stories in front of readers.

This resonated with me. How could a construct so new, so novel be of such importance?

News media’s use of Facebook has been but a drop in the proverbial bucket as far as journalism history is concerned, yet it has changed so much.

As a graduate student and First Amendment scholar, I have spent much time studying John Milton’s concept of a free marketplace of ideas, a concept social media has helped promote.

For those unfamiliar, the theory holds that truth will prevail in a competition of ideas in free, transparent public discourse.

Newspapers have been the guardian of this practice, one in which the First Amendment is grounded in, for hundreds of years, but now, an individual need no longer look toward a newspaper as a pedestal for speech, when the Internet now serves as a megaphone.

All of this is to say, Monday I was alerted to a post on The Vicksburg Post’s Facebook account that suggested the staff photoshopped a Caucasian child’s head onto a darker-complected individual’s body in the Sunday, Dec. 13, edition of The Post.

The damning evidence seemed to be a dark neck and an abnormal arm jutting out of the side of the child’s body.

Upon review of the original digital photo, which unfortunately the general public was not privy to, one could easily see there was a dark shadow cast on the child’s neck and the additional arm jutting out from the child’s side belonged to another, smaller child blocked from view by the child in question.

While The Vicksburg Post strives to represent the vast diversity of its readership and the community that supports it, altering a photo in such a way completely violates this newspaper’s standards and is a practice that should not and would not be tolerated.

We did no such thing.

Call us guilty of printing a dark image, you may, but to call us guilty of breaking our own personal code of ethics would be a mistake. The truth will prevail.

•

Austin Vining is a staff writer for The Vicksburg Post. You may reach him at austin.vining@vicksburgpost.com