Pictures of the Day: Vatican City and Elsewhere

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Photos from the Vatican, Syria, Mali and Colombia.

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How Social Media Affects Journalistic Objectivity

I spoke Tuesday at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, where the former Timesman Alex S. Jones runs the show. My talk was called “The New Objectivity: How Social Media Is Changing Traditional Reporting,” a subject I’ve written about frequently in blogs and columns.

Here is a summary of the discussion - which included a question-and-answer period - with audio. Those in attendance in Cambridge, Mass., included students at the Kennedy School, Nieman fellows, Shorenstein faculty and staff members, and visitors. (That one of the visitors was my son, who attends the law school at Harvard, is incidental â€" but gratifying for his mother.)

And I’ll add one note: The attached story sates that Tom Kent, standards editor for The Associated Press, thinks social media undermines journalistic credibility. It is more accurate to say that Mr. Kent says it has the potential to do so, if used carelessly.

Sunday Column: Keeping Secrets

Keeping Secrets

IF you only own a hammer, observed the psychologist Abraham Maslow, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Similarly, when the government’s only chance of keeping an inconvenient truth out of the news media is to warn of a national security threat, it’s amazing how these threats pop up.

This has turned out to be a powerfully effective tool. News organizations, after all, don’t want to endanger the nation’s safety, or be accused of doing so, so editors often listen to government officials when they make their case for not publishing. And, after listening, editors occasionally consent.

But a countervailing force â€" people’s right to know what their government is doing and the news media’s responsibility to find out and tell them â€" ought to rule the day.

We saw this play out last week when The Times, in an important story from Yemen, broke its long silence on the location of a base used for American drone strikes in the region. Like other major news organizations, including The Washington Post and The Associated Press, The Times agreed well over a year ago to keep that location â€" Saudi Arabia â€" quiet. Instead, it wrote at various times of a base on the Arabian Peninsula. (Other news outlets eventually did name the country, making the secrecy almost a moot point.)

Top editors at The Times changed their minds last week for several reasons. One was that, after monitoring the matter for months, “we were not aware of any specific security threats,” said David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief. In addition, the base location was at the heart of this article, according to Dean Baquet, the managing editor, while previously it had been “a footnote.” The most pressing reason, though, was that the drone program’s architect, John O. Brennan, had been nominated to lead the Central Intelligence Agency and The Times had a responsibility to examine his record.

In short, it was time for the facts to come out.

High time, I’d say.

That’s because the bigger and more troubling issue is whether the information should have been withheld to begin with. The reason offered â€" that naming the location would upset Saudi citizens to the point that the base might have to be closed, thus hampering America’s counterterrorism efforts â€" doesn’t cut it. Keeping the government’s secrets is not the news media’s role, unless there is a clear, direct and life-threatening reason to justify it. The classic example is revealing troop movements in wartime. Such a specific threat doesn’t exist now, and from all I can glean, it didn’t exist many months ago either.

This discussion couldn’t be more important, considering the context: the darkness in which America’s drone program has been operating and quickly growing.

In what a federal judge has described as an Alice in Wonderland situation, with a little Catch-22 added for good measure, the secrecy around the drone program is self-perpetuating. The government, until very recently, had not even acknowledged its existence, even though the unmanned aircraft have killed thousands of people in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan â€" tragically including many civilians, some of them children, and even some American citizens. The government prefers to describe the dead, sometimes inaccurately, as militants or terrorists.

The Times, to its credit, is in court trying to get information on the drone program, and on the deaths of Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son, both American citizens. Also to its credit, The Times published an eye-opening drone-related article last May when the reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote about President Obama’s list of individuals to be targeted for assassination. And it has published other strong pieces on the subject, despite the obstacles.

This administration, while vowing transparency and accountability, has actually become ever more secretive and punitive: stamping “classified” on everything in sight, pursuing whistle-blowers as never before, and prosecuting journalists for publishing leaked information.

All in the name of national security, the hammer of choice.

The real threat to national security is a government operating in secret and accountable to no one, with watchdogs that are too willing to muzzle themselves.

Top Times editors say that they are deeply committed to informing the public, but that they believe it’s only responsible to listen when government officials make a request. And, they emphasize, they often say no.

Fair enough. But the bar should be set very high for agreeing to honor those requests. This one didn’t clear that bar.

What’s missing in the dark and ever-expanding world of drone warfare is a big helping of accountability, served up in the bright light of day.

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Recent topics on the Public Editor’s Journal, at nytimes.com/publiceditor, include the evolution of the Edward Koch obituary, whether book excerpts constitute conflicts of interest, and a first-day look at the subject of this column.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 10, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Keeping Secrets.

Money for the Taking in the Niger Delta Swamps

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When night falls on the Niger Delta, hundreds of people set sail on hand-made wooden boats toward the oil pumps jutting out along the swampy creeks. Clouds of smoke float in the night air. Makeshift fuel refineries â€" with the same machines once used to distill palm oil into gn â€" begin churning crude oil into diesel fuel.

The intricate process is illegal and comes with extreme risks. Workers â€" mostly men â€" spend hours in intense heat, inhaling toxic fumes from the simmering crude oil. They work quietly and move steadily throughout the night. As dawn approaches, the refined oil is poured into oil drums and shipped downriver to be sold on the Nigerian black market. The machines go silent before daylight. The smoke slowly clears.

For the last 50 years, the Niger Delta’s multibillion-dollar oil trade has been the cause of intense conflict, legal debates and deep mistrust between the big oil companies and local residents who feel betrayed by the Nigerian government for not profiting from the lucrative industry. Almost 90 percent of those l! iving along the delta survive on less than $1 a day. Many find the clandestine oil trade, even with the risk of prison or death, is the only way to support their family.

The long battle between residents of the delta and the major oil companies piqued the interest of Samuel James, a photographer who had documented youth gangs in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria, in 2008. He was awarded a grant through VII Photo Agency to continue his photo series “Area Boys,” which allowed him to develop close relationships with the youths. In time, he gained access to an underground scene that very few see of Nigerian gang life, street culture and the illegal oil trade. In a terrain where economic stakes are high and conflict can quickly erupt, Mr. James credits his ability to navigate between different social and economic cultures in Nigeria to one thing: respect.

“You move with respect or you don’t move at all. That’s how Nigera works,” Mr. James, 26, said. “You have to move with respect, and you have to be trusting.”

Mr. James is originally from Cincinnati, and his first trip to Nigeria was in 2007, when he was awarded a grant by Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership program to spend two weeks documenting the booming population of Nigeria and its effects on the development of megacities.

When he returned to Lagos in 2010, he was 24 and gained the trust of local gang members â€" almost all his own age â€" who were informal gatekeepers for the city. Spending almost all of his days with the area boys, Mr. James slept under bridges and inside abandoned buildings. He learned to speak pidgin, a form of English shared by the more than 250 ethnic groups across Nigeria.

He always kept his camera close by.

Through his connections with the area boys, Mr. James was on assi! gnment for Harper’s Magazine in 2012 when he took the five-hour bus ride from Lagos to the Niger Delta. He spent two months traveling throughout the swampy creeks to document the illegal oil refinery process and the residents of the wetlands who are directly affected by the trade.

During that time in the delta, Mr. James traveled using a boat and paddle and visited more than 12 oil refinery camps carefully hidden along the gulf. He had many guides and stayed in the homes of residents in town who would welcome him with little hesitation. Mr. James attended church services, religious ceremonies and a few funerals. Sometimes he would stay at a camp for a few days, sometimes a few weeks. But he always visited a camp more than once.

“My work isn’t about showing up some place, spending a day or two and then splitting,” he said. “I keep close relationships with the people in those photographs.”

Mr. James now splits his time between Nigeria and New York and considers his work in Nigeria a cntinuing project that he plans to keep exploring. He does not like to consider himself a photographer, but more of a storyteller in which the camera is one means of communication. One of the of key aspects of developing a good story, he said, is about building relationships based on trust.

“It’s a matter of time,” he said. “That’s how people get to know each other.”

Samuel James teaches nonfiction storytelling at The Program for Narrative and Documentary Practice at Tufts University, and images from his project “The Water of My Land” are on view at The Half King in New York City through April 7.

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