Intrusion and Inclusion: Towards an ethical death knock practice for Australian journalists

Journalists routinely write stories about people who have died in newsworthy circumstances, regardless of whether they are well known. They seek out official sources such as police and other first responders for information about the person’s death and unofficial sources such as bereaved family and friends for information about the person’s life. Although it is routine work, the intense atmosphere of approaching newly bereaved families is one of the hardest aspects of journalistic work. Journalists call this assignment the death knock because in pre-internet times it required knocking on doors to ask for interviews and photographs. Now, in the digital era, journalists are most likely to start and even complete their newsgathering on social media, where they can quickly and easily access personal information including photographs and tributes to reproduce in their stories. This is sometimes done without the permission or even the knowledge of grieving families, giving rise to new ethical uncertainties for journalists. Unsurprisingly, the digital death knock, as this practice has become known, can compound the trauma already being experienced by bereaved families, but what is less known is that it can also impact journalists, sometimes in the form of moral injury, which occurs when an individual breaches their own moral or ethical code. This thesis proposes a model of an ethical death knock that might mitigate the harm to journalists doing death knocks and, in so doing, also benefit the bereaved people they interview and/or rely on as sources for their stories. It proposes reframing ethical death knock practice as a type of public service journalism. The model emerges from a mixed-methods study of Australian print and digital journalists’ death knock practice which reveals key practices, the impacts of those practices and the journalists’ ethical concerns about those practices. Bourdieu’s field theory is the theoretical framework used to interpret the findings and develop the model and its three dimensions of preparations, precursors and professional identity. The research is timely, as death knock practice is changing with increased social media use, and journalism ethics and journalists’ wellbeing are increasingly in the spotlight.<p></p>