A fiancée and an ex-girlfriend
As the first outlet to know
Stuart, the
The blog was public, so Bailey felt comfortable using material from it, but she decided not to use the woman’s name or photo so as not to risk exposing her to public attention. “I’d already deleted plenty of nasty anonymous comments sent in to our site, several wishing violence on
The ex-girlfriend.
Meanwhile Chambers, the Branford reporter, checked with her sources to see if they had anything on
The report was journalistic “gold,” Bailey says. Chambers had promised her sources that she would use the police report only after the police had named
Bailey “ friends ” Del Rocco . After her luck on MySpace, Bailey decided to trawl online social networks for information about Del Rocco. On Wednesday, September 16, she found a page on Facebook belonging to someone named Jessica Del Rocco. Because Facebook listed people by location, Bailey could be confident that this one, listed as living in Branford, was the right Jessica.
Bailey sent a request to become Del Rocco’s Facebook “friend,” meaning that Bailey would have access to postings, or “status updates,” that Del Rocco put up behind a privacy wall accessible only to designated individuals—her “friends.” Del Rocco quickly accepted, and Bailey discovered that a day earlier, in her “friends only” space, Del Rocco had responded to the news that her ex-boyfriend was a murder suspect.
“I feel like I’m sixteen all over again,” Del Rocco wrote. “It’s just [sic] bringing back everything.” She said she had known since Sunday that
Through Facebook, Bailey sent Del Rocco a message identifying herself as a reporter and asked if she was willing to be interviewed. “If I did the whole thing over again, I would identify myself as a reporter when I friended her,” Bailey says. Del Rocco politely declined to be interviewed but kept Bailey as a friend.
Bailey had another scoop in her sights, but was she on ethically safe ground using this information? On the one hand, it was difficult to consider the postings private given that Del Rocco had some 350 Facebook friends. Moreover, even if they were private, hadn’t Del Rocco granted Bailey access to them by not removing her as a friend once she’d learned she was a reporter? But on the other hand, was giving a reporter access to information the same thing as allowing it to be used in an article? Could the Independent protect itself, in any case, by guarding Del Rocco’s identity?
[1]
Melissa Bailey,
“Suspect in Annie Le Murder Has Fiancee,”
New Haven Independent
, September 15, 2009.