Yet another sensational murder case in the Raleigh area last week raised new issues for The News & Observer about covering news in the Internet era.

The front page was dominated most of the week by the killing of Navy Reservist Paul Berkley just days after his return home to Clayton from assignment in the Middle East. His wife Monique was charged with murder, along with her teenage lover and his friend.

Salacious stuff. What made the story more juicy is that everyone in the Berkley household kept an online journal, or Web log, of their daily lives. The N&O was able to tap those blogs to add lush detail to its reporting, including the online musings of Berkley the day before his death and of his two teenage children, Ezekiel, age 18, and Becky, 16.

The Web sites, as one N&O story said Wednesday, "provide an almost voyeuristic look at the family's life." They included Becky Berkley's ruminations on her father's death and such details as her personal interests -- music, theater, plastic surgery, the Holocaust, even her first French kiss. The coverage included a photo of the girl's Web site, with pictures of Becky vamping for the camera, and her Internet user name. Readers also learned that Ezekiel Berkley maintained a site with graphic and vulgar content.

Too much information, said some of our readers. "(W)hat on earth makes the weblogs of the two children newsworthy at all?" asked Hart Matthews of Durham. "Are you suggesting the boy was involved because he uses hard language to describe his punk music? Or that the girl is trying to cover something up because she's so casual? Otherwise, I just can't fathom the purpose of such a story unless it's there to exploit the victims of the crime."

A Clayton mom whose children were in school with the Berkleys said publishing from Becky Berkley's blog was the same as taking her personal diary from her bedroom: "I just think she's a victim here, and you guys are continuing to victimize her. I don't see what her French kiss has to do with anything." (The Clayton woman didn't want her name used, to protect her own children.)

N&O editors defended the use of the family's Web site information as valuable detail that helped readers better understand the tangled relationships of this strange family. After all, it was the two Berkley teenagers who introduced Monique Berkley, their stepmother, to the men accused with her of killing Paul Berkley. Becky Berkley's blog shows that she had a crush on one of the accused.

Linda Williams, deputy managing editor, said the paper used information from the blogs that shed more light on the family and the accused killers, and it left out titillating, but unrelated, details of the children's personal lives. Information posted on the Internet is public, she noted, and by its nature is intended by its authors to be read by others, even strangers. "We discussed it and concluded that people who are blogging don't have an expectation of privacy, because it's on the Internet. Anybody can find it," Williams said. "It was clear that this was a family that communicated with each other and others through cyberspace."

Can publication of online information be an invasion of privacy? The phenomenon of the Internet and blogging as an information resource is so recent that there's not much history or track record for newspapers to go by. One journalism professor who studies online publishing sees personal blogs as a perfectly appropriate information source for newspapers. "I think it's fair to use it," said Phil Meyer of UNC-Chapel Hill. "This is a bizarre case, and you need to get into the motivations of these people." He added, "I don't see the difference between (the information) being in the newspaper and being on the Internet, except it's more permanent on the Internet."

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