In the summer of 1954, the American photographer Berenice Abbott set out with a couple of friends to photograph the length and breadth of U.S. 1, from its beginning in Fort Kent, Maine to its terminus in Key West, Fla. Abbott later explained that she did what she did because the American landscape was changing so rapidly. "Photography can only represent the present," she said in an interview. "Once photographed, the subject becomes a part of the past."Except that nowadays, subjects don't necessarily become a part of the past once they have been photographed. In this Age of Google, they may very well become a part of some distant present-a present that involves a job interview, perhaps, or even an online dating encounter. It's a reality that I fear many young people who set up blogs or MySpace pages don't pay enough attention to, and they really should.

But should newspaper editors pay attention to this reality, given that nearly all papers in the country now produce online versions of their print editions? Are the editors of college newspapers any more obliged than the editors of mainstream papers to take the perennial properties of the Internet into account before choosing the photographs they feature on their cyberpages?

There is, I'm afraid, no easy answer.

It's a dilemma that I discussed with Dan Hirschhorn '07, editor-in-chief of the Justice, long before the Oct. 10 and Oct. 17 editions of the paper brought the issue to the fore. And although Hirschhorn and I seem to differ on the matter, we are both equally ambivalent about our points of view.

Let me begin by stating that I do not believe it was inappropriate for the Justice to run its story about the administration's reaction to the "Less You Wear" dance with a pair of photographs showing exactly how little some of the people at the dance were wearing. If the administration believes, as Assistant Dean of Student Life Alwina Bennett stated, that the dance has deteriorated to "just naked people in a dark room," I think it is important for those of us who were not at the dance to see the photographs in order to evaluate Bennett's estimation of the event. One reader of the Justice wrote in to say that she didn't think the photographs should have been used without the permission of the subjects. I disagree. If a behavior occurs in the public square, it is fodder for news coverage. How, whether, when and where that coverage takes place is, of course, an editorial decision-but except in the case of children, journalistic ethics do not require an editor to obtain the permission of a subject who has acted in a public forum.

That same rule applies to the photograph of a student being taken into protective custody that was featured on the front page of the following week's edition of the Justice. This photograph was, I think, more problematic, simply because so-called "perp-walk" photographs tend to undermine our collective commitment to the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" (although, properly speaking, this was not a perp-walk, since the subject was not being deliberately paraded in front of a camera by police). Nevertheless, I think it is the damage that might have been done to that principle, more so than the damage that might have been done to the student's reputation on campus (which at least one reader has expressed concern about), that should have guided the editors of the Justice when determining whether and how to use the photograph in their print edition.

But then there is the complicated matter of the paper's online edition, which serves a community that exists beyond the boundaries of Brandeis University-and beyond the boundaries, even, of the year 2006. I have stated that newspaper editors are not ethically obliged to obtain permission from a photograph subject who is an adult, and Brandeis students legally are adults. But the majority of them are living on that part of the adult landscape that most closely resembles the American landscape Berenice Abbott photographed in 1954-that is to say, the rapidly changing part. Not only that, but Brandeis students are enjoying four very special years on that changing landscape, years when they are allowed, and sometimes even encouraged, in the spirit of discovery, to make some mistakes. The boy on a bicycle who's featured in one of Berenice Abbott's photographs became a part of the past as soon as Abbott clicked the shutter on her camera. The young adults in panties and handcuffs, though, who are featured in the online archives of the Justice will be very much a part of the present should the photographs be pulled up by a potential employer five years from now-even if the young woman who brazenly wore her underwear in public or the young man who attracted police attention in the Mods back in 2006 no longer exist.

So am I saying the photographs should not be featured in the online edition of the paper? No. My thoughts on this issue are not nearly so well-defined. Editor-in-Chief Dan Hirschhorn is firmly committed to the idea that any information conveyed in the print edition of the paper ought to be available in the online version as well, and I respect this point of view. Indeed, the general trend in newspaper publishing is to use the Internet to convey more information than a print version allows, not less.

At the same time, though, I wonder if it might not be appropriate to set up some kind of filter such that the simple "googling" of a name will not automatically bring an Internet user to the Justice's website. This would, of course, mitigate one of the truly remarkable contributions the Internet has made to our society, and that is the ease with which information can now be identified and accessed. As I sat in the microfilm room of the Farber Archives last week, looking at nineteenth-century journals that have yet to be scanned online, I was painfully aware of what an amazing research tool the Internet is-and I hesitate to limit its potential in any way. But I don't think putting a filter on the Justice's website would really limit the Internet, per se. It would just require people to be a bit more discriminating when they dig-and sometimes, discrimination can actually be a good thing.

The ombudsman serves as the readers' representative, writing a regular column evaluating the newspaper's journalistic performance. Prof. Maura Farrelly (AMST), the director of the journalism program and a former brodcast reporter for Voice of America, can be reached at farrelly@brandeis.edu.