Journalism and Ethical Blogging

Martha Sperry of the Advocate’s Studio writes:

Yesterday, I read some­thing that riled me up. A tech blog post with an inflam­ma­tory title designed to ensure click-​​through and “opin­ion­ated” con­tent mar­gin­ally “based” on “facts” with an equally inflam­ma­tory bent. On a well-​​respected and highly viewed tech blog.

via Honor Among Bloggers « Advocate’s Studio.

She goes on to note that this kind of pan­der­ing to increase clicks is not with­out harm:

I surely don’t begrudge any­one their income oppor­tu­ni­ties, as long as they are not hurt­ing any­one in the process. Are these manip­u­la­tors hurt­ing any­one here? Umm, yes!  Whether they choose to be or not, blog­gers pop­u­late the new wave of journalism.

She goes on to point out that pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists adhere to a code of ethics, which includes ideas like: be hon­est, avoid mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, dis­tin­guish news from analy­sis and com­men­tary, and keep adver­tis­ing dis­tinct from news. This last cer­tainly raises ques­tions about paid reviews in blogs and other sim­i­lar ventures.

I under­stand her point that as tra­di­tional news sources fade in impor­tance, alter­na­tive sources of news and analy­sis — like blog­gers — have a greater eth­i­cal respon­si­bil­ity to take their place. But blog­gers are far more var­ied that jour­nal­ists, so per­haps it is unfair to expect all blog­gers to adhere to such a standard?

Personally, I feel the cur­rent news­pa­per trou­bles are tem­po­rary, although what will emerge out of it may be noth­ing like cur­rent news­pa­pers. Situational, eco­nomic and tech­no­log­i­cal changes often cause exten­sive dis­rup­tion to entrenched indus­try, but even­tu­ally new busi­ness mod­els emerge, even if old play­ers are replaced by new ones. I believe this is what will occur with jour­nal­ism, but it may take time.

Meanwhile, blog­gers who main­tain high stan­dards of ethics have the poten­tial to con­tribute for the ben­e­fit of us all. How can one trans­late the tra­di­tional code of jour­nal­ist ethics into blog­ging terms? Cyber Journalist has a pro­posal that makes sense, and I rec­om­mend you read and con­sider it.

But how can we tell which blog­gers uphold high stan­dards of ethics? In the tra­di­tional world of jour­nal­ism, news­pa­pers had a rep­u­ta­tion to main­tain such that fail­ing their read­ers could bank­rupt them. Of course, an alter­na­tive busi­ness model is to spe­cial­ize in not hon­estly seek­ing to inform read­ers — but most such “news” sources are well known for this. (Very unfor­tu­nately, even as obvi­ous as these may be to informed indi­vid­u­als, some mem­bers of the pub­lic are nonethe­less eas­ily con­fused.) But nev­er­the­less, there are a lim­ited num­ber of such sources, and over time it becomes pos­si­ble to sort them out and keep track of reputations.

In blog­ging, sources come and go quickly. Anyone can set up a blog. Anyone can write and be read. Potentially, this rapid­ity bet­ter allows for quick mar­ket deci­sions that sep­a­rate the “good” from the “bad” sources — so per­haps eth­i­cal blog­gers will sim­ply rise to the top.

The mar­ket (and the pub­lic) often needs help with this sift­ing, though, so hope­fully reputation-​​ranking and pub­li­ca­tion ser­vices of some kind — ”hope­fully based on more than sim­ply num­ber of read­ers (as many crowd­sourc­ing approaches cur­rently do) — ”will emerge to assist.

Sperry has more about how this might apply to legal blog­gers specif­i­cally (who she sug­gests likely already adhere to higher stan­dard, due to the greater impor­tance of their rep­u­ta­tions to their busi­nesses). She also sug­gests you leave the “wild asser­tions and crazy opin­ions” for social media (like Twitter) or cock­tail par­ties. I might go just a bit far­ther, given the per­ma­nence of online speech, and sug­gest you stick to the cock­tail par­ties, but oth­er­wise, I sec­ond her advice.

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