Poynting the way
Bill Mitchell and Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute have put together a paper for the upcoming conference on blogging, journalism and credibility. It’s called “Earn Your Own Trust, Roll Your Own Ethics: Transparency and Beyond,” and I like it. They don’t assume that the only way to stay ethical is to live by an established code of ethics.
The idea, in brief, is for bloggers to invite questions from their audience about what questions they have about the blog, what might increase their level of trust, etc. The questions would vary with the blog. The blogger might then build an FAQ responding to such questions and could update the FAQ new questions arise.
Finally, the blogger could be guided by those questions in creating a principles and policies statement addressing issues of trust and credibility. The blogger could describe the principles he or she is committed to, e.g., fairness, independence, accuracy, etc. In addition, bloggers creating such a page could describe the processes they’d use in order to uphold their principles. They might explain how they handle updates and corrections on their blogs, for example, as well as an explanation of how they handle comments. And if the blogger wants to offer some personal background — where they’re coming from, as Jay Rosen puts it — so much the better.
Individual bloggers will have to make their own decisions about whatever principles and processes guide their behavior, of course. The most effective standards and codes are not imposed from the outside. The idea that the journalism establishment would have the standing or influence to impose ethical standards on the blogosphere seems especially disconnected from reality.
Excellent idea. Codes of ethics are great for professionals. For the rest of us (even professionals in their off hours), our lack of explicit, codified sets of ethical principles governing our every activity doesn’t mean we’re unethical. It just means we humans generally do what’s right and resort to ethical discussions when we go wrong or get confused.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Exactly what I was wrestling with when I wrote the Code of Blogging Ethics for Desirable Roasted Coffee.
Writers are informed by their ethics codes, which are informed by whatever ethics codes they’ve absorbed over the years. That’s clear.
What’s different for some writers (offline and on) is that they declare those codes: “These are the standards, Reader, that I will adhere to.”
I’d like to see more of that, with a lot less “sniffing” from journalists that bloggers are unethical.
Editorial frames are to be choosen by who publishes. It does’t change if it is a blog or a newspaper. Is it the same with ethics?
Yes, in a way. Publishing is a fair activity if it is made following a sort of agreement with the public. And if who publishes sticks to what was promised.
But this is only step one. Which is already a very revolutionary improvement.
Step two should be about improving the collective system that grows aroung the need for information. And at this point problems arise. What if one sticks to verifying what is being written and never excedes the limit of a research methodology in proving the news, while others speak aloud about gosts of information that conquer much more attention? It happens a lot. Is it only a question to be solved by the market and the quality of readers (that in time should abandon bad information and go towards the good one)?
This is not going to be easily solved. Shouldn’t there be a sort of common behaviour and feeling that awards those that look for proven information and disregards those that just cry aloud? Shouldn’t this kind of behaviour be extended while the other should be distrusted? How can this be achieved without a sort of (sort of) ethics?
I don’t know the answer. I know that some circles will have their own answer and it will be a sort of (sort of) ethics. In general, there will never be agreement about this. And that’s why I also agree with Mitchell’s and Steele’s proposal as a revolutionary step one. But don’t ask me to be completely and surely happy with it…