DOUBLE STANDARDS?Blogs are better, supporters write, because, among other things, they are transparent. No hidden agendas, not hidden biases. Everything is out in the open. Well, not really. At Zonkette:
I think the ethics question is a serious one, which I've brought up elsewhere and fought with Markos Zuniga, and several others in the blogosphere, about. In this past election, at least a few prominent bloggers were paid as consultants by candidates and groups they regularly blogged about. In bad old media, that would be a direct conflict of interest and, if not disclosed, a firing offence. Does the fact that the blogs in question are obviously blogs of opinion from a particular political standpoint make it different? The fact this is being talked about is another sign of the rapid maturation of Blog World. Some of the sites (Daily Kos et al) have readership that outstrip all but the largest of media companies. Some are star of the online world and, in the case of Wonkette, Jeff Jarvis and others, regulars on and in old media, too. But it seems to me that if we in "this world" are to be taken seriously, we have to show that we live up to the standards we demand of media, and to the self-professed strengths of blogging, including the much bally-hooed transparency that we don't get from legacy media. If you're blogging about someone who is paying you, let me know. I'm smart enough to figure out if it's influencing you or not. If you don't tell me (and I later find out) I'll wonder what else you're hiding.
(In the interest of transparency, no one pays me to do this and I cover all associated costs — broadband connection, hosting, software, etc. — myself.) |
DAN AND THE LAW
While I'm fumbling my way through some ideas about the legalities of the internet (posts below), Dan Gillmor is moving into a position to help drive the debate. He's been named a Fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. |
FOOLING THE MEDIALots of comment at lots of media sites about this: Fake tsunami photos fool media. A number of newspapers around the world have been taken in by two-year-old photos from flooding in China, and making the internet rounds as tsunami pix. At Cyberjournalist.net:
So far few news organizations have figured out how to handle photos and information from "citizen journalists" on a large scale while still applying the same level of verification news organizations traditionally apply to information before publishing. Figuring that out will be key to mainstream media organizations' ability to incorporate citizen journalism as it evolves. EditorsWeblog.org adds some great advice:
...Sree Sreenivasan, Professor at Columbia and a visiting professor at Poynter, criticizes these hoaxes saying, "My mantra: If something is too good to be true (Microsoft giving away stock to you) or too bad to be true (travelers found in tubs of ice with their kidneys stolen), it probably is." Before forwarding any emails, Sreenivasan checks their validity at UrbanLegends.about.com and Snope.com's What's New page, both sites that keep track of breaking news and photos on the internet.
UrbanLegends and Snopes should be on every journalist's bookmark list. Better still, both have an RSS feed, so you can stay up to date on the hoaxes du jour. |
FOLLOWING UP ON OWNERSHIPThe issue of the rights of "content creators" in the wide-open spaces of the internet is apparently on more than a few minds. After writing the post below (More thoughts on ownership), I've come across a couple of other sites where the issue is being discussed. At Don't Lose the Question, Raymond M. Kristiansen asks Can we just disregard copyright issues during a tsunami? SOURCE: J.D. LASICA AT NEW MEDIA MUSINGS He picks up on the case of the video I alluded to that went from creator to mainstream media to "public domain," with a loss of credit somewhere along the line. (My memory of the original item was faulty; his post spells it out.) Raymond concludes:
As the buzzword goes, bloggers and video blogging is the future. No doubt about that. But if we are to mature as an alternative, we also need to be careful about what we are doing. Acting like careless pirates is not the solution — even if you do not currently make money on the traffic your content generates. There's more in the comments that follow his post. My original item was picked up by Lloyd @Work, a new blog by Lloyd Shepherd, Head of Development at Guardian Unlimited. He agrees this is an important and emerging issue:
I'm sure the fix will have to be technological, though it seems ironic that the creative commons may have to run a form of DRM (MRM — moral rights management?) in order to thrive. But it also strikes me that the way "connective" technology is evolving &mdash trackbacks, Technorati pings, Google &mdash it is becoming easier, not more difficult, to keep at least half an eye on who's using your stuff (one guy I know has something set up to track searches on his name, all the time). So maybe a technological solution based on that, rather than on adding metadata, might be the answer. The irony — musings about some sort of moral rights management (I like that phrase) by someone who believes strongly in the creative commons — is hard to miss. It's in the great messy middle — between outright piracy and the outright control that the entertainment industry seems intent on creating — that the work needs to be done. Right now, the most widespread idea appears to be this: I've found cool stuff, I'm going to put it on my site but I'll take it down if the rightful owner finds it here and asks that it be taken down, which seems backwards. I don't want to keep my stuff in a corral. I also don't want it misused or used in a way that conflicts with the things I believe in. I don't want someone using one of my photos from the Florida Everglades at a web site that argues for more parking lots there, for instance.
A tech fix (whether it's metadata, pings, whatever) is part of the answer. We also need much more discussion (and much more widely spread than this little blog provides) so that we are all aware of what's legal and moral in all this new media. Those who work in mainstream media have a firm grasp on where the lines are drawn, based on a common culture. We need to bring that type of cultural learning to the internet. |
BLOGS AS MAINSTREAM MEDIA?Andrew Sullivan shudders at the thought:
Blogs are strongest when they are politically diverse, when they are committed to insurgency rather than power, when they belong to no party. I'm particularly worried that the blogosphere has become far more knee-jerk, shrill and partisan since the days when I first started blogging. Some of that's healthy and inevitable; but too much is damaging. In challenging the MSM, we should resist the temptation to become like them. 9:04:07 AM LINK TO THIS POST |
Last update: 1/30/05; 10:21:57 PM .
