MORE FROM ZONKETTEZonkette touched off a fuss with her revelations of consulting fees paid to bloggers (my original post on this is here) in hopes that it would positively influence what they were writing. She has a follow-up post today with some clarification and further thoughts.
My interest--and where our focus needs to be, whether you're a little green football or a kossack -- is in collectively building a culture online where we figure out norms for people who both consult and write online so that readers can have the tools to be skeptical, active participants. My current solution is that I don't read people who I know are also consultants for those they write about -- not because I think they are lying or shills, but I figure their writing is framed in part by their day jobs. How do other people deal with this? What tools do you use to keep your distance from commentators? Good questions in search of answers.
UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has some thoughts worth (as usual) reading. |
BLOGS, REPORTERS, OPINION, OBJECTIVITY
Excellent piece by Adam L. Penenberg at Wired on the
SOURCE: ED CONE |
THE ETHICS OF BLOGGINGLots of Blog World chatter about ethics, driven by a lot of things: the CBS firings, payoffs to media commentators, consulting fees paid to bloggers, etc. Rebecca MacKinnon has a timely post today that includes one man's proposed code of blogging ethics. You have to read the whole post because there's a lot of worthwhile and admirable stuff there. As a proposal, it's a good start toward a set of motherhood statements I think most of us can subscribe to. Like this:
Strive for factual truth and never intentionally deceive readers. Make yourself accountable for information you post online. Cite and link to all sources referenced in each blog post.... ...but not so much this:
...and secure permission before linking to other blogs or web content. That last part seems to miss an essential component of a commonly held understanding of what blogging is. It is not, in my understanding, op-ed writing. It is a conversation, a great circulating mass of ideas that get picked up, picked apart, added to, expanded upon (or dropped into the deep silence of cyberspace). No one I've ever linked to or quoted in this blog has ever complained, and I've never complained about being quoted or linked to by others. Insisting on a code of ethics that includes "permission to link" would not just slow the conversation down. (Hey, Simon, could you please dig through the hundreds of emails you must get, right now, to track down my request to cite you so I can get on with this?) "Permission to link" seems antithetical to my central concept of blogging as conversation, where you put stuff out not to "entertain" or "inform" but because you want to start a conversation, or keep one going. Other than that quibble, it's a nice start. RELATED: One of the other big drivers of the ethics conversations is a coming conference, Blogging, Journalism & Credibility.
The conference has drawn some flak for a shortage of bloggers, but that doesn't detract from the importance of what they'll be talking about. Lots of links at the conference site to ethics-related posts and musing. |
THE FUTURE OF THE PRESS?Is the future of the press partisan, agenda-driven publications, backed by "special interests?" That's one of the questions being asked by Susan O. Stranahan in a CJR Daily report on an Illinois community newspaper with a special beat.
...the Record is different from the others. It covers lawsuits -- and only lawsuits. That's because it's partly owned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- which just happens to have tort reform high on its agenda and was willing to pony up $200,000 to establish a journalistic beachhead in a litigious corner of the Land of Lincoln. So, is the Record a newspaper, or a propaganda sheet pushing an agenda? Has it blurred the very definition of journalism, erasing the once-solid line that separated objectivity and opinion? Is it a harbinger of what's to come in a world where everybody with a computer and an idea can become a media outlet? Stranahan finds the concept — and the fact that some others don't see a problem with the paper — a little chilling. So does the CJR Daily, which headlined the story Wherein Our Reporter Enters a Parallel Universe - but Escapes to Tell About It. Her article comes the same week that there's some internet buzz about an Atlantic Monthly article that carries the subtitle, "With the mass media losing their audience to smaller, more targeted outlets, we may be headed for an era of noisy, contentious press reminiscent of the 1800s." (Unfortunately, the article is not available on-line, a cause that Leonard Witt has taken up at at PJNet.) Author William Powers writes:
...the disaggregation of the old mass media has taken on a furious momentum. And the tribalization is not just about political ideology. In the post-mass-media era audiences are sorting themselves by ethnicity, language, religion, profession, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and numerous other factors. Powers argues this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
...newspapers helped pull the country together not by playing down differences and presenting everyone agreed but by celebrating and exploiting the fact that people didn't. It's the oldest American paradox: nothing unifies like individualism. He wraps up by pointing to the last U.S. presidential election "covered by noisy, divisive, often thoroughly disreputable post-broadcast-era media" and which had the highest voter turnout in any election there since 1968, near the height of the inflamed passions over the Vietnam War, racial inequality and other issues. There was a difference, though, between the journalistic rowdiness of the press in a young America and what's happening with the publication of the agenda-driven Record. If you study those old newspapers and read the scholarly and popular historical accounts, it seems fairly clear that there was rarely any doubt about which group or individual with which agenda was driving which publication. (Of course, that may be a case of historical "20/20 vision, but only looking back" to quote a songwriter friend of mine.) That wasn't the case with The Record, which never declared the Chamber of Commerce ownership stake. It only came to light when it was revealed by the Washington Post.
As a society that relies on the informational and interpretive abilities of media, we're going to need a lot more clarity if the future of media is "unmassed." If the new media can't provide that, we're going to need some clear-eyed critics and guides to get us through it all. |
TECHNICAL PROBLEMS?I just noticed that Safari is having trouble loading Notes From a Teacher (something is hanging it up and stopping it from loading completely). Firefox still loads the page, but it's slow to come up. Apologies. I'll see if I can track down the gremlins. UPDATE: I've tinkered with the code a little and hope this makes a difference. Again, my apologies if you've been trying to get here and haven't been able to.
UPDATE II: The problem seems to be fixed. The culprit apparently was a bit of coding from the TLB ecosystem report, so that report no longer appears. You'll have to trust that I'm still a Lowly Insect in the blog ecosphere. |
MEDIA AND INFLUENCEArmed Liberal at Winds of Change continues the debate on media, blogs and influence.
Clearly blogging is a recruiting tool — smart bloggers have the opportunity to move into advocacy or policy roles, and the visibility their blogs gives them may help that happen. But it also opens the door to a (relatively inexpensive) way to buy buzz and mindshare. (Among the posts Armed Liberal points to is the one from Zonkette cited below.)
If 2004 was the Year of the Bloggers, it appears 2005 may be shaping up as the year that critical eyes are turned on Blog World and a lot of tough questions are posed — about transparency, accountability, credibility. In short, all those attributes that a lot of bloggers cite as failures of legacy media. |
INFORMING, EDUCATINGI really like what The Seattle Times has done with an investigative series that looks "inside the mysterious spy case against Army Capt. James Yee." Some of you may remember the story: Yee, a Muslim who worked at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, was charged with spying. The charges was eventually dropped and earlier this year, he was honourably discharged from the Army. While the story itself is compelling journalism, what I really like is how The Times is using its paper and the internet to show readers how the story came together. As well as links to a short report and a column by Executive Editor Mike Fancher on how the story was done. It's a good example of major media adopting the idea of transparency and and even better example of how legacy media can educated readers about the "how" as well as informing them about the "what." Letting me in on the documentation and telling me how it was all done adds credibility to the piece by allowing me to see what the reporter saw.
SOURCE: THE SCOOP |
Last update: 1/30/05; 10:22:00 PM .
