Bloggers' ideas about ethics
Some ideas on what ethical practices bloggers should follow, from today's WSJ:
• Reveal biases: "I keep coming back to the idea of personal integrity," says Jeff Jarvis, a blogger at Buzzmachine.com. "It's relevant for us to tell people where we come from, so you can then judge us," he says. "The fact of how I feel about Howard Stern is relevant when I go around defending him. It's fine for people to know that I'm a fan of his."
• Disclose who pays your salary or funds the site's operating costs: "The audience should be able to come to your blog and assume that you're not on the take," says Jason McCabe Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs Inc., which publishes Autoblog.com and Engadget.com. He holds the 45 bloggers that work for him to "old-school" standards: no junkets, no gifts, no review products.
• Correct mistakes: Blog readers respond instantaneously, especially when they see an inaccuracy, so the instant feedback keeps bloggers accountable: "When I make a mistake, people jump on me like white blood cells on a germ. If I don't correct it, my reputation's going to suffer," says Mr. Jarvis.
• Don't knowingly publish something false: "Right now the currency is readership and respect, not money," says Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who writes Instapundit.com, a well-read blog. "I don't think you can start reading a blog and immediately know who to trust." That relationship is built over time. Mr. Reynolds says he wouldn't knowingly publish or link to something false -- but as one guy at a computer, there's only so much fact-checking he can do.
Jay Rosen, the New York University Journalism Department chairman, told WSJ that as bloggers move away from opinion writing and become what he calls "citizen-journalists," they will inevitably struggle with the same ethics questions that traditional media did. "The blogger system is necessarily evolving and changing and will go through crises and problems and periods of invention, because it's new," he says.
For more ideas on how to do the right thing when publishing on Weblogs, here is CyberJournalist.net's recommended Bloggers' Code of Ethics.
Jan 21, 2005 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(2)
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2 comments about 'Bloggers' ideas about ethics'Under "Correct Mistakes," you've got "so the instand feedback keeps bloggers..." Do you mean "instant?"
Posted by Borus at January 26, 2005 5:02 AM
Indeed. How ironic! I fixed it... thanks!
Posted by Editor at January 26, 2005 7:50 PM
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