ethics

Mudslide in Ohio

Submitted by yelvington on November 11, 2007 - 1:45pm

Tuesday I'm in Pickerington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, to lead a daylong "citizen journalism" training workshop. Undoubtedly the meltdown at the Plain Dealer will be one of the topics of conversation. Noteworthy links:

Wide Open blog bumps up against journalistic ethics: Cleveland Reader Rep Ted Diadiun explains how "The Plain Dealer got itself spattered by some primordial ooze last week" and concludes with "You can't contribute to a political candidate and then write about his or her campaign, either as an employee or as a paid free-lancer for The Plain Dealer, on paper or online. Period."

Jeff Jarvis responds: "The problem, in my view, is that Diadiun isn’t listening and learning. That, you’d think, would be the fundamental qualification for his job. ... Diadiun just defends the paper against an accusation of buckling to political pressure and lashes out at the bloggers as aliens to the newspaper ways."

Jay Rosen says:"If you’re caught up in a situation that appears to pit journalists with ethics against bloggers who ain’t got none, you may actually be facing a conflict between one ethic and another, and it would be good to find out what the “other” is before deciding what to do."

My favorite, though, is a buried comment on Jarvis' site from Jill Miller Zimon observing that she's written Plain Dealer op-ed pieces many times, and never has been asked whether she has donated to anyone's political campaigns, or advised of any policy against it.

Related items: MSNBC's list of journalists who have contributed to candidates and a rundown of varying policies regarding political activity.

The baby and the bathwater

Submitted by yelvington on April 9, 2007 - 3:39pm

One of my favorite blogs is Creating Passionate Users, where Kathy Sierra's diagrams are as thought-provoking as her posts. Not long ago, some jackass posted threats in the comments on her website. She went public and the resulting uproar about cyber-bullying led Tim O'Reilly to call for a blogger code of conduct. Now Jimmy Wales has set up a wiki to develop that code.

This territory is at once dangerous and silly. Dangerous because claiming to adhere to a published code could place a blogger at legal risk that otherwise might not exist. Silly because it's not going to solve any problems.

No matter how many codes of conduct or ethical guidelines or terms-of-service documents we amass, some people are just going to be jackasses. The sort of person who threatened Kathy Sierra isn't going to be deterred by a code of conduct.

And some of the proposed solutions in the draft I see today would throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm specifically talking about "We do not allow anonymous comments," a provision that would require verified email addresses before anyone could comment on a blog post, and "We encourage blog hosts to enforce more vigorously their terms of service," a provision that suggests that Internet service providers should perform some sort of police function.

Don't get me wrong. Codes, guidelines and contract language all have roles to play, as do aspirational/mission statements. I've used all of them, and I certainly support the development of "safe places" where civil conversation can flourish.

But we're not talking about private developments or gated communities here. This is being pitched as a universal ruleset for the blogosphere. We need to keep in mind that freedom and order often act as opposing forces, and sometimes solving one problem can create many new ones.

See also: Dan Gillmor, who warns "they're creating a bit of a monster," Jeff Jarvis, who snarls, "I don’t need anyone lecturing me and telling me not to be disagreeable," and Ryan Sholin, who growls, "Keep your code of conduct out of my communication medium, thank you kindly."

Cuban's speech at ONA, ShareSleuth, and community video

Submitted by yelvington on October 7, 2006 - 9:07am

Mark Cuban was a keynote speaker yesterday at the Online News Association conference in Washington. There were rumblings in advance of dissatisfaction with that selection because of ethical discomfort with his ShareSleuth.com project with former Post-Dispatch business reporter Chris Carey. There were some questions raised by Jeff Jarvis and Rich Jaroslovsky and I thought Cuban handled them fairly well.

Try as I might, I can't get my undies in a bunch about ShareSleuth. Cuban is using the information Carey churns up to short stocks, and Cuban has access to that information before the rest of us. He's also open about that fact.

It's not unusual for journalists to leave the news profession and work as researchers and analysts for investment companies -- Rich did that, in fact, before returning to journalism for Bloomberg. What's unusual is that Carey is publishing his findings (and inviting tips). The combination is different than the way WSJ makes money on the unequal distribution of information in society, but I won't jump to the conclusion that different is bad.

If you haven't looked at the work Carey is doing at ShareSleuth, you should. Fascinating stories, especially if you're not unlucky enough to have invested with the pondscum he's exposing.

Cuban was asked what newspapers should be doing online, and his answer -- get members of the community to video their lives and their kids' lives and upload them into a shared local space -- is basically what we're already doing with Spotted (and with great results). We do not yet support video with Spotted but it's in the pipeline and I don't think our timing is at all bad. Despite all the hoopla about YouTube, the number of people shooting video is still very small and the future growth opportunity will be great.

Syndicate content