PressEthic

It’s no news that newspaper staffs love blogs, and that many news sites host a variety of them. Topics range from your basic political commentary, to weird sports and pet obsessions. The advantage for the newspaper is, of course, a more engaged audience in an age of quickly changing media technology.

As San Jose Mercury News reporter Dana Hull recently put it, “the best newspaper blogs generate an avalanche of posts and comments from captivated readers, get linked to by other blogs and, ideally, drive more traffic to newspaper Web sites.”

But along with the wave of blogs, comes debate over the standards and ethics of hosting and operating them.

Hull writes:

“But newspapers' current passion for blogging is fueling a vigorous, industry-wide debate about everything from staffing to sourcing, standards to liability. There's an inevitable clash of values between a newspaper, which has a journalistic reputation and brand name to protect, and a swiftly changing medium that has grown in power and prestige precisely because it has flouted many of journalism's traditional rules.”

Hull quotes University of Minnesota media ethics professor Jane Kirtley as saying:

"Blogs are not intended to be objective. They are supposed to be opinionated, snarky and in your face — and that's not the way the mainstream media usually goes about reporting.”

A group of professional journalists met at the Poynter Institute late this past summer to discuss general guidelines for blogging, and as Hull reports, will available within months.

I’m always a little humored by print publications that latch so fervently on to blogging as it were the antidote for a slowly dying operation. I understand how important offering original content can be for attracting web traffic, but problem are bound to arise when you combine the rapid rate of personal publishing with the ethics and standards of a newspaper.

I’m not sure what guidelines the meeting at the Poynter Institute while end up with, but lets hope that they consider the is huge difference between a blog and a newspaper. Though I defiantly think that a blog associated with a print publication should be held to high standards regarding things like accuracy, libel, and defamation, the most popular blogs on the web are, as Kirtley notes, full of bias and snark. That’s what makes them fun to read, and if newspapers want in on blogs, they will just have to accept that.