PressEthic

The Poynter Institute gathered 25 professionals to start asking the tough ethical questions sparked by online journalism and blogging.

Its seems that the group came up with more questions than answers. But Bob Steele, conference organizer and Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values, stated that he was not looking for a "rulebook" from the group, but wanted participants to determine the issues, pertinent principles and the appropriate questions to ask.

Most of the participants were traditional news institutions but also included the president of the Media Bloggers Association.

In a Poynter article summarizing the conference, Rick Edmonds wrote that the heart of the matter was developing "guidelines that would be worth considering by a range of stakeholders that includes traditional news organizations, individual bloggers, and the millions of people who read, view and use content on the Web."

He wrote:

The group came up with starter sets of principles and protocols across five main areas: voice and tone; revenue and content; credibility and accuracy; resources and capacity and user-generated content.

Small groups of participants tackled each of those areas and, in the process, found a common issue sparking more debate than resolution across four of the five: the ethics of linking.

Honestly, I never considered how important it would be to examine my reasons for linking to a specific source. But what am I saying about the Daily Show's creditability if I link to a video on their site? What am I saying about the reliability of a local blogger's rants on a developer's plans, when I haven't backed them up with another source?

The group, and Edmonds, came up with some important questions to ask:

• If you provide a link to an external source, what are you saying about its reliability, taste and transparency?
• What purpose will be served?
• What harm might be caused?
• How much of this content is verified?
• How reliable and comprehensive are the sources?
• Are we giving proper context?
• What do you do if you find out, after the fact, that a link is badly flawed? Of course, you can take it down. But do you also owe readers some species of a correction, an explanation of what had been there and why it was pulled?
• How do you balance such often-conflicting considerations as editing resources available, the volume of material to be linked and the role of the reader in assessing the linked material for himself or herself? And just how thorough a vetting are we talking about?

Like I said, they came up with more questions than answers. But one group in the conference concluded that a good guideline would be to "commit to presenting as accurate and complete a picture of our world as possible" and "taking full advantage of emerging media and technology" to do so.

The Institute plans on exploring the issue further in the future. It will be interesting to see what answers they come up with.