‘If Facebook were a nation it would be the third largest country on earth.’ With so many people consuming and interacting with media online, we asked our panel at this month’s Walkley Media Conference, whether they foresee any ethical implications in breaking down the barriers in our new media landscape. Below is a summary of their comments.
Panellists: Lawrie Zion (La Trobe University), David Higgins (editor of news.com.au), Christopher Warren (MEAA Federal Secretary) and chaired by Liz Jackson (ABC journalist, Four Corners)
Liz Jackson opened the discussion by paraphrasing a quote from the Online Journalism Review 2007, which reported that the ethics of online journalism are “essentially no different” to the ethics of traditional journalism.
Chris Warren agreed with this assessment, saying that personally he felt that ethical guidelines, such as respect for truth and the rights of others, “remain applicable regardless of the platform.” He also made the interesting observation that, in terms of funding, “in old media the ad pulls the story, whereas in new media the story now pulls the ad.”
“We’re familiar with the idea of cash-for-comment, but what about cash-for-clicks?” asked David Higgins. Higgins said there is a lot of pressure in an online environment to write stories which will generate hits. Interviewing someone who is “popular in the click economy” is one way web writers try to increase their hits, Higgins explained. He used the example of NYU Professor Jay Rosen, who has almost 40 000 followers on Twitter and re-tweets all articles he is involved in. When compared with the choice to report stories or interviews on topics not so popular in the click economy, “Could interviewing someone [like Rosen] who offers the chance at more clicks, prove too much of a temptation?"
Lawrie Zion worries about the next generation of online journalists who “don’t make the connection between blogging and journalism and therefore don’t think that the same ethics apply.” In Zion’s opinion, there are more and more people building journalism careers “without an institute around them”, meaning that ethics are “at the whim of each individual writer.” As senior lecturer in journalism at La Trobe University, Zion teaches his students to incorporate hyperlinks in their articles as a way to easily provide credit where credit is due.
Liz Jackson highlighted the case of Julian Assange and Wikileaks as being the most current and provocative example of how new media can challenge traditional journalistic practices. She described him as being both “hero-worshipped and hated” for his exposure of thousands of classified U.S. government documents.
“Online journalism is truly stateless now,” said Zion in response. Although, Zion said we are yet to see whether the work of Assange and others will lead to a “more transparent government or governments which are better at hiding things.”
In response to a question from Liz Jackson about the use of Facebook photos, David Higgins said that journalists probably don’t consider taking Facebook photos “as obviously ethically compromising as stealing photos off a mantelpiece.” Chris Warren agreed, saying that many journalists assume that because the images appear in the public domain, we can use them. “But this is hugely at odds with widely held public expectations. People don’t expect their Facebook photos to appear in the paper,” he explained.
The panel agreed that one particularly ethically damaging element of new media is the propensity of some to leave anonymous comments or to comment under pseudonyms. Such practices leave media organisations unable to account for the opinions posted on their sites, either by as comments to articles or on live Twitter feeds. David Higgins summed up by arguing that such disregard for ethics was detrimental to journalism as a whole, “there are professional reasons to adhere to ethical standards, we define ourselves as professionals by what we will not do,” he said.
You can access the Media Alliance Code of Ethics and Ethics Complaint Procedure here
Or, visit Upstart, an online magazine edited by panellist Professor Lawrie Zion, which showcases student writing.
