Online Journalism Ethics (or how I learned to love attribution and stop worrying)

Why do ethics matter?

This semester we've been working to become better journalists (editing, writing, design & interviewing.) I've always thought that ethics are the most important thing journalists can have, study and discuss. Most of the questions I asked in my News & Feature Writing class were regarding ethics and ethical decisions that my instructor made while on staff at newspapers. She's a great resource, since she also teaches the ethics class I'll be taking in about a year.

With ethics, it's not enough to know what people did in certain situations but to know why they made the decisions to do what they did so that you can evaluate situations based on those examples and apply your own personal ethics to them.

There are three levels of ethical responsibility
I. Self - Personal ethics
II. Institutional - Ethics which guide the organizations that we work for
III. Societal - Not laws but ethics concerning the beliefs and customs of a society

In class we listened to a 911 call from a woman who later died. There was some discussion about if, as journalists, we would release the audio of the actual 911 call. My take on it is no, if the story is simply about the fact that the woman died but I would probably use it if the story were about the 911 operator doing something incorrect.

The incident occurred in the Miami area, two Miami stations chose not to air the call and two stations chose to air an edited version of the call.

We read an article from freedomforum.org about traditional journalism and open-source journalism. I found this to be an interesting article and I had never considering using online communities as fact checking proof readers. I can see that, in certain instances, this would be a very useful tool. I'm not sure if it's something I'll be using for my article about sexism in the music industry, but I could see using it going forward on articles with subjects I'm not real sure about.

The Online News Association was set up to try and make sure online journalism keeps to the same ethical standards as other forms of media.

We then looked at an article about copyright infringement online and discussed if quoting another article or piece of media is ethical or not. I prefer to post links to things I'm referencing and attribute them and I've never quoted someone I didn't interview myself without attributing it. In fact, if you don't attribute something you didn't do yourself, that's plagiarism. And plagiarism is never good. When in doubt, attribute.

We talked about a great site, the Student Press Law Center, which we've discussed before, but is just a great resource for student publications and student media.

Dr. Baltrip also provided links to the Internet Society (ISOC) & Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which are resources that helped set internet standards, and are also good resources for ethics, etc.