(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...Journalists need to remember that bloggers are not journalists. The media wrongly believes we aspire to be reporters.
The path is clear to become a reporter: attend J-School and report for a paper. Most bloggers enjoy their freedom — the freedom from rigorous journalistic standards.
Bloggers can become journalists, but we will need to then be journalists and follow a journalistic honor code. Until then, the medium is the message. Blogs are similar to letters to the editors: they might reside alongside and even in newspapers, but letters to the editor are not journalism and the letter-writers are not journalists and don’t aspire to be.
Leave us alone if you please.
Ethical journalism is becoming more of an oxymoron as papers become more competitive. Bloggers Aren’t Ethical explores this issue. Even though I have already written about this, I rediscovered it through the echo chamber with the added bonus of the words of J. D. Lasica
Stowe Boyd believes that the collaboration between bloggers and corporations will “turn the blogosphere into a graffiti-laden slum where you won’t be able to tell if a blog posting is genuine or a paid message.�? I don’t agree. I believe the media is the message and I believe that the majority of bloggers aspire only to share and entertain.
More like talk radio or television, where programming is bound to advertising like conjoined twins. They share lifeblood and are inexorably linked. Talking about ethics at this point is really pushing the limit of over-regulation. Caveat emptor is the common phrase, “buyer beware”; but the more apropos is caveat lector, which means “let the reader beware.”
For a blogger to become a journalist, he much become a journalist. Go to J-School and become licensed and accredited.
Until then, we’re bloggers and you readers — especially you journalists who steal from us more and more — need to be more discerning, more realistic, and do a better job of checking your facts:
Caveat emptor et caveat lector
Filed under: Blogger Ethics, Caveat Lector
Loading ...
Leave a Reply