Ethics for Digital Journalists

Emerging Best Practices

Lawrie Zion, David Craig, Lawrie Zion, David Craig

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135114305
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Langues et linguistique
• Sous-sujet: Journalisme

The rapid growth of online media has led to new complications in journalism ethics and practice. While traditional ethical principles may not fundamentally change when information is disseminated online, applying them across platforms has become more challenging as new kinds of interactions develop between journalists and audiences.

In Ethics for Digital Journalists, Lawrie Zion and David Craig draw together the international expertise and experience of journalists and scholars who have all been part of the process of shaping best practices in digital journalism. Drawing on contemporary events and controversies like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Arab Spring, the authors examine emerging best practices in everything from transparency and verification to aggregation, collaboration, live blogging, tweeting and the challenges of digital narratives. At a time when questions of ethics and practice are challenged and subject to intense debate, this book is designed to provide students and practitioners with the insights and skills to realize their potential as professionals.

1
Why Best Practices?

Lawrie Zion

LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

This book is about how journalists and journalism can realize their potential at a time of enormous change. It is a contribution to developing debates about the crisis of journalism—a crisis not just of business models or technologies, but also one of ethics. But the book also aims to point forward by examining how journalism might actually be improved by the changes that are transforming it as a profession and a practice. Amid the chaos stemming from both the collapse of the traditional business model for print journalism and the explosion of digital media, many practitioners are addressing questions about how journalism’s mission to inform, enlighten, and entertain might be renewed in more open and collaborative ways.

This project, which features contributions from 15 academics and journalists from seven countries, is itself designed to be an example of this collaboration. It begins with an examination of the utility of the concept of “best practices” as a framing device for the application of ethical principles and for dealing with the practical challenges that have arisen in the wake of changes to journalism practice. It also discusses how the process of exploring emerging best practices might make journalism more open and accountable.

The book will explore themes of emerging best practices as they relate to network journalism sphere, transparency, verification, links and attribution, aggregation and curation, live blogging and tweeting, corrections and unpublishing, collaboration, moderation and audience participation, the private and public self on social media, and the challenges of multimedia storytelling and data journalism.

It will examine these topics by illuminating some of the new kinds of relationships being forged between individuals and organizations producing media and their audiences, and providing case studies that illustrate how emerging best practices in digital journalism can enhance the application of ethical principles and lead to better journalism.

Best Practices

Question: Is it true, as one respondent confidently asserted, “If it’s fact-checked, it’s not a blog,” and is this an existential or a definitional question? The issue is an important one because so many in the blogosphere insist that blogs have (and are entitled to) their own rules of the road. Subject for discussion: Why have earlier attempts at standardizing the world of blogs and social media notoriously failed? Is it, at long last, possible to identify best practices for using the tools and techniques of digital journalism?

(Navasky and Lerner 2010, 42)

The term “best practices” has emerged relatively recently in discussions about journalism. But its origins can be traced back almost a century to Frederick Taylor’s 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor 1911) where he stated that “among the various methods and implements used in each element of each trade there is always one method and one implement which is quicker and better than any of the rest” (quoted in King 2007). This came to be called “one best way” (King 2007).

While the private sector and management provide one trajectory for the history of the term, another origin for “best practice” comes from the very different area of agricultural extension where research-based innovations in the United States were promoted at the county and state level early in the 20th century (King 2007; McKeon 1998).

The term has since gained currency in a broad range of professional fields including law, medicine, management, education, information technology, immigration, public policy, and in the nongovernmental organization (NGO) sphere (McKeon 1998; Bendixsen and de Guchteneire 2003) and continues to be used widely in diverse contexts (King 2007). UNESCO’s International Migration program, which ran its own best practices project to realize its goal of promoting human rights for migrants, defines best practices as “successful initiatives which have a demonstrable and tangible impact on improving people’s quality of life.” Best practice activities, it is suggested, have the potential for replication, can lead to other ideas, and can inspire policy development and initiatives elsewhere (UNESCO 2014). Other “best practices” definitions include “a set of guidelines, ethics or ideas that represent the most efficient or prudent course of action” (Investopedia 2013) and “an industry accepted way of doing something that works” (itSMF Australia 2013).

This book is based in part on the assumption that the speed of changes in journalism practice and the emergence of new kinds of journalism in the digital sphere necessitate new approaches to exploring and developing standards and guidelines within the media sphere, and that some of the approaches to this, to be discussed below, show a promising start.

But first it’s useful to note how the issue of adopting best practices has been approached in another area. Writing about education, Denise McKeon (1998) suggests three approaches to strengthening the efficacy of best practices. The first of these, she argues, is to develop an exploratory framework:

The one-size fits all approach to best practice does not usually work in medicine or law, and it is not likely to work in education, either. Therefore, what is more likely to work in education (as in medicine or law) is a more generative approach to the concept of best practice—with teachers asking questions, exploring the research, making educated guesses about the models that are most likely to fill the bill, trying those models, and observing the effect those models have on their classes and their practice.

(498)

Second, McKeon advocates ensuring collaboration between researchers and practitioners.

Could a collaborative research and development system be constructed in education? Could it include teachers as colleagues and partners in the research and development enterprise? Could it permit both formal research and practical inquiry (research conducted by practitioners to help them understand their contexts, practices, and students)? There is evidence to suggest that it could.

(499)

Her final consideration in strengthening best practices in education is the importance of the dissemination or diffusion function. “Once there is some agreement about what constitutes best practice, how does that knowledge make its way to the people who need it most?” This is a particularly pertinent issue in the case of digital media, with so much now being published outside of the traditional professional domain of journalism.

Critiques of best practices also point to some of the challenges and limitations inherent in any attempt to develop useful outcomes. A 2007 policy brief focusing on best practice approaches by the Network for International Policies and Cooperation in Education and Training stressed that best practices

are not fruits just waiting to be plucked. They need to be re-potted, grafted, and reworked for different soil conditions. … Our authors acknowledge that there is potentially good practice or best practice, but these can’t just be borrowed and mainstreamed. Or if there is borrowing, there needs to be an awareness of the culture, “chemistry”, history, and political economy of the education system that produced the innovation, as well as a recognition of the learning and adapting that has to take place, if these practices are to be effectively embedded in a new context. This is not just a requirement for a handful of policy-makers but for education communities more generally.

(Network for International Policies and Cooperation in Education and Training 2007)

Best Practices in Digital Journalism

How might these considerations apply in the context of the media? A new set of problems arising simultaneously due to rapid technological developments and the emergence of new practices in everything from blogging to user-generated content, verification, correcting errors, and hyperlinking has created confusion, and in some cases, exasperation on a wide scale. Take linking for instance, which is the subject of Chapter 6. It’s one thing to affirm the need to acknowledge sources, but how might this best be done using hyperlinks? What kinds of information require linking? What should you link to? Traditional ethics codes remain an important foundation for thinking about journalism, but can be hard to apply in emerging terrain.

Linking is just one of many best practice issues to be explored in this book. That the term “best practices” has turned up only relatively recently in discussions about journalism might be in part because of factors associated with the professional identity of journalists (including some resistance to being seen as “professionals”). As Ivor Shapiro suggests:

the lack of a widely recognized framework for assessing quality or excellence in journalism amounts to a fog of aspiration whose origins presumably lie in journalism’s historically feisty culture, which is largely hostile to corporate or institutional concepts such as “quality assurance” or even “best practices.”

(Shapiro 2010, 145)

Codes of ethics, Shapiro argues, “have been accepted, sometimes reluctantly, as a bulwark against abuses or against perceived threats to credibility, but words like “standards” raise the specter of journalism becoming a “profession”—a term associated, for some, with government-imposed collective self-regulation and with diminished individual autonomy and innovation.” By contrast to doctors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals, “journalists, scholars of journalism, and others with interest in the field lack a common evaluative lexicon. This hermeneutic gap cannot but make a difference to quality in practice” (Shapiro 2010, 145).

But this is changing as journalists and scholars have continued to wrestle with the challenges of a rapidly evolving mediascape. The term “best practices” has been used—apparently at least partly coincidentally—in a number of recent initiatives involving the application of ethical principles online, as well as in discussions of how to optimize the capacities of technological innovations.

In a study I undertook for a paper presented at the 2012 International Symposium on Online Journalism (Zion 2012a) which is the genesis of this book, I examined a number of best practice initiatives undertaken by media organizations, including the American University’s Center for Media & Social Impact formerly known as the Center for Social Media. One of the conclusions of its report “Scan and Analysis of Best Practices in Digital Journalism in and Outside U.S. Public Broadcasting” was that “Although the nature of technology, audiences, and journalism itself continues to change, recent reports … begin to suggest a set of emerging best practices, principles, and norms that can guide how public broadcasting outlets and producers adapt to the digital landscape.” The term “best practices,” it points out, is “more than a buzz phrase”:

In any professional sector or industry, researchers commonly identify a set of activities, principles, themes, norms, or routines that appear to aid industry members in meeting common challenges or achieving shared goals. Best practices are intended to be generalizable across organizations and settings, though the decision to adopt any recommended activity will depend on the needs, resources, and goals of a particular organization.

(Aufderheide et al. 2009)

Another Center for Media & Social Impact report, “Copyright, Free Speech, and the Public’s Right Know: How Journalists Think About Fair Use,” found that journalists are facing ever-greater challenges to applying the doctrine of fair use in daily life, in part because of confusions associated with the growth of digital media. “Social media, video, and user-generated content pose new challenges and unfamiliar choices. Online aggregators, bloggers and citizen journalists copy original material and further destabilize business models” (Aufderheide and Jaszi 2012).

The report concluded that

until journalists establish their own best practices in fair use, journalists and their institutions and gatekeepers will continue to be haunted by fear, letting unfounded risk-management calculations substitute for a clear understanding of what is normal and appropriate in employment of fair use. As new opportunities develop with the evolution of digital culture, the very mission of journalism is at stake.

Another organization that has been proactively developing best practices initiatives in response to the evolution of digital media is the Canadian Association of Journalists. In 2010 it published “The Ethics of Unpublishing” report, which offered guidelines on the issues of correcting online content and handling public requests to “unpublish” material (English, Currie, and Link 2010).

This is significant because the capacity to “unpublish”—that is, to remove material from a website—is something that was not possible in the print era, and traditional ethical codes don’t really equip publishers with guidance about circumstances in which it might be considered ethical to unpublish. Further complicating the issue is that while it’s technical...