Chapter 18: Ethics Issues Specific to Web Journalism



Chapter 18: Ethics Issues Specific to Web Journalism

Overview: Journalism on the Web

View the documentary: “13 Seconds in August,”

Sara Quinn, “A year later, ’13 Seconds in August’ commemorates bridge collapse,” July 31, 2008.

David Shedden, “Why the new media isn’t: a personal journey,” poynteronline, Aug. 3, 2007. The author’s recollections of the changing technology in news.

Jeffrey Cole et. al., The UCLA Internet Report: Surveying the Digital Future (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Communication Policy, 2000), 5.

Cecilia Friend and Jane B. Singer, Online Journalism Ethics: Traditions and Transitions (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2007).

Paul Farhi, “The Twitter explosion,” American Journalism Review, June/July 2009. A definitive article on Twitter’s strengths and weaknesses as a method of transmitting the news. Discusses the rules and roles (as yet unclear) of tweeting journalists.

Ethics Issues in Web Journalism

Fred Mann, “ ‘New media’ bring a new set of problems,” May 1, 1998.



Robert Niles, “What are the ethics of online journalism?”, Online Journalism Review. A succinct ethics code.

“Online journalism ethics: Guidelines from the Conference,” poynteronline, Jan. 31, 2007. This is a set of guidelines for doing ethical journalism on the Web, created in August 2006 at a Poynter Institute conference.

Joshua Benton, “Len Downie: Online standards should match print standards,” Nieman Journalism Lab, Nov. 13, 2008. Benton writes a short introduction to the transcript of a speech by Leonard Downie Jr., then executive editor of The Washington Post. Includes a 23-minute video of Downie’s speech.

Bob Steele, “Ethical values and quality control in the Digital Era,” Nieman Reports, Winter 2008. Situations that editors confront in this digital-era maelstrom reflect the vexing ethical challenges and the diminished quality control standards at a time when they are most needed.

Ki Mae Heussner, “Paper’s decision to twitter 3-year-old’s funeral sparks outrage,” ABC News, Sept. 12, 2008. When a Rocky Mountain News reporter covered the funeral of a boy killed when a pickup truck crashed into an ice cream shop in Aurora, Colo., critics questioned the value of a play-by-play coverage of a tragedy.

Citizen Bloggers

Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, For the People (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2004).

Bill Mitchell and Bob Steele, “Earn your own trust, roll your own ethics: transparency and beyond,” Jan. 15, 2005. .

Rebecca Blood, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2002), 115. Read excerpts from the handbook at:

John Carroll, “Musings on the New Media and the Old,” a condensed version of his Creason Lecture at the University of Kentucky, April 1, 2008. [See separate file in this folder.] The full text of the lecture is at:

Alex S. Jones, “Bloggers are the sizzle, not the steak,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2004.



“Bloggers: A portrait of the Internet’s new storytellers,” Pew Internet and American Life Project, July 19, 2006. A survey of a nationally representative sample of bloggers.

Simon Owens, “Scott Rosenberg traces the blogosphere’s origins,” Mediashift, Sept. 22, 2008. An interview with the co-founder of .



Katie King, “Journalism as a conversation,” Nieman Reports, Winter 2008. “Today, digital publishing is practiced by the masses, and it’s inseparable from the practice of journalism.”

Frank Fitzpatrick, “Ibañez, Donaghy cases refuel the debate about blogging,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 14, 2009. Should the mainstream media ignore what bloggers report, or should they embrace their reporting standards? (News databases)

Blogging by Journalists

Brian Toolan, “An editor acts to limit a staffer’s weblog,” Nieman Reports, Fall 2003, 92-93

Andrew Sullivan, “Why I blog,” The Atlantic, November 2008. “As blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented … .”

Mallary Jean Tenore, “Live blogging: How it makes us better journalists,” poynteronline, April 9, 2008. “[J]ournalists … have found that live blogging can actually help us grow as storytellers – by teaching us to look for quirky details and be better listeners, note takers and deadline writers.”

Sewell Chan, “CNN producer says he was fired for blogging,” The New York Times, Feb. 28, 2008.

Interactivity: Benefits and Pitfalls

Kelly McBride, “Dialogue or diatribe: one woman’s story,” poynteronline, May 18, 2007.

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Bob Steele, “Baggy pants, drunken driving and day care: Cincy’s challenges with user comments,” poynteronline, May 24, 2007. .

Clark Hoyt, “Civil discourse, meet the Internet,” The New York Times, Nov. 4, 2007.



Saundra Keyes, “Fiery forums,” The American Editor, Winter 2009. “Anonymous comments drive traffic to newspaper Web sites and generate news tips, but

with embarrassing flame wars and damaged credibility, is the price too high to pay?” Surveys editors on how they deal with online users’ comments.

Jane B. Singer, “Moderation in moderating comments,” Media Ethics Online, June 2009. The online space is shared, and both creating and controlling content for it are collaborative exercises. The central ethical challenge for all the stakeholders is to make the collaborations work for everyone.

Virginia Hefferman, “Comment is king,” The New York Times, April 26, 2009. The echo-chamber effect of online readers’ comments is unpleasant, and it is hard to keep listening for the clearer, brighter, rarer voices drowned out in the online din. Which is too bad: newspaper journalism benefits from reader comments.



Adam Rose, “Louts out,” Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2008. Discusses strategies for how to handle offensive online comments. (Academic databases)

Pat Walters, “Dealing with comments: a few interesting approaches,” poynteronline, May 31, 2007.

Richard Pérez-Peña, “News sites rethink anonymous online comments,” The New York Times, April 11, 2010.

Leonard Pitts Jr., “Anonymity brings out the worst instincts,” The Miami Herald, March 31, 2010. “Why have message boards failed to live up to the noble expectations? The answer in a word is, anonymity. The fact that on a message board – unlike in an old-fashioned letter to the editor – no one is required to identify themselves, no one is required to say who they are and own what they’ve said, has inspired many to vent their most reptilian thoughts.”

Judy Zhuo, “Where anonymity breeds contempt,” The New York Times, Nov. 29, 2010. Zhuo, a product design manager for Facebook, writes: “At Facebook, where I’ve worked on the design of the public commenting widget, the approach is to try to replicate real-world social norms by emphasizing the human qualities of conversation. People’s faces, real names and brief biographies (‘John Doe from Lexington’) are placed next to their public comments, to establish a baseline of responsibility.”

Andrew Alexander, “Online readers need a chance to comment, but not to abuse,” The Washington Post, April 4, 2010. The ombudsman describes a Post initiative to divide commenters into “tiers,” placing those who identify themselves and observe the rules in a prominent “truster commenters” tier.

Rem Rieder, “No comment: It’s time to news sites to stop allowing anonymous online comments,” American Journalism Review, Summer 2010.

• Bill Reader, “In response: Banning unsigned comments undermines the media’s role as a forum for debate,” American Journalism Review, September 2010.

Calvin Stovall, “Internet snipers can’t hide behind free speech to justify vile comments,” , Oct. 30, 2010.

Margaret Sullivan, “Seeking a return to civility in online comments,” The Buffalo News, June 20, 2010.

Jesse Singal, “Freedom of screech: Anonymous online comment boards can be obnoxious, but eliminating them is a mistake,” The Boston Globe, June 27, 2010.

Keeping the Facts Straight in a Medium Built for Speed

Kurt Greenbaum, “Readers as editors,” The American Editor, Fall 2008. Greenbaum, endorsing an idea advanced by blogger Jeff Jarvis, wonders: “Now that the public can point out editors within minutes, can the modern newsroom afford to shed a layer of editors?”

Kelly McBride, “Journalists must expose, not perpetuate, bogus news,” poynteronline, September 3, 2009. In a two-week period, McBridge found at least four Internet hoaxes that could be traced to professional journalists deliberately creating false information, failing to vet their facts, or passing along information that is clearly suspect.



Bob Steele, “Ethical values and quality control in the digital era,” Nieman Reports, Winter 2008. “Situations that editors confront in this digital-era maelstrom reflect the vexing ethical challenges and the diminished quality control standards at a time they are most needed.”

Deciding When to Link to Questionable Sites

Steve Outing, “The thorny question of linking,” poynteronline, Oct. 21, 2004.

Debora Halpern Wenger and Deborah Potter, Advancing the Story: Broadcast Journalism in a Multimedia World (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2007), 278.

Maintaining Integrity (and Fairness) in the Archives

Clark Hoyt, “When bad news follows you,” The New York Times, Aug. 26, 2007.

Steve Kolowich, “Alumni try to rewrite history on college-newspaper Web sites,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15, 2009. As newspapers have begun digitizing their back issues, their Web sites have become the latest front in the battle over online identities. Youthful activities that once would have disappeared into the recesses of a campus library are now preserved in the online archives of student newspapers. Alumni are asking editors to redact the record.

Kathy English, “The long tail of news: To unpublish or not to unpublish,” a report prepared by English (public editor of the Toronto Star) for the Associated Press Managing Editors, October 2009. The report is based on a survey completed 110 newspaper editors; it showed that journalists have not agreed on a defined policy for dealing with requests to alter their electronic archives. English’s report:



• Craig Silverman, “Archival research: New study finds there’s no clear standard for updating or maintaining online news archives,” Columbia Journalism Review, Dec. 4, 2009.

• Mallary Jean Tenore, “5 ways news organizations respond to ‘unpublishing’ requests,” poynteronline, July 20, 2010.



Additional Case Studies

Blogger loses job over ‘Journolist’ comments: David Weigel, who wrote a blog about the conservative movement for The Washington Post, resigned June 25, 2010, when it was disclosed that he had written e-mails disparaging some people he was assigned to cover. The messages appeared on Journolist, a supposedly off-the-record listserv, which was abolished after Weigel’s resignation.

• Howard Kurtz, “Washington Post blogger David Weigel resigns after messages leak,” The Washington Post, June 26, 2010.



• Andrew Alexander, “Blogger loses job, Post loses standing among conservatives,” The Washington Post ombudsman blog, June 25, 2010.



• Ezra Klein, “On Journolist, and Dave Weigel,” a Washington Post blog, June 25, 2010; Klein was the founder of Journolist.



• Jeffrey Weiss, “Blogger’s fall: The lesson in David Weigel’s demise,” Politics Daily, June 26, 2010. Weiss writes, “An ‘off the record listserv’ is like a unicorn, a leprechaun, and a non-public status update on Facebook. Imaginary.”



• Greg Marx, “Look at us! Lessons from the response to the David Weigel flap,” Columbia Journalism Review, June 28, 2010. Marx writes, “[W]e have an opportunity to establish a new set of journalistic values – one that valorizes fair-mindedness, intellectual honesty, and proving your point with serious reporting, and that accepts a variety of ways to achieve these goals.”

The Trent Lott case: Esther Scott, “ ‘Big Media’ meets ‘the bloggers’: Coverage of Trent Lott’s remarks at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party,” 2004.

The Starr Report: J. D. Lasica, “Internet journalism and the Starr investigation,” in Tom Rosenstiel and Amy S. Mitchell (Eds.), Thinking Clearly: Cases in Journalistic Decision-Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 23-56.

Chat-room reporting: Robert I. Berkman and Christopher A. Shumway, “Is it appropriate for reporters to ‘lurk’ in online chat rooms?”, an excerpt from Digital Dilemmas: Ethical Issues for Online Media Professionals (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2003).

Ousting Eason Jordan: Neil Reisner, “The accidental blogger,” American Journalism Review, April/May 2005. “How a biotech company founder went to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and wound up costing CNN’s Eason Jordan has job.”

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