On the standards & ethics of blogging
January 20, 2010If you do a cursory google search, you will find thousands (around 1,120,000 actually) of mentions of blogging ethics. In the end, however, blogging ethically is the same as any other type of ethical journalism.
Are bloggers journalists?
As a blogger you may not consider yourself a journalist, but even if you’re just writing about your day or what you think about a subject, you are.
Journalism, as defined by the Random House Dictionary is:
1. A person who practices the occupation or profession of journalism.
2. A person who keeps a journal, diary, or other record of daily events.
Therefore, anyone who blogs is, by definition a journalist! (How does it feel to be a journalist? Pretty cool, eh?)
The power of blogs…
Blogs have given the public at large the power, not only in this country but the entire world. No longer do we have to rely on the “traditional” media. Too many times in world history horrible things have happened—and gone unnoticed—due to everyone relying on traditional, and in some cases, state-sponsored media. (I’m looking at you, Iran and China, and many others probably.) If it weren’t for Twitter, it’d be very unlikely that anyone would have known the full impact of the recent (and sadly, failed) Iran Revolution. How many of Hitler’s atrocities could have been stopped or could have never happened if we had this ability in the 30′s and 40′s?
Ethical Blogging
Editing previous posts
Sims recently said (and I’m paraphrasing here…) “The blog is a living, breathing thing…I know people who, and I have, gone back to posts I wrote 2 years ago to change and update them…Your ideas change, your perceptions change, and sometimes you want to reflect that in old posts.”
This really got me thinking. This is really a bad idea to spread without some caveats. Even though it is technically possible to do something, doesn’t mean it should be done. I technically can take an axe to my laptop, but I shouldn’t, as it’s still pretty new (2 years and counting…hopefully I won’t have the urge to upgrade for at least another 2, but Apple will probably come out with something so amazingly cool I won’t make it that far..), works great, and I need it for work and school. If you are going to edit previous posts, you should use 
Strikes or simply add the word EDIT: at the bottom and add text there if you want to add to it. Some (possibly all, I’m not sure) blogging platforms, when you update a post, it sends it back through the RSS feed, and people who have already read it will find it pretty odd and annoying that you’ve changed it without giving any indication of the changes. It will make you seem less truthful, and probably undermine your credibility in the long run.
Standards
As I said in my introduction, there’s around 1,200,000 mentions of blogging ethics on the web. It’s a topic that has plagued blogs since the beginning—For blogs to be taken seriously in the real world, and be a true competitor of the traditional media, bloggers must be able to convince the general public that they are credible. Too often do bloggers say “oh, it’s a blog, I don’t need to write with proper capitalization, punctuation, spelling or language”. I completely disagree. (When I say language, I mean using real words and not “foul” language.) As a blogger, you should consider every post you write as something that someone, be it a fellow blogger, your parents, a possible boss, your children might read and judge you. As far as the boss thing goes, bosses are ever increasingly checking up on social media sites for prospects and current employees… so watch out. However, this reminds me of an XKCD comic…
It’s important for everyone to retain credibility. Even if you don’t want to gain thousands or millions in readers, the people who do read it will stop if it’s hard to read. So, always assume that someone incredibly important, someone you want—or need—to impress is reading. Who knows, they might be.
A Code of Ethics
- Be Honest and Fair
- Minimize Harm
- Be Accountable
I shall leave you with a link to the first article on that Google search. It’s quite good and goes into detail of these main points.
A Bloggers’ Code of Ethics at CyberJournalist.net
Good post. You consider some important issues here. Yes, bloggers should indicate any updates, corrections or rewrites. Some blogs do just that, particulary the more “professional” variety. Personal bloggs are of a different sort. But more importantly, readers should approach blogs – or anything in print or the wider media – with a critical eye, cross referencing and fact checking.
Of course, I say you should hold yourself up to a high standard of writing, and yet I seem to have gotten off topic quite well.. Oops!