gatewatching

The debate about the ethics of naming Katherine Wilson has spilled over to Troppo, where Don Arthur reflects on his own actions, and responds to my concerns. The new registration thingy at Troppo is taking awhile to give me a password, and my lunchbreak is probably my only window for blogging today, so I’ll reply here rather then there. Sorry Troppo folks.

I’ve tried not to personalise my comments at any stage, except when directly replying to people. I know the way that tends to turn out, and I’m really trying to advance some general principles and have a discussion about ethics, rather than trying to offer free character assessments to anyone in particular.

For what it’s worth, I think by the standards I’ve been trying to advance, Don behaved well. He tried to confirm his hunch with Wilson, and his reporting of what other blogs were saying was fairly unembroidered until he did get some confirmation via Margaret Simons. I have said Don was an exception to what I have been saying about bloggers’ treatment of this information (without directly naming him) from my first post on this topic.

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blogging, ethics blogging, blogosphere, Club Troppo, ethics, Hoax, KatherineWilson, KeithWindschuttle, Quadrant

I’ve had to be away from my computer since Friday, as I’ve been entertaining visitors. When I came back the last thread had been transformed out of all recognition. I thought that rather than address everything that had been said there with further comments, and in the light of further posts at The Content Makers and LP, it might be good to post anew.

Over the last few days a mysterious piece of woodwork called the “journalists versus bloggers frame” has kicked around a fair bit. What motivated my original post was, in part, a desire to trouble an idea that seemed to be doing the rounds that comparisons between bloggers and journalists were necessarily uninformative, even misleading - “out of court” as I said initially. I elaborated on this in comments in the last thread. While I don’t think it’s the only lens through which practices of blogging ought to be viewed, I think there are times in which it’s perfectly legitimate and relevant to compare the actions of bloggers and journalists. There are circumstances in which the actions of bloggers and journalists overlap sufficiently for the comparison to be informative. This is one of them.

What’s at issue is a very specific question: when is it right to publish details of someone’s identity, knowing that revealing this information may have damaging effects on the the reputation of the person concerned? This is an ethical question with implications for the practice of anyone engaged in publishing information. My answer to the question is: the appropriate time to name someone publicly is after you’ve had some solid confirmation of the person’s identity, and ideally this should be first-hand confirmation.

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blogging, ethics, media blogging, blogosphere, Club Troppo, ethics, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, media

A little while back, during the AMIC Conference, I was at an after-dinner presentation by a honcho from Fairfax Online. I asked whether they write news with RSS Readers in mind. She said that folk who take their news through RSS Feeds are pretty well an elite minority in Australia, and they’re not really taken into account by the big online players when they’re presenting content. It may sound odd to those of us who use them habitually, but most people get by quite happily by simply going directly to their favourite sites for news, Googling topics of interest, or relying on forms of aggregation that don’t involve RSS - like lists of links on trusted sites.

Perhaps Ken Parish has had the same inkling. Over on Club Troppo he’s unveiled the Tropposphere, which is, as he puts it, a “‘hard-wired’ online feed reader’ hosted by Troppo. It’s their selection of the best of the Australian blogosphere, and I guess it’s intended to augment their daily “Missing Link” compilations, which range around more broadly.

It’s a good initiative, particularly for those who don’t use feeds. Beyond that, it visualises one version of community in the Australian blogosphere (obviously, as in any selection, there’s a lot that’s excluded, but Ken explains the principles by which blogs have been chosen quite clearly).

Nice work Ken and the Troppo crew.

(PS - As impressed as I am, I had to ask a cheeky question in the comment thread. Given the stick we got from Troppo over making “left-right” distinctions in the blogosphere in our own research, I had to know how Ken had arrived at his own categories of “left-leaning”, “right-leaning” and “centrist” in the feeds. Sensibly, he seems to have ignored this remark.)

UPDATE: Troppo’s principles of selection for the ’sphere have not met with Lauredhel’s approval. The suggestion is that there is a significant underrepresentation of women on the Tropposphere aggregator.  I think there might be some women in there on co-authored blogs (e.g. LP and VOTAY) but it could be a fair point.

Uncategorized aggregation, Club Troppo, Fairfax, RSS