When am I a journalist?
I’ve left off on the issues I raised some weeks ago in the last few posts because frankly, I found a lot of the discussion - especially as it happened on this blog and LP - distracting rather than clarifying. But Margaret Simons keeps usefully raising the topic, and her latest stimulated me to get some thoughts down.
I’ve used some of the time since the last post to do some more reading around the issue, and in particular I found the work of US Legal scholar Daniel Solove to be helpful, especially his book The Future of Reputation, (I bought it before realising it’s available for free at the link). Solove’s context is different, as he’s writing from a country that constitutionally protects free speech. But his examples are international, and I think the issues he raises are relevant everywhere. I don’t draw on it too explicitly in this discussion, but I will in upcoming publications that expand on the theme of this post.
Rather than focussing on who is or isn’t a journalist - which doesn’t really matter in the end - I think there is a more useful way of thinking about this for bloggers and anyone putting information online. The key question that I think needs to be more commonly asked is: when am I a journalist?
Some preparatory remarks are necessary before I come to that. The bottom line that everyone needs to recognise is that when you’re putting information online for an audience, you’re publishing. The mode of communication that we encounter in the blogosphere and especially on even more immediate platforms like Twitter is deceptive. Microblogging in particular can feel a lot like a face-to-face conversation, but it’s much less ephemeral. Barroom gossip does not create a permanent, globally accessible archive; unsecured Twitter streams do. Social networking services can be similarly beguiling. But acts of publishing on these platforms take us legally, and I believe ethically into a similar space to publishers of other, “older” media.
Publishing has legal implications. The key laws that apply to publishing in Australia involve intellectual property, defamation, vilification, and for some political bloggers, electoral laws. I’ll mainly talk in this post about legal defamation and ethical issues around reputation. Litigants and the courts have demonstrated that they will act when they feel they have been defamed online, so the dangers are real. Peter Black has been involved with a team at QUT which has been preparing a legal guide for bloggers, (I am trying to confirm whether or not that’s had a release) and efforts like this recognise that knowledge of publishing laws are far less widespread than they should be. There may be an argument for reforming these laws in the light of new technologies, but for the moment they’re there, and can’t be wished away.
I’d argue that there is always an ethical dimension to publishing as well, and that the obligations it brings are at least as significant as those attaching themselves to “older” media forms. If I blog or tweet some information about someone, I’ve publicly revealed it just as surely as if I’d published it in a local newspaper.
In significant ways, as Solove also argues, I believe online publishing is “publishing plus”. Material on a public blog or Twitter stream is accessible from anywhere in the world. It is archived, and can be searched for with an in highly efficient ways. And none of us can make any solid guarantees about the way information will circulate once we have published it online. Material can be republished and recirculated across a range of sites and platforms with an astounding ease and rapidity. It’s very easy to lose control of information. An appealing piece of gossip can spread far beyond our own social networks, and can even become a global meme. If we say something damaging about someone that we later regret, or find to be incorrect, retracting or deleting the information in the spaces we do control may not be enough to undo the damage. And I’d offer a basic ethical principle in connection with all this: that unnecessary and avoidable damage to others’ reputations should be avoided where possible.
It’s this common act of publishing that justifies continuing to talk about journalists and bloggers together. Publishing is what the profession and industry of journalism is structured around, and that’s why bringing up journalists, and camparing their practices to bloggers will often be useful for bloggers.
That’s not least because the practice of industrial journalism — or the ideal version of it — has built-in mechanisms that address these legal and ethical dimensions of publishing. Journalists have evolved a range of techniques and habits that minimise the risks that come with publishing. They try to confirm information in person or in conversation, and are trained to consider the reliability of their sources. They are less vulnerable as individuals to legal difficulties because major news outlets have specialists to check legal aspects of stories, but they are trained to have a thorough working knowledge of the legal dimensions of publishing. And most journalists do recognise additional ethical limits on the kind of information they will pass on. My union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, has a formalised code of journalistic ethics, but there are unwritten rules as well.
There are many different kinds of blogging. Margaret Simons has offered a useful taxonomy. Some bloggers only do commentary, some only ever publish recipes or book reviews. But there will be occasions for many bloggers where they alone are in receipt of a piece of information about some individual which they’ll be tempted to publicise more widely. “News” is the term that journalists use, but it may be helpful to think in terms of “gossip” as well. (The latter term need not be read as perjorative, and the boundary between news and gossip has never been clear, as scholars like John Hartley have amply shown. Gossip performs many useful social functions, as Solove’s discussion of gossip demonstrates.)
In the moments when they’re deciding whether or not to publish a piece of news or gossip that’s not generally known or available, I suggest that the best strategy is for bloggers to think of themselves as journalists. My answer to the question in this post’s title is: you’re a journalist when you’re publishing news. In that situation I think it’s a good strategy for bloggers to behave as journalists ideally would, and ask themselves the same questions that journalists do.
That means trying to confirm information, and not just because truth is a defence against defamation in every Australian jurisdiction. If you can get confirmation from a reliable source - preferably the person, people or organisation that the news is about - legally, you’re in the clear. You can also have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re telling the truth. There are many ways to make sure of information, but I still think that it may mean occasionally picking up the phone. Notwithstanding John Quiggin’s point about journalists having a kind of professional licence that excuses such intrusions, if bloggers want to avoid trouble they may occasionally need to steel themselves and ring the subject of their rumour.
Thniking of yourself as a journalist also means asking whether a particular piece of information actually needs to be revealed to the world. If journalists generally have better support structures than bloggers for deciding whether to publish something, the advantage many bloggers have is that they don’t generally live or die on their “scoops”. They have time to think things over. With that time, they should ask whether they’re prepared for what they’re publishing to be an indelible part of the global information archive, and whether they’re happy with the risk that it might spread and be republished in spaces they don’t control. They should realise that there’s a good chance they won’t be able to take the information back once they’ve published. If the information likely to damage someone’s reputation, even if its true, is there some broader interest that justifies doing such damage?
Knowledge and practice will make it easier to answer these questions, and some experienced bloggers may have instincts as good as any journalist in making publishing decisions, so that this discussion will be redundant. But for new bloggers, and the hordes of people currently signing up to microblogging services, it may not be obvious that any of this applies to them. In a dynamic, growing and fragmented publishing environment, useful norms can struggle to take root. As an academic, it occurs to me that disseminating training and information to the broader community about these issues is a far more pressing task than, say, finding out what bloggers may or may not think they’re doing.
None of this, by the way, is an argument against the robust political discourse in the blogosphere. I like snark as much as the next person, and hypocrisy sometimes deserves to be exposed, whatever the reputational damage inflicted. (Indeed, I’ve been bemused by the outbreak of preciousness in recent days surrounding one particular “gatewatching” effort - I hope to post more on this soon).
Rather, it’s a simple claim that whoever is publishing may have something to learn from the approach of those who do it for a living, and may benefit from thinking about themseleves as journalists on those occasions where they are delivering news to an audience.
As I said, there will be more from me on this topic, but this is where I’m at for now.
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