Since only 12 percent of Internet users trust blogs as a news source, bloggers who want to be taken seriously need to adopt serious standards.
Bloggers who want to separate themselves from the unwashed masses of Internet ranters and be considered independent journalists are going to have to work at it. According to data published last year by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, only about 12 percent of those who surf the Net trust blogs as a news source all or most of the time.
Responding to the data, Marie Cocco bluntly summed up how many mainstream journalists view bloggers: “Bloggers, at least in the United States where the press is unfettered by government, aren’t journalists. They’re contemporary pamphleteers,” she said in a Washington Post Writers Group article titled, “In Blogs We Don’t Trust.”
Her statement holds more than a grain of truth. The din of political rants in the “blogosphere” is almost deafening, though there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, as long as bloggers avoid pandering in half-truths and misinformation. Unfettered opinion can serve as a wicked-mean gadfly to keep mainstream media and politicians in check, and flog the public conscience.
But Cocco’s statement hardly applies to all bloggers. It lumps a widely diverse group of people under a single label, and passes a single judgment: bloggers are pamphleteers. Unfortunately, those wishing to be considered something more are going to have to prove it themselves. And their best tactic lies in realizing that the world of blogging is like a wild, polluted ocean: they need to rise above the bottom feeders.
That means bloggers who want to be treated like journalists better start acting like journalists. And a good first step is to adopt a serious ethical credo for their work. Several useful codes of conduct for bloggers have been suggested on the Web—like those by Tim O’Reilly (radar.oreilly.com), Blogging Wikia (blogging.wikia.com), or the BlogHer Network (blogher.org). But these guidelines generally focus on playing nice and keeping out of hot water, by guarding against content which is abusive or libelous, or infringes on copyright.
What they lack is an ethical methodology for approaching articles.
Such guidelines can be easily found on journalism Web sites like the Associated Press (ap.org/newsvalues), or the Society of Professional Journalists. The SPJ’s code, among other things, stresses that journalists “test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error,” while remaining “free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.”
What good are these codes to blogger-journalists? Bloggers can describe the ethical standards they use on their blog, for all the world to see, inviting readers to hold them to those standards. This also allows readers to more accurately weigh the nature of information and opinion provided on the blog.
This kind of transparency and accountability will raise a journalist’s credibility over time. As Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel insist in The Elements of Journalism: “The willingness of the journalist to be transparent about what he or she has done is at the heart of establishing that the journalist is concerned with the truth.”
Independent journalists lack the cachet of a newspaper or network to vouchsafe their integrity to the public. But that may not be such a huge handicap. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, only 56 percent of those surveyed trust mainstream news sources all or most of the time, either.
In the world of words, you are only as good as your last story, and the only reputation you have to trade on is the one represented by your name. Keep your brand clean and tight, and your methods transparent, and readers will eventually separate the wheat from the chaff.
