http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2007/12/04/do-you-need-a-licence-to-be-a-journalist/

Doesn’t apply to the United States, of course, except with one exception. Access. If you want access to photograph in or around a crime scene, you’ve got to have a PRESS badge. The rules for obtaining a press badge vary by police department, but generally they want to see at least three articles you’ve previously published in a newspaper.

Some thing applies, in a vaguer way, with access to politicians and DC staffers. If they’re going off the record, they want to know they can trust you, that their identity will not, under any circumstances, be revealed. That they’ll know if you work for a major news org. If you’re a blogger, then it’ll help to have gone to college with ‘em.

Let’s say a hypothetical blogger is doing investigative journalism. He’s not publishing rumors, he wants to be regarded as a credible journalist, right? How’s that ethics seal going to look to him, when it also adorns http://www.hollywoodrumors.com et al.?

A seal has little value unless it’s backed up with some well-defined form of accountability. Those are some notions that have been developed over the last hundred years, in newsrooms around the world. You should be looking over the fence to learn how they did it.

Imagine the following scenario- You’re a dogged investigative journalist/blogger who makes a contact in the federal government, who informs you of a grand jury investigation into a (pick a party) Senator who has allegeded to be taking bribes from (pick an industry).

Your source, however, doesn’t want to go on the record. ‘Capital Hill source’ is as close as they wanna get. You think “fine, but this is red-hot and man my pageviews will go through the roof!” So you write it up and post it on your blog.

It’s an overnight sensation. It’s referenced by many other blogs, and indirectly mentioned on Sunday talking heads programs. Accolades from the opposition party, natch.

But then the calls start coming from the other party, “This is unfounded, he doesn’t have a named source, it’s only a rumor.” Et cetera.

Party flacks and like-minded bloggers start clicking through on your blog’s ethics board seal, and register complaints (or whatever the procedure is) with the board. Then a member of the ethics board contacts you. They do what any newsroom editor would do, and ask if you can verify the story with them.

You call your DC source. He says, “No way, if my name gets beyond you, my career is fucking toast.”

You tell the board member, “Sorry, but my source wishes to remain anonymous.”

Now, what should the ethics board do? Should you be allowed to keep the seal? Unlike a traditional newsroom, you’ve got no formal oversight, no editor or verifiers to vet the story before it goes online.

And then, the grand jury issues a subpeona. You make the three hour flight to DC, and appear before a group of professionals in a nondescript office in the district. They want to know how you found out about their investigation of the Senator. “Who is your source?”

What, also, will you do when the Senator sues for libel? Newspapers employ lawyers, should bloggers also?

Thoughts?

The beauty of the web is that even if someone doesn’t accept negative comments on their blog, you can publish elsewhere to make people aware of the ethical problems with the content.

Of course, in the same way you get dubious Fairtrade logos popping up on clearly non-fair trade products, it could happen with this, but I don’t that should put off the introduction of this kind of system.

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A few Qs spring to mind:

I’m left thinking about how it differs from Creative Commons (not the same legal fear for breaking the code for example) and how we can learn from some of the problems CC has faced… Creative Commons is about protection of your material whereas this is about legitimising your content, if I understand it right.

How do you build it have such a credibility that mainstream media would want to use it as well?

Also how do the varying legal systems of different countries fit into this? What if someone’s content is ethical by the standards of their home country, but not of another?

It shouldn’t be just for blogs though, it should also be for commenters.
(the major blogging platforms should have a comment field for “ethics seal”, and provide a link back to a person’s disclosure if they have a nonstandard one, or a(text) icon for it if it’s one of the standard ones.)

Then give us the ability to choose to view a comments thread showing only those commenters meeting a specified seal level.

Accountable in terms of they are doing what they say they are doing. It’s one thing to have a seal on my blog that says I only report primary sources, but if you are an institution lending ethical credence to a blog, the institution will have to verify occasionally that the blogger in fact does only report primary sources. Does this make sense? I think Verisign is one parallel (that your data is transmitted securely) and that “USDA Organic” is another (that the food I buy is in fact organic and not just labeled as such.

In short, I see the ethics seal as a set of standards bloggers can adopt, but you’ve got to figure out a mechanism for making sure people stick to the standards.

PS You should install Subscribe to Comments so that I can track comment discussions on the posts I read.

Accountable for what?