Ethics Must Come from the Heart As Well As the Head
MUD day 11: For anyone interested in the ethics of new-media journalism, the past 24 hours have been painfully instructive. For me, it’s been a reminder that in any ethical decision, you have to be...
View ArticleTransparent vs. Opaque: Six New-Media Principles, No. 5
Because one of its foundational ideas is openness, as I described in yesterday’s post, new media encourages and rewards transparency. Traditional media organizations have tended to be opaque, aiming...
View ArticleThere Are Two Sides to Every Editorial Wall
In an article today on MediaShift, Dorian Benkoil makes a good case for why reporters and editors should be more involved in the business side of publishing. My only complaint is with what seems to be...
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What Is the Lifespan of an Error?
There has been much coverage lately of a new book by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal called The Lifespan of a Fact. It relates the years-long debate between D’Agata, an essayist, and Fingal, a fact...
View ArticleSelling and Journalism
I’m sure there were at least a few journalists who took offense at Gap marketing chief Seth Farbman telling an audience earlier this week that marketers are more honest than journalists. In his former...
View ArticleCuration: Add Value and Pass It Along
Among all the topics that seem to rile journalists and publishers these days, perhaps the most contentious is curation. Is summarizing and linking to another person’s article an honorable act or a form...
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Let’s Not Confuse Morality with Quality: Jonah Lehrer and Plagiarism
Jonah Lehrer For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I’ve been deeply bothered for the last few days by the uproar over Jonah Lehrer’s reuse of his writing in various publications. I know almost...
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The Skeuomorphic Byline: How Journatic Screwed Up by Looking Backward
Reading Mathew Ingram’s take today on the controversy over content provider Journatic’s use of fake bylines in its stories for newspapers, I realized that the problem is more complex than it seems. The...
View ArticleBeware the Witch-Hunting Impulse
My experience today reading Joe Konrath’s “Writers Code of Ethics” was probably exactly what he intended. From points one through three—never write or pay for reviews of your own work—I was in complete...
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Rethinking the Role of “Advertisers”
Writing last week for the Nieman Journalism Lab, Ken Doctor analyzed “The newsonomics of the Quartz business launch.” It should be required reading for every B2B journalist and publisher. In...
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