The road to a professional content | Ethics and Standards

Like it or not, blogging and online publishing in general is part of journalism. The problem is that the content is written by untrained people who extremely often commit mistakes a professional journalist wouldn’t do. The first step to the professional content, in my humble opinion is to follow the standards and ethics of the journalism, thus eliminating basic mistakes.

First, let’s make one thing clear: I won’t show in these series real counterexamples. I don’t want to say that for example that “Matt Cutts blog is not good because… “, I’m not a judge, I just try to enlighten some things. By the way, if you’re wondering who Matt Cutts is, he’s a Google engineer and his personal blog can be found here.

Journalism when first appeared in England in the 10th century, wasn’t controlled by any journalistic code of ethics. Monks wrote these rudimentary newspapers by hand where they expressed their beliefs on one single paper, then other monks were copying these texts, then distributed the fresh newspapers to the people who had the knowledge of reading. There was no issue, monks didn’t lie.

The problem appeared when other knowledgeable people started to publish their own newspapers. They wrote their own beliefs which often had nothing to do with the reality.
To avoid the people’s disinformation, appeared in the 13th-14th century the first standard which said:

Don’t lie

That is, that simple. This simple standard was ported in every journalistic Code of Ethics and Standards we nowadays have, we still use this standard, at least it would be awesome if everyone would use it.

The Standards and Ethics codex of the journalists’ was complemented by many other things as the humanity evolved. For example it was added that a journalist shouldn’t accept bribes, another clear and simple standard. But let’s take a look on the current Ethics codex of the International Federation of the Journalists. It’s a very short read so please follow [this link] and read the codex.

I won’t go into every principle, I’ll just rip off the ones which can be reflected on online publishing too and can have the greatest impact on your content. So, the very first principle says:

Respect for truth and for the right of the public to truth is the first duty of the journalist.

As you see that’s what the first journalist standard in the history said, too. Why should you follow this principle? While a lie can bring you extreme traffic on short run, on long run you loose your reputation. Think with your visitor’s mind: “Dam, this guy cheated me once, I bet he will try again, I won’t read his posts again”, you lost a visitor. The problem is that not only one will think that way, but many. You loose your reputation, you lost your traffic and possibly your revenue too.
I can’t say this enough: tell the truth, your visitors will like you and your reputation will be increased considerably with each post.
Also, as per the 3rd amendment, you shall publish only content which source can be verified. This is very important in my opinion; if you say that “Google released its first space shuttle” it’s OK, but link back to your source, link to a Google page where this was announced. This will exclude people thinking that you actually said the untruth, and is also in your benefit: if other bloggers find your post faster than the Google announcement, they will possibly link to you, and I hope I don’t have to explain how precious a good link is.

4th principle states:

The journalist shall use only fair methods to obtain news, photographs and documents.

While in offline life theft is a bad thing, so is online. It’s extremely simple to go to the Reuters news service and copy-paste everything you find, that content will not be your own, the fact that you stolen will mark you, and not in the good way. If you’re unlucky, Reuters will also file a DMCA content removal request you have to comply with.
So, now form the bloggers point of view: You will have duplicated content (because it’s likely that Reuters published the content first), you will have headaches because DMCA lawyers are dancing on your head and after they finished, you remove the stolen content which will be punished by the search engines as they don’t like 404 pages.
Stealing content and publishing under your own name is also plagiarism, which in my honest opinion is one of the most disrespectful acts you can do. You will be caught, then you can say “bye-bye” to your reputation.
If I’m already at plagiarism, let’s see the 8th amendment:

The journalist shall regard as grave professional offences the following:

• plagiarism;
• malicious misrepresentation;
• calumny, slander, libel, unfounded accusations;
• the acceptance of a bribe in any form in consideration of either publication or suppression.

I think each is clear, maybe the last is a bit on the gray line because many bloggers write for example paid reviews.
My thoughts on paid reviews are, that you should only accept payment from a paid review if the one who requested the review wants from you the truth, your belief about the advertiser’s product, website or service. If they want you to say that the product is excellent while it’s the most fishy you ever saw, you better refuse to accept the offer. Why? Because you have impact on your users. If you say the background of Google is white, they will believe you; if you say that a product is excellent, they will believe you, they buy the product then realize that it’s the worse possible and never ever will believe you again. You lost your hard earned reputation.

These were the ethics of the International Federation of the Journalist which can be reflected on the online publishing. I really recommend you to read and even bookmark the page I linked above, you can only win if you comply with the standards of the journalism.
If you’re in the mood of reading, I’d also recommend The Washington Post Standards and Ethics. One thing is very interesting about this codex, specifically that this Codex was, let’s say composed right after the Watergate Affairs, when it was revealed how great impact can the journalism have on specific things, in Watergate Affairs case on democracy.
To learn more about the Watergate Affairs, please follow this link to The Washington Post’s archive.
If you’d like to dig yourself further in the Standards of Journalism, a great source shall be the International Principles of Professional Ethics in Journalism.

Basically, these were the standards I wanted to shed light on. If you think anything else should be mentioned, don’t hesitate to comment; I would be extremely glad to adjust the post.

Also, while I said I wouldn’t judge any other blog, You are anonymous and you can. Did you find a blog post or even news article which didn’t obey with the International Federation of Journalists Standards and Ethics? Please, drop a comment with a link to the post or the article.

Thank you.

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