Week 11: Digital Journalism: Ethics and Law

Summary of Ethical Issues Specific to Digital Journalism

When online journalism is bi-directional, hypertextual, multimedia, immediate

"...although the essence of journalism remains basically unchanged, it is obvious that the Internet ‘‘shapes and redefines a number of moral and ethical issues confronting journalists when operating online or making use of online resources,’’ Deuze and Yeshua (2001, 276)

Some say media ethics is a matter of self-regulation around 5 main issues

1. Reliability of online content. 
2. Usage of database information. 
3. Linking. 
• Barrett Brown
4. Editorial control of potentially hurtful or harmful content. 
5. Journalistic integrity and commercial pressure.

Others describe Digital Media Ethics

• Digital media is transformative, interactive and immediate
• Digital presents tension between
• legacy and online journalism
• local or global  
• Integrated news outlets
• vertical and horizontal integrations 
• vertically,from citizen journalists, freelancers, paid commentators, regular contributors
• horizontally, from print to broadcast to online
• ethical questions around how the layers interact
•  Boundary issues
• Who is a journalist?
• What is journalism?
• Anonymity
• When is it permissible? desirable?
• Different rules across platforms? 
• Speed, rumor, corrections 
• ethical to articulate guidelines for dealing with rumors, corrections
• principles of accuracy, verification and transparency
• Impartiality, conflicts of interest and partisan journalism
• selling soap? political parties, social activism

• Entrepreneurial not-for-profit journalism
• journalists consciously raise funds
• GoFundMe, Patreon, subscription model 
• How will they report on issues related to a source of funding?
• Reporters using social media
• gathering information, "branding"
• Guidelines still emerging
• Citizen journalism and prosumer content. 
• How much to use
• How to vet and identify sources
• Ethics of images
• How much can you edit/alter. Change overall contrast and brightness, lighten or darken skin tones?

Robots, Drones, Augmented Reality, and Algorithmic Journalism
Botnerd ethics

And the law

Canadian Constitution Act, Charter of Rights and Freedoms 

Libel, Slander and Defamation of Character

• Defenses against charges
• good faith in the public interest

G20 watershed moment in Canadian Rights and Freedoms
New book by the former Chair of the Toronto Police Commission apologizes.

Excessive Force: Toronto’s Fight to Reform City Policing eBook: Alok Mukherjee, Tim Harper: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2018, from https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07B7N5LQL/ref=pe_386430_116509240_TE_DP

Security

Staying safe and keeping sources safe.

Surveillance Self-Defense

Week 10: Ethics and Codes of Practice continued

Ethical Issues in Journalism

#BUDigitalJournalism hashtag

Self-driven Uber car kills pedestrian

Quebec Journalist arrested

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook

“… we just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda’, because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda’, the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?’.”

Codes of Practice

• Canadian Association of Journalists
• Canadian Association of Electronic Journalists
• J-Source List

Sources and protection of sources
Research
Interviews
Verification fact checking: How do you know that? How do they know that?

Issues specific to Digital Journalism
Information wants to be free vs Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Verification of images
Copyright

• Creative Commons
• For a creator the only thing worse than piracy is obscurity. 

Authentication and Verification

• Manipulation of images

Week 9: Codes of Practice - Overton Window - Podcasting

Mid Term projects?

Overton Window

Digital journalists report political issues and provide analysis that helps people make sense of their worlds. On area of journalistic interest concerns the framing of  acceptable political discourse. What can we talk about, what is taboo, how do issues move from one category to the next? Overton proposed a framework for analysis described as the Overton window which helps to explain and predict patterns of social and political behavior. 

This window serves two functions: first, it lays out the process by which social reform movements move from the fringes of society to influencing whole segments of pop culture. Secondly, it explains why politicians are limited in the range of policies they can push. (Maeli, 2016)

As with most theoretical propositions the Overton Window idea has been the subject of  criticism. See, for example, The Flaws of the Overton Window Theory (Marsh et al., 2016).

Ethics and Codes of Practice

Journalism Ethics and the Law by Glen Gatin

Anchor Podcast app

Maeli, J.-P. (2016, April 1). Today’s Radicals are Tomorrow’s Moderates: Effects of the Overton Window. Retrieved March 13, 2018, from http://thepoliticalinformer.com/the-overton-window
Marsh, L., Vyse, G., Ford, M., Shephard, A., Dayen, D., Abrams, A., & Shephard, A. (2016, October 27). The Flaws of the Overton Window Theory. The New Republic. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/138003/flaws-overton-window-theory

Podcast Demo

Audio recording >>

Demo map

Week 8: Introducing Ethics of Digital Journalism

Principles of Digital Journalism

Ethical theories and systems of legacy journalism need updating
Constantly breaking new ground
Endless opportunities for digital journalists

A little more on maps. 

• Coordinate systems Lat long, UTM
• Township, Section and Range
• KML files
• Dominion Land Survey
• First Nations Seeker

Podcasting 

• Recording File management 
• Recording and Audio editing with Audacity
• Hosting and posting

Aggregation: More Propaganda Theory

I'm trying out an new service, one that I hope will replace Storify which was a very powerful aggregation and story telling tool. The new tool is Wakelet and here is an example. I pulled a series of links from a Twitter account I follow.