Ethical Issue of Citizen Journalism

Today, during the discussion on the future of media convergence, a visitor from China raised a question – how can media outlets that strive to win audience engagement ensure the accuracy and truthfulness of user-generated contents?

This is a good, and also a hard question. Something like a code of ethics of citizen journalism, or participatory journalism as a newer term, is really a complicated and controversial issue that have aroused heated debate. It is a general issue that need to be look into, not only in the more developed media markets such as the United States, but also in developing societies where new technologies are emerging and enable the traditional audience to start contributing to the news contents.

As far as I'm concerned, the trend is not simple reflected by the fact that Facebook has as many as 500 million users in the U.S., the popularity of Renren.com in China also demonstrating that new tools like social media has facilitating the free flow of information in a larger extent. Ethical citizen journalism is not simply limited to the fact-check of the news contents, but is supposed to be inclusive of all the basic values of journalism in broader sense.

Traditional journalism has pretty clear code of ethics for journalism professionals, including thoroughfulness, fairness and credibility. Generally speaking, the duty of the journalist is to enlighten the public to uphold the justice and build the foundation of democracy by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues (Society of Professional Journalists). However, with the speedy advancement of new technologies, especially the wide application of the Internet, the audience in the traditional sense has transformed into active contributors to news stories, which has put the traditional standards in jeopardy. Anonymous Ruthless and rude comments from the readers were impossible to be put in print in the past, but now they are very likely to appear in the online comments. Fake stories or fabricated images submitted via social media may easily screw up the credibility of reputed news organizations. How can we maintain the creed of journalism as a profession while embrace the trend of interactive information sharing?

The first question we may ask is whether professional code of ethics are generalizable to non-professionals. Should citizen reporters or bloggers obey those basic principles? Well, put aside the argument whether citizen journalists, bloggers or free lancer reporters are exactly professional personnel, my logic is like this:

More than one hundred years, when Walter Williams founded the world's first journalism school, his belief was that well-educated journalists will bring quality news to the public and make the news market vital. Today, technology and education has changed the situation a little bit--"Every citizen is a reporter (OhMyNews.com)" However, being non-professional doesn’t mean there is no need to have a code of ethics or standards. If citizen journalism is to sustain, citizen journalists are subject to social audit. A code of ethics and standards should be adopted for citizen journalists around the world so news organizations can employ these citizen journalists and expect the same kind of honest reporting from them that they get from their legacy journalists.

Maybe the experience of OhMyNews may shed light on how to balance the two sides of the stories. Englis.OhMyNews.com pioneers in cultivating citizen journalism. However,citizen reporters' responsibility are clearly stated on the website http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=171638&rel_no=1. This may also well explain why this Korean citizen journalism Web site has been developed sustainably in the last few years. The practice to lay out the ethical requirement for citizen journalists or online contributors really worth thinking and trying.