
First, there were newspapers. Then there was radio, and then TV. And now, in the last 15 years or so, there's the Internet.
Times sure have changed, and so have the ways that we in the press gather news and distribute it to the world. And the core ethical principles of our profession have had to be expanded on and tweaked with each new technology that developed.
I was honored to be one of the working journalists asked to take part in a really cool day-long session at Santa Clara University in California on Monday on journalism ethics in the digital age.
I'll be honest with you: It was unusual for me to be part of such a high-powered group of media executives -- I'm not sure my daily schedule of filing FOIA requests, tinkering with government databases and scanning in records much resembles those of the head of Google News and the editor in chief of Yahoo, with whom I was in small discussion groups Monday.
But it was heartening to me to know that a lot of folks in positions of great authority in this new digital sphere took journalism ethics very seriously and had given it a great deal of thought, even those who were not journalists by training.
We discussed a handful of broad topics, such as objectivity in social media marketing, and laid out some of the major problems and possible solutions to each. The leaders of the session say they'll take our collective findings and see if they can use them to build some kind of framework that can help guide ethical journalism decision-making in the digital sphere.
We’ll keep you updated.
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Contact Jennifer Peebles at 281-656-1681 or jennifer@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @jpeebles and @texaswatchdog.
Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Scribd, and fan us on YouTube. Join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feeds in your newsreader. We're also on MySpace, Digg, FriendFeed, and tumblr.
Photo of 'keyboard in action' by flickr user lapideo, used via a Creative Commons license.
I was honored to be one of the working journalists asked to take part in a really cool day-long session at Santa Clara University in California on Monday on journalism ethics in the digital age.
I'll be honest with you: It was unusual for me to be part of such a high-powered group of media executives -- I'm not sure my daily schedule of filing FOIA requests, tinkering with government databases and scanning in records much resembles those of the head of Google News and the editor in chief of Yahoo, with whom I was in small discussion groups Monday.
But it was heartening to me to know that a lot of folks in positions of great authority in this new digital sphere took journalism ethics very seriously and had given it a great deal of thought, even those who were not journalists by training.
We discussed a handful of broad topics, such as objectivity in social media marketing, and laid out some of the major problems and possible solutions to each. The leaders of the session say they'll take our collective findings and see if they can use them to build some kind of framework that can help guide ethical journalism decision-making in the digital sphere.
We’ll keep you updated.
***
Contact Jennifer Peebles at 281-656-1681 or jennifer@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @jpeebles and @texaswatchdog.
Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Scribd, and fan us on YouTube. Join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feeds in your newsreader. We're also on MySpace, Digg, FriendFeed, and tumblr.
Photo of 'keyboard in action' by flickr user lapideo, used via a Creative Commons license.