Elon College, N.C. – Editors of online newspapers in the United States say their products are not as accurate or reliable as their parent print publications. In a new study, nearly half of the online editors polled say the ethical standards of traditional print journalism are not being upheld by online versions of daily newspapers.
Forty-seven percent of the more than 200 online editors responding to the survey say the speed of the Internet has eroded the key standard of accurately verifying the facts of a story before putting it before the public. Nearly one in three reported that online print outlets are not as likely to follow the general ethical standards of traditional print journalism.
The survey was conducted via e-mail in October-November 1999 by journalism faculty members Janna Q. Anderson of Elon College in North Carolina and David Arant of the University of Memphis. It is the first major study to scrutinize ethical issues raised by online news publication. More than 680 online news managers were contacted in the survey. The full survey report can be found on the Web at: http://www.elon.edu/andersj/ethics.html.
The speed of the Internet medium is not held entirely to blame for the lowering of standards. Thirty-seven percent of the news managers participating in the study said that high ethical standards are easier to meet when there is an adequate number of employees working in the online operation.
Twenty-seven percent of the online daily newspapers taking part in the survey had no staff members working exclusively on the online product and 19 percent had just one full-time worker. The overall average staff size, including sales and technical positions, was six full-time positions. This is only slightly higher than the average of four full-time jobs reported by a study published in 1997.
A majority of the online managers in the current study report they make at least
some changes to material from their print editions when it is published online, and 67
percent report they are publishing at least some breaking news online first – before it goes
through the traditional print-edition editing regimen.
“Online teams – many of which are operating with no full-time staff or a skeleton staff – are asked to constantly remake the news stories in their Web editions to keep them fresh, and they are expected to push hot, breaking-news items online quickly,” said Anderson. “High standards of journalistic responsibility and ethics are difficult if not impossible to uphold in this sort of environment.”
Ninety-eight percent of the editors polled said they expect the journalists they hire to have a good grasp of news ethics, and 97 percent support the idea that journalism schools should require an ethics course that covers issues specific to online operations. However, the study revealed a major shortcoming of relying on journalism schools to teach ethics to online journalists: about half of the news managers surveyed in this study did not major in journalism at the undergraduate or graduate level. This is despite the fact that they average 17 years in the news business, three of those years with online operations.
Even if online ethics courses were required at all of the nation’s communications schools, a great number of online professionals would slip through untutored. Because many people who work in online operations are not trained journalists, they not only lack training in ethics; they have little or none of the background in editing, fact-checking, theory and media history expected of most journalism school graduates.
The public has expressed doubts about online media, and so too do media professionals, yet 45 percent of the online managers surveyed either have no ethics code in place or said their ethics code is not in active use.
“New issues are part and parcel of the new media,” said Arant. “Concerned people in newsrooms everywhere should be addressing the idea of establishing an ethics protocol at their operation. Mistakes are made and negative public perceptions are formed when there is no structure in place for heading off ethical problems or efficiently correcting such problems.”
Anderson and Arant also suggest that publishers should agree to some uniform
method for alerting online audiences to mistakes in stories. Currently, readers navigating news sites are required to hunt around for varied correctives and clarifications. Some sites
run no corrections at all.
The researchers suggest that the American Newspaper Publishers Association
recommend the adoption of a clearly marked hyperlink placed, for instance, in the top-left hand corner of the home page near the masthead of every Web news site. This Corrections & Clarifications button could look the same on every news site for every U.S. news operation. In addition, it would be expected that each correction would be clearly labeled in any archival edition of each story.
“Leaders in the news industry must discuss and come to some consensus on an array of general issues, including staffing and ethical decision-making – both key to the ultimate audience perception of the information product,” Arant said.
The researchers identified the following key areas in need of scrutiny by the online news industry:
Staff sizes and expected workloads for online employees.
The establishment of active news operation ethics protocols specific to online newsgathering and Web publishing.
Specified regimens for fact-checking and editing in the rapid-fire world of instant e-news.
The clear and consistent placement of corrections and clarifications.
The labeling of product placements when used on the same page as corresponding editorial material.
The policing of chat rooms and community bulletin boards.
The sale of archival information.
The manipulation of images.
“Newspapers tread in dangerous territory if they abandon any of the rigor of their standards of accuracy and integrity as they move from print to the online product,” Arant said. “Without care, the online offspring could damage the newspaper’s reputation and squander the immense value of the parent’s good name.”
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