Bob Steele worries about bloggers' standards:
"I'm very worried about the significant erosion of ethical standards across our profession and the resulting corrosion of the quality of the journalism," writes Bob Steele in Nieman Reports. "The blogs, Tweets, social networking, citizen-submitted content, and multimedia storytelling that are the tools and techniques of the digital era offer great promise. They also, when misused, present considerable peril."
He goes on the say that too often we give unjustified credibility to "bloggers who are, at best, practicing amateur journalism or simplistic punditry." I think it's true in general that standards are more lax on blogs, not just those of the "simplistic amateurs" but those run by news organizations as well. The pressure to get stuff out there and push up the page views is tremendous. And those who are on their own, with no support group to bounce things off of, are likely to have the loosest standards of all.
But everything Steele says about the digital era (most of it anyway) could also have been said about the penny press era, when newspapes were like analog blogs, mostly spewing both intelligent and ill-informed opinion to support the publishers' political agendas. Over time, standards evolved and a sense of ethics was developed. I suspect that will happen in the digital world, too.
