Local citizen journalism grows up, a little
My colleague Joe Killian has an excellent post up at his personal blog on what he calls the "fissure" that leaking of the RMA report on the Greensboro Police Department has created within the Greensboro blogging community.
Journalism - even on a much smaller scale than this - is full of really tough decisions. The options are often lousy. What you think you should do and what you feel you should do aren't always the same thing - and what you can do legally often complicates even the choice between those two. At better papers editors, publishers (and in this case at least) lawyers make these decisions together, and they do it after years in the business making decisions like this, weighing the ethical concerns and seeing the outcome.Blogging - both because it's a new medium without any real hard and fast ethical rules taken up by many different people with many different motivations and because it is (like politics) a pursuit for which no experience is considered necessary - is bound to bump its head on these things as people use it for journalism. And, because it's a medium that doesn't require collaboration on decisions like this, because it's a medium in which people can do whatever they'd like with information and present it as best suits their views and ends, something this big was bound to cause a fissure in the blogging community.
I think a lot of local bloggers who got involved with the RMA report really got their first taste this weekend of how excruciating some of these decisions can be. I've never argued that journalism is rocket science, but I've also been struck by the number of people who seem to think that pro journalists do without a second thought the kinds of things we often actually sit up nights over. Sometimes there are no good choices, and if we sometimes seem excessively prone to defend a bad choice, it's usually only because all the other choices are much, much worse. Being in that situation is not a good feeling; it makes even some longtime pro journalists literally sick. I think some local folks got their first taste of that feeling during the past few days. I hope -- and please understand I'm saying this without spite or schadenfreude -- they found the experience educational.
I refuse to second-guess any local blogger's decision on how he or she has handled, or declined to handle, the RMA report. (For the record, I have not been involved in the N&R's coverage of the report, nor, at this point, have I read any of the report.) But I want to highlight one of Joe's points: Blogging as a medium doesn't require collaboration; a blogger with information can act unilaterally. Bob Steele, an ethicist at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida, wrote a column years ago called Ask These 10 Questions to Make Good Ethical Decisions. At least three of those 10 questions imply that making the best decision on an ethical conundrum simply cannot be done unilaterally:
5. How can I include other people, with different perspectives and diverse ideas, in the decision-making process?6. Who are the stakeholders -- those affected by my decision? What are their motivations? Which are legitimate? ...
10. Can I clearly and fully justify my thinking and my decision? To my colleagues? To the stakeholders? To the public?
(I also highly recommend Steele's "Guiding Principles for Journalists." As I've often said, anyone can function as a journalist; Steele's work describes how some of the best journalists function.)
I hope and trust that all those who have had a role in the past few days in deciding whether or not to disseminate the RMA report will review Steele's work now, if they have not already -- not only to see whether there was anything they could or should have done differently but also so they'll be better able to grapple with the ethical issues the next time something like this happens.
Because, as surely as I'm sitting here typing and you're sitting there reading, there will be a next time.
