JF - Journalism Changes and Ethics - IAMCR-1

Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade
Journalism is changing – and what about journalism ethics?
Joaquim Fidalgo
University of Minho – Braga – Portugal
([email protected])
Paper presented in the IAMCR 2013 Conference

Ethics of Society and Ethics of Communication Working Group
Dublin – Ireland, 25 – 29 June 2013
Abstract
Major changes have been challenging journalism in the last two decades, in the context of the ‘digital
age’. The technological possibilities developed in the ‘information society’, together with the social and
cultural trend for more participation, opened this field to new actors, which caused professional journalists
to lose their traditional monopoly of searching, gathering, editing and diffusing news in the public sphere.
At the same time, these new possibilities of communicating are increasingly forcing the old actors to play
new roles in the media. The digital techniques and the Internet gave birth to a big diversity of new media
and of new forms of dealing with journalism and public information. ‘Citizen journalism’, ‘participatory
journalism’, ‘user-generated content’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘weblogs’,‘ Twitter’, ‘Facebook’, etc., are words
and expressions rather common these days, all of them somehow calling the attention to the fact that
journalism-as-a-professional-activity seems to coexist more and more with various forms of journalism-
as-a-civic-activity, performed by very different people, under very different conditions and with very
different levels of involvement and expertise. As a consequence, questions are being raised about the
ethical implications of this new scenario, both in what regards the activity of professional journalists in
new (online) media and the active commitment of ‘laypersons’ in the process of gathering, editing and
diffusing information.
In this paper we will try to analyze and to discuss these questions, with reference, among others, to Eliot
Freidson (2004) and his distinction between ‘practice ethics’ and ‘institutional ethics’. Furthermore, we’ll
try to discuss what really makes journalism distinctive from other practices that nowadays coexist with it
in the public sphere, strongly increasing the possibilities of communication between people but not
necessarily following the purposes of public interest and of civic democratic participation. In this context,
the concept of journalism seems to ask for a clearer definition, and so do the roles to be played by
journalists in the more complex (but also more stimulating) media environment we are dealing with in
contemporary societies.
Keywords
Journalism, journalism ethics, new media, participation
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CECS 1 / 27
Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade www.cecs.uminho.pt
Joaquim Fidalgo Journalism is changing – and what about journalism ethics?
“Upheavals in journalism have bequeathed to journalists a dizzying whirlpool

of ethical issues that become the topics of talk shows, academic papers, and conference panels.
The focus of these discussions tends to be on how to responsibly incorporate new media,
including social media, into responsible daily journalism.”
Stephen Ward, 2012
1. The professionalization of journalism

Journalism has changed – and is changing – deeply in the last two decades, to a great
extent because of the new possibilities of publication, diffusion and interaction brought by the
digital technologies and the internet. The clear definition of who is and who isn’t a journalist, or
of what really characterizes the activity, is also a motive for debate.
The journalists’ professionalization process has been difficult, ambiguous and often
contradictory in its own terms It is a relatively recent process – it occurred basically in the last
decades of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century – and it is still somehow fragile
and incomplete, not to mention the argument, raised by some voices, that journalism still
shouldn’t be regarded as a true ‘profession’1, but rather as a ‘craft’ or as a ‘semi-profession’
(Fidalgo, 2008; Ruellan, 1997).
The fact is that longstanding efforts have been made by the journalists’ professional group
to try to have their craft socially acknowledged and legitimized as a true profession (following
more or less the ideal-typical model of the ‘established professions’). In so doing, they couldn’t
avoid the emergence of some problematic contradictions among them, particularly in the
cognitive and evaluative dimensions – which might help to explain why they often tried to stress
the normative dimension of their specific work over all the others2. After all, journalists always
were, and still are, somehow ‘ambivalent about the professional project’ (Aldridge & Evetts,
2003: 547).
Three main contradictions could be pointed out in this process:
(1) The first one opposes the journalist regarded as an artist to the journalist regarded as a
skilled worker. This perspective isn’t without consequences: for an artist, the important thing is
1
In an important book written by Spanish sociologists Ortega & Humanes (2000), under the title “Something more than
journalists” [Algo más que periodistas], it is argued that it is a mistake ‘to think about journalism as merely another profession’.
Recalling the importance (and power) of journalists in the social construction and interpretation of the reality surrounding us,
the authors suggest they play much of the role usually played by intellectuals in the public sphere and, therefore, it is important
to try to understand ‘the meaning of an activity that, being undoubtedly a profession, is much more than just a profession’
(Ortega & Humanes, 2000: 9).
2
We refer here to the different characteristics commonly associated to a claim to professionalism, and synthesized by several
authors (e.g. Larson, 1977; Singer, 2003) into these three dimensions: evaluative (autonomy and social prestige), cognitive
(specific knowledge, know-how and skills) and normative (public service orientation, altruism, ethics and self-regulation).
CECS 2 / 27
his/her talent, his/her ‘call’ to the activity, his/her creative freedom, rather than any specific
education or school degree. So, why should we have journalism courses or journalism schools?
As someone wrote with irony in the 19th century, when these questions were coming to public
debate, the idea of launching a journalism school would be ‘more or less as if you wanted to
create a poetry school…’ (apud Delporte, 1999: 176). On the other hand, no activity could be
praised and socially recognized as a real, valuable profession if there were no specific education
(and usually of a tertiary level) to qualify people for it. That’s why journalism courses slowly
began to develop and eventually came to the university (as late as 1979, in what concerns
Portugal), trying to raise journalism both to the status of a profession and of a scholarly
discipline, that is to say, of a specific and autonomous field of knowledge, of study and of
research.
(2) A second contradiction arises from the way journalism is actually performed:
journalists are usually workers in a media industry, receiving orders from who owns the company
and pays for their salary. The ideal-typical model of a professional working autonomously,
serving his/her clients in the best (and free) possible way and being accountable to them, is hardly
recognizable in the context of a press industry, where routines must be followed, an hierarchical
chain must be respected and the individual performance is often submitted to internal rules. This
working context seems to be more typical of manual or technical occupations rather than of the
intellectual labour commonly associated to the professions. Furthermore, being these media
companies in most cases market-driven private companies, they are interested in getting as much
profit as they can, therefore putting at risk the alleged commitment of professional journalists
with the public service they offer to society – that is to say, the service of true, comprehensive,
accurate, independent information about the world surrounding us.
(3) A third contradiction could be summarized as the choice to stress the pole of
individual freedom in journalism or, alternatively, to put the emphasis on its social responsibility.
This question has been extensively studied and discussed, in the context of the research on
normative theories of the press, especially after the report of the Hutchins Commission in the
USA, in 1947 (“A free and responsible press”) and the publication of the classic ‘Four Theories
of the Press’ (originally in 1956), by Siebert, Peterson & Schramm (1963), where the more
‘libertarian’ or ‘authoritarian’ approaches were matched with the ‘socially responsible’ model for
the press3. According to the preference of journalists towards one or the other of the poles, a
3
The more recent book “Normative Theories of the Press – Journalism in Democratic Societies”, by Christians, C., Glaser, T.,
McQuail, D., Nordenstreng, N. & White, R. (2009, Chicago: University of Illinois Press), intends somehow to ‘update’ the
contributions of Four Theories of the Press, according to the relevant changes in the media landscape since the 1950’s.
CECS 3 / 27
particular understanding of their work and role emerges, with consequences for example in what
concerns the acceptance of some collective accountability mechanisms regarding ethical issues
or, inversely, the insistence on the sole voice of the individual consciousness of the professional
as the judge for what is right or wrong.
Although traditionally more inclined to an individualistic approach of the profession,
journalists soon realized that their intents towards professionalization asked for some collective
responsibility. If they were to be granted some privileges or at least a particular statute in order to
control the borders of their territory, they should offer the counterpart of a sort of moralization
and self-regulation effort inside those same borders, in order to legitimize their condition – and
their power. We shouldn’t forget that legitimacy is ‘closely allied to the concepts of trust and
confidence’ (Svensson, 2006: 580), and the need to be trusted was always a very sensitive issue
for journalists. Actually, when the press industrialized and developed in a massive way, it was
clear very soon that it had an enormous power of influence in society. Besides that, it was also
evident that it could be used in the most negative ways, as a vehicle for propaganda, as a means
for large-scale manipulation, as an intruder into private lives, as a profitable market instrument to
serve vested interests, etc. The need for the press to be free, but also to be responsible and
accountable, was more and more claimed in those early decades of the journalism
professionalization process. The efforts to professionalize the journalists ran in parallel with the
intent to moralize their activity.
In spite of these tensions, the journalists followed the strong appeal to professionalism as
soon as their activity became somehow autonomous, as well as socially valued, politically
powerful and economically attractive. But, since journalism is ‘a social reality which has been
developed historically’ and ‘is also an area for multiple interactions which are necessarily
complex’ (Ringoot & Ruellan, 2007: 67), its professionalization process was often ambiguous.
And the recent changes associated to the ‘digital age’ are bringing new important challenges to
the ways journalism has been practiced.
2. New challenges to an old problem

The professionalization process here quickly evoked occurred in a very narrow media
landscape, reduced to the written press. As time went by, the problem of who is and who isn’t a
‘true’ journalist turned to be more and more complicated, first with the entrance of new
competitors into the media field (radio and television), and then with the overwhelming
dissemination of computers, online platforms, Internet, mobile phones, digital technologies, all of
which multiplied the possibilities for public communication and for self-edition. If, in the first
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stage, there have been only some changes in degree, in the second stage the changes were much
deeper: in the last decade of the 20th century, journalism jumped across the borders of the
classical industrial media outlets and spread around a lot of new platforms (either industrial or
domestic, either collective or individual, either permanent or casual) made possible by the new
digital technologies:
Nowadays, when we ask whether someone is a journalist, we may need to refine the question. We should
ask: Is this the kind of journalist who presents analysis, commentary, or political rants? Or, is this the kind
of journalist who offers the fruits of reporting? Or some of both? The issue is not the job title but the activity
(Daly, 2005, emphasis added).
If it was not very easy to define journalism and journalists at the very beginning of the
activity, now it turns to be much more difficult: it’s no longer about changes in degree, it’s
probably about changes in the journalistic traditional paradigm itself. To recall the words of Jane
Singer, we now live in a media environment where ‘virtually any bit of information,
misinformation or disinformation is just a google search away for the online user’ (Singer, 2006:
3) and where ‘while all journalists still publish information, not all publishers of information are
journalists’ (ibidem). And she goes on, anticipating a first conclusion to her thoughts:
[T]he current media environment – one in which anyone can publish anything, instantly and to a potentially
global audience – demands a rethinking of who might be considered a journalist and what expectations of
such a person might be reasonable. Journalists no longer have special access to the mechanisms of
widespread production or distribution of information. Nor do they have special access to information itself
or to the sources of that information. These and other practical notions of what defined a journalist in the
past no longer apply. Instead, the contemporary media environment demonstrates the need to emphasize
normative constructs for journalists seeking to delineate themselves from other online information providers
(Singer, 2006: 8)
In the contemporary media landscape, big changes occurred both inside the journalistic
profession and, more broadly, around the journalistic field. In practical terms, journalists lost the
monopoly of gathering, handling and disseminating news information about the actuality in the
public space. Nowadays, anyone can, at almost no cost and with no particular technical skills,
launch a website or a weblog that instantaneously connects you to the whole world, allowing all
sorts of messages – including news, as well as commentaries, opinions, critics, etc. – to be sent
and received on a large scale. And many of the people using now these new devices and
possibilities claim to be doing some sort of journalism, although not on a regular, professional
basis (‘participatory journalism’ and ‘citizen journalism’ are common expressions to refer to this
activity, as well as to the contributions brought by lay people, through laptop computers or
through mobile phones, to traditional media outlets – the so-called ‘user-generated content’ or
CECS 5 / 27
‘crowdsourcing’4). And if, in some cases, these new trends are not welcomed by the professional
group, who insists that journalism should be performed only by credentialed and trained
journalists, in other cases (as it happened already with BBC, in the UK, or with the Society of
Professional Journalists – and its recent creation of a ‘Citizen Journalism Academy’5 – in the
USA) the professional organizations themselves offered training to average citizens, making them
more acquainted with the standards of the profession, and so allowing them to better ‘do
journalism’, when the situation occurs.
Furthermore, the development in technologies and telecommunications made it very easy
for any institution to directly contact the public without the traditional mediation of journalists.
More and more institutions and organizations of the most various areas (in politics, in business, in
sports, in culture…) use their own sites, channels and staff to diffuse any sort of information they
want to, instead of trying to submit it to a newspaper, a radio station or a television channel, as it
was the rule in the recent past. And one of the classical roles of journalists (to uncover and to
bring the ‘message’ from the primary sources of information to the public) loosens its
importance, up to a point where more and more voices suggest journalism itself is quickly
coming to an end. Those who argue that this is an overreacting perspective agree, anyway, that
the journalists’ traditional roles are changing, and they will become ‘less the manufacturers of
news than the moderators of conversations that get to the news’ (Jeff Jarvis, apud Beckett &
Mansell, 2008: 97), since ‘networked journalism’ is increasingly taking over former top-down
information processes. The traditional role of journalists as gatekeepers of the news that should or
shouldn’t go public doesn’t make much sense either, in an information landscape where, so to
say, there are almost no gates to keep; instead of that, their job is probably more and more, as
Jane Singer suggests, about ‘vetting items for their veracity’ and ‘placing them within the broader
context that is easily lost under the daily tidal wave of new «information»’ (Singer, 2006: 12).
Not gatekeepers, but ‘sense-makers’; not agenda-setters, but ‘interpreters of what is both credible
and valuable’ (ibidem), as Singer synthesizes:
The journalist no longer has much if any control over what citizens will see, read or hear, nor what items
they will decide are important to think about. In such an open, frenetic and overcrowded media
environment, the conceptualization of what a journalist does must turn from an emphasis on process –
selecting and disseminating information, framing particular items in particular ways – to an emphasis on
ethics (Singer, 2006: 12).
4
Crowdsourcing is ‘the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it
to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call’ (Howe, 2008). When applied to journalism, it
means ‘soliciting reporting, writing, editing, photographs – or all of the above – from amateur users, rather than traditionally
trained journalists” (Metzger, 2007: 2).
5
See <www.spj.org/cja.asp>.
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These are some of the important changes that can be traced inside the journalists’
professional group. Their relationship with the public is a major chapter of these changes, since
the traditional stereotype of journalists ‘delivering’ information to an allegedly passive audience,
in a kind of linear, one-way process, is no longer accepted – or acceptable. Either because of the
new possibilities of online communication that make interactivity with the audiences easier than
ever in the past, or specially because of the new demands by the audience-as-citizens (rather than
audience-as-consumers) to be also an active part in the information process, journalism is
increasingly asked to work in a networked environment, where new opportunities ‘to facilitate
public debate’ arise (Beckett & Mansell, 2008: 102).
But these changes go beyond the professional group itself, since the new possibilities
offered by the digital context caused the traditional boundaries of journalism to be crossed, and,
as we said before, more and more people began to involve themselves in an activity which many
of them claim to be journalism as well, and as legitimate as its traditional professional form. This
claim can be partly associated to the old debate about the bare nature of journalism (a
profession?, a craft?, a trade?, just a civic activity?), and about the bare definition of who is / who
may be a journalist. Some theoretical controversies about this were present during the journalists’
professionalization process, but they faced new strong arguments in recent years.
3. Freedom of speech vs. right to information

The simple fact that professional journalists may need to have some sort of license, or
school degree, or credential, in order to work as journalists (as it happens in some countries)
raises controversies. Those who criticize any kind of license or register for journalists ground
their opposition in one key argument: it runs against freedom of speech. And freedom of speech,
the argument adds, is a fundamental and universal right that cannot be menaced or disrespected in
any circumstance. Since journalism is regarded as a direct emanation and the most widespread
public expression of this freedom of speech, it can’t be subject to any previous authorization,
requirement or licensing. The classic example of this opinion points to the example of the First
Amendment to the Constitution of the USA6, which forbids the American Congress to make any
law that could affect freedom of speech and freedom of the press. According to this same
argument, everybody may be a journalist – and everybody may exercise journalism wherever
he/she wants, because it’s all about freedom of speech and nothing else. A journalist is regarded
6
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress
of grievances” (Bill of Rights – First Amendment).
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as a citizen, equal to any other citizen, and submitted to the general laws of the country, like any
other citizen in any other activity7. Otherwise, if only a selected number of persons could accede
to journalism, that would mean the universal right of freedom of speech would be ‘captured’ by a
minority of citizens.
This libertarian perspective has been discussed for a long time. Giroux (1991: 129/130)
confirms that journalists ‘tend generally to subordinate their social function to their freedom of
speech’, and inscribes this tendency in what he calls the ‘founding myth’ of journalism.
Accepting the rationale underlying this myth, the simple idea of making journalism a profession
wouldn’t make much sense, because professions usually are associated to a set of attributes
(specific knowledge and know-how, school degree, professional code of ethics, restrictions in
access) that put them somehow apart from the common citizen. For instance, what’s the point of
talking about journalism ethics, if journalism is not a specific occupation, with its particular
standards, rights and duties, but only the way of any citizen to exercise his/her freedom of speech
through freedom of the press?
Challenging this ‘founding myth’ of journalism, strictly based on the universal right to
freedom of speech, Giroux (1990: 131) argues that ‘the paradigm which founds the practice of
journalism is the right of the public to information’, another fundamental and universal right.
Following this alternative point of view, the social responsibility of the press – and of journalism
– must be brought into consideration too, since those who work to fulfil the fundamental and
universal right to information in our society are supposed to do it in an adequate and competent
way, for the public interest sake. And this means that they should be well prepared to do the job,
that they should be granted some protection in order to work without restrictions, that they should
have some specific rights and duties because of that; in return, they should assume a public
commitment to follow some professional standards and to obey to specific ethical values and
norms, accepting to be accountable for them. This is, after all, the rationale underlying the idea of
giving the journalists a special statute (actually, a professional statute), presupposing their right
to freedom of speech as a cornerstone of their activity – although not understood only in
individual terms – but adding to it their commitment with the right of the public to information.
7
In spite of this, even in countries (like the USA) where journalists are not licensed, some practical mechanisms distinguish
professional journalists from those working on less formal contexts. As Powell (1998) argues, the granting of press credentials
by public authorities to have access to an event, in order to cover it, is a form of licensing journalists, and of deciding who is
(who gets the credential) and who is not (who doesn’t). And he concludes: “So who is a journalist? Whoever the government
says is a journalist” (ibidem). Actually, as Glaser (2008) recalls, bloggers, for instance, still have trouble getting press
credentials for events, ‘though established blogs are gaining more credibility with readers’ and, in many cases, they
unquestionably ‘do journalism’.
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Information, let’s insist, that is an essential ‘public good’ for citizens to be able to take their
decisions and to actively participate in the public life.
This special statute has been, in various countries, translated into some kind of mandatory
license, credential, chart or card. All of them mean some sort of restriction of access to the job
(now understood in professional terms), and, at the same time, they grant the journalists some
special rights or privileges (right of access, right to professional secrecy regarding the protection
of confidential sources, right to a ‘conscience clause’ in order to protect their individual freedom)
which give them a particular status. Some special duties are also imposed to them (both in legal
and in ethical terms), as a sort of counterpart for their privileged position and as an alleged
guarantee that they will responsibly and accountably pursue their task of public service.
These are, in general terms, the grounds for the existence of a journalists’ professional
group – that is to say, an organized group of persons sharing a set of common standards, norms
and values, as well as a specific statute and a legal credential, working in journalism on a full-
time, exclusive, paid basis, in the context of established media industries.
But in recent years, as we said above, these strict boundaries have been crossed in
multiple senses, and more and more persons have been involving themselves in some form of
journalism – now understood not as a professional work but as a civic activity, accomplished on
an amateur (even regular) and independent basis, particularly through mechanisms of self-edition
made possible by the digital technologies and the Internet. This raises questions about the bare
definition of journalism, with some voices arguing that it can’t be regarded nowadays as it was in
the past, when it was shaped very much according to the self-interests of the restricted
community of professional journalists. Critics of a ‘single modelling’ for journalism, Ringoot &
Ruellan (2007: 73/74), for example, argue: ‘Journalism is what the actors of the time say, and by
actors we mean not just those we designate as professionals, but also those whose discourse
transforms perceptions’. Insisting that there are many more actors, besides the professional
journalists, who are today involved in producing and publicly disseminating information, these
authors add, in a more conclusive way:
The constitutive lack of identity which characterizes the group of journalists and the dispersal which
characterizes journalistic production enable us to take on a complex identity which is constantly being
rebuilt. The tensions between discursive order and disorder are neither accidental nor occurring only from
time to time. They appear to us more as an identity component of journalism (Ringoot & Ruellan, 2007: 74)
A similar approach is developed in another work, where Ringoot & Utard (2005) insist on
the need to broaden the traditional definition of journalism, refusing to identify it exclusively
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with an alleged ‘essence’ associated to its professional model. Instead, they call the attention to
different discursive practices, increasingly present in contemporary societies, which are also
engaged in producing and disseminating information. And they add:
The absorption of these different practices by the legitimate sphere risks putting them in comparison with a
unique model - the one that was built by the journalism professionalization. However, our conviction is that
journalism is a social practice of discursive production before being a profession. In order to study it, we
define it on a minimal basis as a socio-discursive practice which brings three stances into interaction:
sources, practitioners and publics. (…) This conceptualization allows us to consider as discursive
formations some practices that an exclusively normative perspective would dismiss as non-journalistic
(Ringoot & Utard, 2005: 18-19)
These perspectives don’t necessarily reject or devalue journalism in its professional,

institutionalized form, but they suggest that other practices can deserve some attention in this
process of permanent ‘invention’ of the activity.
4. Journalists as professionals and / or as citizens

Who is, then, a journalist? – we might ask. Even among those who claim to actually
perform some form of journalism, although on a non-professional basis8, there seem to be two
different understandings of these new challenges.
One the one hand, there are those who suggest that journalism may be performed in
different ways and at different levels, both professional and non-professional, but with a different
set of rights and duties; in these cases, those involved in the activity on a part-time,
complementary basis, claim to have some specific place (and legitimacy) to do what they do as
‘amateurs’, but they admit that a professionalized form of doing the job brings particular
demands regarding education, skills, know-how, knowledge and public responsibility.
On the other hand, there are those who, recalling the ‘founding myth’ of the freedom of
speech as the sole and universal ground for the legitimization of journalism, clearly refuse any
way of treating journalism as a profession (or even a craft), in the sense that there should be no
rules to accede to it, or any kind of license or credential to perform it; in these cases, journalism is
understood as a civic activity, open to everyone in a democratic society, and with no particular
rights or duties other than those of the general laws of the country. And if there are any specific
rules to protect and defend the journalistic work (for example, access to public information or the
right to keep confidential sources of information secret), than they must be applied to everyone
claiming to do journalism, whether in a traditional media outlet (a newspaper, a radio or TV
8
It should be reminded that there are also an increasing number of persons (e.g. bloggers) who actually practice some form of
journalism as an exclusive, full-time activity, sometimes individually and sometimes collectively, although not linked to any
traditional media company – and, therefore, not recognized as professional journalists in legal terms. But this doesn’t mean that
they are not recognized in social terms.
CECS 10 / 27
station) or on an on-line news site, a weblog, etc. This would be about citizenship, not about
professional work.
We stand for the first understanding of this issue. Trying to deal with the complex media
landscape of contemporary societies in a more positive way, we suggest it is useful to distinguish
between different levels of journalistic practice (more complementary than mutually excluding),
instead of just dismissing any form of information work that doesn’t fit the traditional model.
Then, in a second step, we can try to outline their particularities and relative positions as far as
the journalists’ professional group is concerned.
At least four levels could be considered in this complex media landscape where a kind of
’layered journalism’ (Ward, 2009) is increasingly present:
1) Professional journalism performed as a full-time, paid, exclusive, specialized job in
newsrooms in institutional media companies;
2) Professional journalism performed as a full-time, specialized job in new media (online)
outlets, such as news sites and weblogs;
3) Journalism performed as an amateur part-time activity in individual or collective news
sites and weblogs, as well as in institutional media companies;
4) Journalism performed as a ‘citizenship practice’, on an informal and casual basis,
contributing to broaden and expand the sources of information used by old and new media
(the ‘crowdsourcing’).
It should be notice that the first and the second levels are increasingly approaching, and
even mixing, as is pointed by Glaser (2008):
‘Mainstream media reporters have started blogging in droves, while larger blogs operations have hired
seasoned reporters and focused on doing traditional journalism. (…) There are thousands of journalists who
now blog, and there are lots of bloggers who are trained journalists’.
After a period of time when media mainstream organizations (and journalists themselves)
regarded less formal news sites and blogs with some suspicion, things have been changing. Big
traditional media now create their own blogs, blogs more committed with journalism are
developing truly professional projects, and the blogosphere turned to be a valuable source of
information in many cases. Not all blogs are involved in journalism (many of them explicitly say
they don’t want to), not all blogs follow technical or ethical standards that would allow them to
be trustful (neither do some of mainstream media), but an increasing number can claim to
perform journalism in a serious, accurate, reliable way.
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An interesting point would be to discuss whether blogs turn to be more ‘journalistic’

insofar as they approach to the common standards and rules (and ethos) of mainstream media
journalism, or whether they challenge some of those standards and rules, bringing new practices
and new values (and a specific ethos?) to the job, thus broadening the traditional definition of
journalism. This trend can be regarded in two ways. On one hand, there are bloggers who very
closely commit themselves explicitly with the values, norms and standards traditionally
associated to professional journalism: Dan Gillmor, for example, has created a ‘Citizen Journalist
Pledge’ for the contributors of his blog ‘Bayosphere’, urging them to ‘agree to be accurate,
complete, fair and transparent’ in their posts, and to ‘report and produce news explaining the facts
as fairly, thoroughly, accurately and openly’ as they can (Gillmor, 2005)9. On the other hand, it is
clear that blogging has, in many situations, a rather different way of dealing with news and
information, and it also has a rather different way of dealing with the ‘audience’, stimulating a
continuous interaction between news producers and news consumers, up to a point where the
simple difference between producers and consumers (mixed into ‘produsers’) no longer makes
sense. And this practice (which is more than just a practice, because it means a totally new way of
understanding the media operation and media role in the society) is strongly challenging
traditional media practice and ethos, forcing them to face their responsibilities in rather new
terms.
Besides these more or less hybrid professional forms of journalism, other forms of
gathering and disseminating news and information in the public space, although somehow
atypical (that is to say: not performed as a profession or as a job), increasing claim the right to be
considered as ‘journalism activities’. The generalized use of portable computers and mobile
phones, for example, made it very easy for someone accidentally found in the middle of an event
to report about it (through text, sound or picture), either through a personal blog or through an
open news site or even through mainstream media (who now stimulate this sort of contributions).
Recent dramatic situations, such as the Katrina hurricane in the USA, the Far East tsunami or the
turmoil in Iran during election times, just to mention a few, gave enormous evidence of how we
can get more information and more varied points of view if we add all these contributions – with
some inherent risks of misinformation and of lack of skills, of course – to the work performed by
9
Friend & Singer (2007: 127-133) give a series of examples of the same type: the ‘Bloggers’ Code of Ethics’, written by Jonathan
Dube (see Cyberjournalist.net), the ethical guidelines proposed by Rebecca Blood in her ‘The Weblog Handbook: Practical
Advise on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog’, the code of blogging ethics advanced by Martin Kuhn, the guidelines
suggested by the well-known blogger and online journalist J. D. Lasica, the set of rules offered by the Online Journalism
Review, etc.
CECS 12 / 27
mainstream media. And these new opportunities, matching some new positive will of citizen
participation in the public sphere, are open to anybody in a way they have never been in the past:
I think it’s a mistake to define journalism on the basis of who practices it. Some people may perform an act
of journalism only once in their lifetime. Look, for instance, at someone who was caught in the tsunami and
took a picture of what was going on. The journalist’s role is changing. We now have more people doing
journalism, which can be confusing; but there is a role for [professional] journalists, the role of editing,
managing information, perhaps even educating people to help them to do better journalism. The idea that
institutions own journalism is coming to an end, but journalism doesn’t (Jarvis, 2008: 4).
The fact that anybody can (and probably should) do journalism, in the sense explained
above, doesn’t necessarily mean everybody is a journalist, in the sense of a profession. When
someone engages professionally in journalism, this means more than just being able to ‘respond
journalistically’ in a casual situation. More than being reactive to events that may occur here and
there, journalists are supposed to be also proactive in the permanent search (and investigation) of
meaningful, comprehensive, socially relevant information, even when it is ‘hidden’ behind the
events or when it must be searched far from their neighbourhood. Being able to do this implies
having the proper means; acquiring and permanently developing the adequate knowledge, know-
how and specialized skills; assuming the social responsibility of this work in order to serve the
public interest; accepting (and being accountable for) a clear commitment with the ethical values
and norms attached to such an important and sensitive job in the contemporary societies.
Should there be any difference between these different levels of performing journalism,
for example in terms of credential, license or some other sort of public instrument of recognition
of the particular duties involved in it? Probably yes. But this doesn’t mean that one condition is
superior or inferior to the other, one more or less ‘legitimate’ than the other; it just means that the
demands and expectations attached to one or the other are different, both in kind and in degree.
These different forms of working with news and information are to be seen as complimentary,
rather than as mutually exclusive. They can cooperate in the joint efforts to provide society with
better information. To involve citizens (and to involve them actively) in the co-production of
news and reporting is something all the mass-media should consider as a duty, not just a kind of
‘good-will concession’ or a simple way of sparing some money (because these citizen
contributions are usually much less expensive than the assignment of all the tasks to a
professional reporter)10.
10
The expansion of opportunities for citizens to perform some kind of journalistic work has a supplementary advantage that
should be underlined: it certainly helps to expand and to deepen media literacy. The experience of producing news and of
feeling directly all the benefits and constraints associated to it certainly helps people to better understand the logics underlying
the media functioning, and, therefore, to develop a more critical way of consuming information.
CECS 13 / 27
If journalism-as-a-citizen-activity doesn’t need (nor shouldn’t) any kind of license,

credential or prerequisites, the same doesn’t necessarily apply, in the same terms, to journalism-
as-a-professional-work – which doesn’t exclude the ‘citizen’ condition, but goes beyond that.
Although it may look sympathetic or popular for a journalist to claim to be no different from ‘an
average citizen’, performing his/her job on the ground of just giving use to the universal right to
freedom of speech, we know this is not the whole truth. In our societies, and in our media
surrounding, journalists have special duties and responsibilities in order to adequately fulfil the
public’s right to information. They also have special rights (more or less expanded in legal
terms), but these mustn’t be regarded as elite privileges: they have been granted over time
because they were considered as the necessary conditions for them to perform their tasks in the
best possible way. When journalists insist they are not different from any other citizen, very often
the assertion is invoked to refuse any particular professional responsibility and, subsequently, to
escape any further obligation to be accountable for what they did (or did not). That’s why in these
cases any criticism against specific journalistic practices is often disregarded, under the
accusation that it is menacing freedom of speech – as if freedom of speech were an absolute,
irresponsible and unaccountable right, somehow exclusively kept and exercised by the journalists
alone.
5. The central role of ethics

More specifically as far as journalism ethics is concerned, this strongly changing media
landscape raises a number of controversies, doubts and challenges. For methodological purposes,
they might be organized into two separate (although intertwined) groups, depending on whether
we put more emphasis on the media or on the actors: (a) the new ethical questions allegedly
brought to journalism since it began being performed online, in the so-called ‘new media’ and in
a digital environment where Internet reigns; (b) the new ethical issues associated to the fact that,
besides professional journalists, many new actors entered the field of public diffusion of news
and information, claiming to practice some kind of journalism too.
a) New media – new ethics?

Is the Web “simply a new tool for communicating, or is it a new way of communicating?”
(Friend & Singer, 2007: 58, emphasis by the authors). Apparently, it is a new tool that makes
communication easier, faster and more accessible to everyone, user or producer (or ‘produser’);
but it is something more than that, given its particular characteristics and its potential for social
change. Considering the fact that journalism in the new media is being developed with a new tool
CECS 14 / 27
but also in the context of a really ‘transforming technology’, this means, as Friend & Singer
(ibidem) argue, that ‘older journalistic standards are still critically important’ here, but also that
‘several new ethical wrinkles’ must be recognized and dealt with.
According to Heinonen (2005) and his research among Finnish journalists, some ethical
demands are usually regarded as constant or ‘perpetual’, whether the job is performed in
traditional or in new media (truthfulness, accuracy, fairness, credibility); some other ethical
values are also regarded as constant, but they are considered to be ‘highlighted in the online
environment’ (Heinonen, 2005: 137): that would be the case of plagiarism and of the blurring
borders between journalistic and non-journalistic contents, both made easier, more frequent and
rather ‘normal’ by the new Internet context. Besides these, however, some emerging ethical
issues can be identified specifically in online journalism: its ‘expanded time-span’ (ibid.: 138), by
which online journalism is ‘theoretically eternal’ (and, therefore, search engines can keep
bringing up old information from the archives, often without updates or the due corrections), a
sort of ‘clash of cultures’ (institutional and ‘hierarchical’ journalism coexisting with citizens’
eagerness to freely participate in the information flow, but following different rules – see the
problem of anonymity), and, more generally, the questions related to journalists’ relationship
with their audience, in a context where interactivity and partnership are favoured both by the
technology and by the new social demands. The new media seem, actually, to be ‘a catalyst for
ethical considerations’, as Heinonen (2005: 140) argues. And he adds, in the sequence of his
empirical findings:
“[A]lthough the new media do not seem to constitute a revolution in journalism ethics, the data suggests that
in the online world proper journalistic conduct may have to change to be compatible with both the
requirements and the possibilities of the new medium. As institutional journalism everywhere is
increasingly influenced by the global netizen culture, journalistic ethics may encounter issues to which the
prevailing codes of conduct provide no or little guidance (Heinonen, 2005: 141).
The new tools available to journalism online raise specific problems with ethical
implications – one of the most often discussed being that of immediacy. More than ever, news go
public just a second after the events occurred (or after some information was found by a
journalist), because ‘that’s the way it is’ in the online platforms and because fierce competition
among all kind of media outlets forces it to be so. ‘Make it fast and short’ seems to be more and
more the prevailing rule in this media landscape. The idea that information should go public only
after a careful process of verification11 – which includes the confirmation by at least two different
11
Verification, as is argued by Kovach & Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism, is ‘the essence of journalism’. According to
their own words, ‘the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art’
(Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001: 71), but ‘the modern press culture generally is weakening’ this methodology, partly because of the
new technologies (ibid.: 75).
CECS 15 / 27
sources (‘double-checking’) and the consultation of the different parties somehow involved in it –
is nowadays under constant menace. The possibility of updating and correcting the information
along a permanent flow during the 24 hours of the day (a major change against the ‘periodicity’
that was so typical for traditional journalism) tempts everyone to ‘publish now and confirm later’
or, as the defenders of the so-called ‘incremental journalism’ pledge, to come to the real story
through a series of approximate steps by which the ‘truth’ will eventually be totally unveiled.
This increasing practice may put journalism credibility at risk and raises important ethical doubts,
since a rumour or a partial, unverified information can be published exactly in the same terms of
a confirmed story. But, according to some opinions, this is just the new way of dealing with the
new technological tools, namely Internet, where the bare discovery of the ‘truth’ is a process of
‘collaborative work’, made of many different contributions: the information initially published
online by a journalist doesn’t need to be finished, since it will allegedly be continued, developed,
added, confirmed, nuanced, in the minutes or hours to come, with the participation of other
journalists, of bloggers, of members of the vast Internet audience.
This new ethical perspective emerges from the consideration of the Web both as a new
tool and as a new way of communicating. Actually, it is defended by most people who presently
share with the journalists the public flow of news and information – namely the bloggers –, either
participating through comments in the work of the mainstream media or developing alternative
informative projects (professional in some cases, amateur in many others). And bloggers, Friend
& Singer (2007) argue, don’t necessarily share the ideas of traditional journalism regarding the
seek for the truth, and particularly the need for a previous, exhaustive process of verification:
[Bloggers] do not see truth as resting on the decisions of one individual or group of individuals within a
news organization or anywhere else. Nor do they see truth as having to do with attempts at objectivity.
Instead, bloggers see truth as emerging from shared, collective knowledge – from as electronically enabled
marketplace of ideas. (…) Knowledge is seen as evolving through connections rather than as contained
within one entity such as a newspaper or newscast. (…) Truth for the blogger is created collectively rather
than hierarchically. Information is not vetted before its dissemination, but instead through the process of
disseminating multiple views, with truth, in the bloggers’ view, as the end result of the discussion” (Friend
& Singer, 2007: 121).
And this leads to our second point.
b) Different actors – different ethics?

Apart from (but together with) the fact that the new media, given their characteristics,
may challenge some traditional ethical norms in journalism, we live, nowadays, in a media
surrounding where many actors entered the public sphere and finished the old monopoly of
journalists in the process of gathering, editing and diffusing news and information. And the
CECS 16 / 27
obvious questions are: do they all do the same things?, do they have the same rights and duties?,
do they share the same ethics?
It may be useful to make some distinction between three different forms of public
participation and publication in the Internet: (1) ‘user generated content’ (USG) doesn’t have
necessarily to do with journalistic information, but with the universal right to freedom of
expression and with the duty of the media system to be, among other things, an open forum for
public discussion, giving voice to everyone (and particularly to those who usually didn’t have a
voice); (2) ‘participatory journalism’ relates to a kind of collaborative work, where ‘the people
formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2004) involve themselves, together with the structures
of media organizations, in the process of searching, gathering and handling news and information
in the public interest, but always under some kind of supervision by professional journalists of
editors; (3) ‘citizen journalism’ (in this or other similar expression) refers to an autonomous
activity of public diffusion of news and information through instruments of self-edition (news
sites, blogs, etc.) independent from the traditional media industry, carried out by ‘lay people’ on a
more amateur or more professional basis (but, here, apart from the established organizations of
professional journalists), with a purpose of civic participation – and often of a sort of
‘counterpoint’ to the mainstream, institutional journalism.
Some specific ethical issues concern more clearly the last group (since, in the case of the
others, there is usually some kind of filter that makes journalists ultimately responsible for the
publication), but others relate to all the situations: let’s think, for example, in the widespread
trend to anonymity in the online environment, with serious consequences in terms of credibility –
and of lack of accountability.
Besides the different ways of dealing with the ethical demands of truthfulness (because of
a particular understanding of the ways to come to the truth) and of verification (because of the
increasing pressure for immediate publication), as was explained in the previous point, the
coexistence of various types of actors in the field of public diffusion of news and information –
call it journalism or call it another thing – has been raising controversies particularly about two
basic ethical principles: independence and objectivity. More than these two key-concepts usually
associated to journalism professional ethics, bloggers and other practitioners of alternative media
tend to stress another one above them (or even instead of them): transparency.
The claim for transparency as an ethical fundamental demand of serious journalistic work
is not a new one, and shouldn’t necessarily be linked to the emergence of alternative voices in the
media space. Kovach & Rosenstiel (2001) in their important reflections about the basic elements
of journalism, ask the journalists to be ‘as transparent as possible’ about their ‘reporting methods
CECS 17 / 27
and motives’, and even consider transparency ‘the most important single element in creating a
better discipline of verification’ (Kovach & Rosenstiel (2001: 80) – and let’s remember that, for
those authors, ‘the essence of journalism is a discipline of verification’ (ibid.: 71). However, we
can say that never before the emergence of alternative online media was the need for
transparency so emphasized: the well-known blogger Jeff Jarvis even refers to transparency as
“the open-source era’s highest ethic” (apud Friend & Singer, 2007: 71). Other known blogger, J.
D. Lasica, says transparency is the “golden rule of the blogosphere” (apud Friend & Singer,
2007: 123), and Friend & Singer (2007: 70) suggest that this ‘may be the only journalistic ethic
that has moved from online to traditional newsrooms instead of the other way round’
But this claim for transparency in reporting goes beyond the disclosure of what may have
happened ‘behind the scene’ during the journalistic process, allowing the audience to have a
better information about all the questions involved (and to check it by themselves, if they wish
to). It also suggests that, instead of following the traditional posture of objectivity, it is better for
a reporter to use a more personal voice, assuming his/her beliefs and opinions, and not fearing to
be partial and biased in his/her work – as far as he/she previously tells the audience, in a
transparent way, what his/her interests are, what points of view, what motives. In this sense,
transparency could ultimately be regarded as a replacement for objectivity as an ethical value or
norm, as many bloggers tend to defend. And, in fact, most of them (as well as all those involved
in alternative media) disregard any division between ‘fact-based’ reporting and ‘value-driven’
commentary, clearly rejecting traditional objectivity:
Practitioners of alternative media have both recognised the moral and political nature of objectivity and have
directed their work to challenging its central assumptions: that it is possible in the first place to separate
facts from values and that it is morally and politically preferable to do so. Such challenges are not the sole
province of alternative journalists, neither are they new. (…) Workers within alternative media, however,
seek to challenge objectivity and impartiality from both an ethical and a political standpoint in their own
journalistic practices (Atton, 2005: 19).
Although not all bloggers assume the partisan character typical for the so-called
alternative media, the fact is that many of them pretend to practice a kind of alternative
journalism – which means a different practice, but also, very often, the critique of mainstream
journalism practices and values (being ‘watchdogs of the watchdog’ is actually one of their
relevant roles in our time).
In spite of all this, it should be said that the urge for more transparency in journalism (in
all its forms) doesn’t necessarily mean that all journalism would better be partisan and that some
effort of objectivity should be regarded as impossible or undesirable. The concept of objectivity
has been discussed for decades and there is some consensus that it is often misunderstood (or
CECS 18 / 27
perverted in its background and its purpose). Those who stand against it insist that pure
objectivity is impossible and that any account of the reality is always a personal construction to
some degree – therefore, journalists had better assume their subjectivity with transparency and
without illusions. Those who insist in its potential value argue that objectivity never meant to
deny the journalists’ subjectivity but, on the contrary, to be well conscious of it, on order to be
cautious when reporting, trying to do it with as much detachment as possible: it was about
method, not about the person. When the concept began to appear associated to journalism, in the
early decades of the 20th century, ‘objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method
of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and
cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work’ (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001: 72.
emphasis added). In this sense, it can be an important tool in order to accomplish the previously
referred ‘discipline of verification’ that is ‘the essence of journalism’ (ibidem).
It’s probably because of this controversy that some authors have been trying to ‘redeem’
objectivity and to put into a new perspective, no longer associated to naturalistic visions of the
surrounding reality, but understood in the light of the contemporary expectations towards
journalism – towards an interpretative, meaningful approach of the social events and processes.
That’s the case of Stephen Ward and his proposal of a ‘pragmatic objectivity’ applied to
journalism, insisting that an objective attitude doesn’t mean an unconditional belief in ‘the facts’
and just ‘the facts’:
Unlike traditional objectivity, pragmatic objectivity does not require detachment from all values and
perspectives – an impossible demand on humans. Instead, it tests the essential activities of interpreting,
evaluating and adopting a perspective (Ward, 1999: 5)
In this sense, Ward suggests that ‘an interpretation is objective if it is well justified
according to the best available standards’, divided into three types: ‘empirical standards’,
‘standards of coherence’ and ‘standards of rational debate’ (ibid.: 6). That’s why a report can be
(or not) objective, even if it goes beyond the sheer account of facts and engages in (always
somewhat value-driven) interpretation:
A new theory of objectivity is needed because journalism is moving away from a rigid, traditional style of
objective reporting that eliminates any judgment or hint of editorializing. More and more, reporters use a
lively, opinionated style, or adopt an interpretive stance toward stories. (…) Journalists increasingly see
themselves as providing meaning to the daily barrage of fragmented news items. But giving meaning to an
event is not a simple, uncontroversial procedure. The meaning may be biased or ideological. Journalists
need a theory of objective interpretation to guide their forays into interpretive journalism (Ward, 1999: 11).
CECS 19 / 27
In this context we could also evoke Donald Matheson’s assertion that ‘the journalist’s
interpretative role [is] the basis of good journalism’ (Matheson, 2005: 112) and this is ‘something
of an ethical imperative’ (ibid.: 113).
Concluding, we’d say that a deeper and more updated understanding of what objectivity
in journalism may be good for is, in our opinion, more stimulating than just its bare dismissal as
an old illusion, an unattainable ideal or a disguised way of actually manipulating information.
6. Personal and institutional responsibilities

In global terms, then, the main question to be asked is whether the same ethical principles
and norms apply, and apply in rather similar terms and degree, both to journalists and to non-
journalists:
“Are the ethics of communication universal or do the ethical choices involved in publishing information,
ideas, or opinions vary depending on whether a person is a professional journalist or an amateur one? Do
different principles take precedence? Do blogs raise issues for their creators that traditional journalists
typically do not encounter, or are ethical challenges merely matter of degree?” (Friend & Singer, 2007:
116).
It seems clear that many bloggers share many of the same ethical concerns as
professional journalists do, as we have seen in the examples shown in point 4 of this paper. It also
seems clear that a rather different emphasis is put by them in some ethical demands that often are
somehow ‘forgotten’ or insufficiently considered by journalists and newsrooms from mainstream
media – such as transparency. Finally, an open discussion remains about the need to revise some
ethical norms associated to traditional journalism but allegedly less adequate to the new
environment of Internet and of online publication, where most media (both mainstream and
alternative) increasingly work – such as the clear separation between editorial and commercial
content, or the previous verification of all information before publication, in a context of pressure
for immediacy and of an information flow running 24 hours / 7 days. In this last case, however,
the question challenges both the amateur and the professional journalists.
Although the big ethical values and principles of public communication are always the
same (seek the truth, be accurate, honest and fair, minimize harm, be accountable), the specific
ways of making them efficient and collectively shared in practical terms may vary according to
the time and to particular social and cultural contexts. As it happens with most professional
organizations, that usually develop a set of specific deontological norms organized into a ‘code of
ethics’ or ‘code of conduct’ (and from time to time revise that code), also in this particular case
one should remember that ‘the ethics of journalism (…) is grounded in time, place, and
technology’ (Friend & Singer, 2007: xxv). And the digital media environment certainly is an
CECS 20 / 27
opportunity for a deep reflexion about the better concrete ways of meeting the large ethical
demands associated to fair and trustworthy communication, both in professional journalism and
in the various forms of publication of news and information.
Yet, another problem deserves some attention: should ethics be regarded as an ‘almost
wholly personal’ issue, as bloggers often tend to do, or should we consider another level, the one
of professional journalism, where ethics are “both personal and social” (Friend & Singer, 2007:
121)? Even when no substantial differences between journalistic practices by professionals or by
amateurs can be pointed on an individual level, the same is not necessarily true on a collective
level – on the level of the professional group, or rather on the level of journalism as a
profession12.
Recalling the concept of professionalism (Evetts, 2005; 2006) – understood in terms of
‘occupational professionalism’ (a specific system of values and of social responsibilities attached
to a specific profession), and not just as a common-sense attitude of always doing the right thing
at work –, Freidson (2004) argues that ethics is its very ‘soul’, and a decisive stance to explain the
difference between professionals and just well-paid technical experts.
As Freidson explains, professional ethics is mainly about assuring that the good intentions
of rendering a good and trustworthy service in the public interest, with competence,
independence and altruism, ‘are translated into action in the various professions’ (Freidson, 2004:
214). But professional ethics itself must be regarded, still according to Freidson (ibidem), at two
different levels: the individual level of ‘practice ethics’ and the collective level of ‘institutional
ethics’. This distinction helps us to understand that even in journalism (a craft which, unlike
many other professions, is being increasingly practiced by ‘laypersons’ and on a non-professional
basis) there is an ethical responsibility that can’t be reduced to the individual level of one’s
consciousness. And since journalism plays a relevant social role, because it deals with
fundamental rights of citizenship in a democratic society (the right to information and the right to
free speech), then it should not disregard its efforts in order to be practiced also on a professional
level – and with professionalism.
‘Practice ethics’ are only a part of professional ethics; they ‘deal with the problems of
work that are faced by individual practitioners, addressing ethical issues familiar to everyone but
which have assumed exotic guises that need sorting out and recognizing’ (Freidson, 2004: 216).
Besides these, Freidson points also to the ‘institutional ethics’. What is their particular role? They
12
‘Many journalists now regard themselves not merely as ‘being professional’ but as being a member of a profession’, say
Aldridge & Evetts (2003: 560) in a comment to the more recent efforts of journalists to approach to the structures (and not only
to the discourse) of professionalism, such as journalism university degrees, thus trying to achieve higher social respectability.
CECS 21 / 27
more broadly ‘deal with the economic, political, social, and ideological circumstances which
create many of the moral problems of work’ (ibidem, emphasis by the author). In this sense, they
are ‘animated by moral concern for the ultimate purpose’ of professions (ibidem), and, so,
demand that the professional groups somehow take the responsibility for it at an institutional
level too:
The proponents of professionalism must necessarily exercise a strong, principled voice both in broad policy-
making forums and in the communities where practice takes place. This voice cannot be left to individuals,
however, for the most influential source of evaluation and protest comes from a collegial body which
provides authoritative support to individuals and expresses forcefully the collective opinion of the discipline
(Freidson, 2004: 217).
This perspective on professional ethics underlines the collective responsibility of a

profession13 in order to gain and maintain its social credibility, as well as the trust of the public it
aims to serve. In the case of journalism, and of the different levels of its practice, it may not be an
important issue to those who ‘do journalism’ on a casual, informal basis (and to whom the
‘practice ethics’ would be enough), but it surely is important for the professional journalists, who,
regarded as a professional group, are expected to defend and preserve the ultimate purposes of the
discipline. And these purposes are grounded on ethics (also understood at an institutional level),
which constitute, according to Freidson, the very ‘soul of professionalism’:
The functional value of a body of specialized knowledge and skill is less central to the professional ideology
than its attachment to a transcendent value that gives it meaning and justifies its independence. By virtue of
that independence members of the profession claim the right to judge the demands of employers or patrons
and the laws of the state, and to criticize or refuse to obey them. That refusal is based not on personal
grounds of individual conscience or desire but on the professional grounds that the basic value or purpose of
a discipline is being perverted (Freidson, 220-221, emphasis by the author).
That’s why, following this perspective, professionals should claim ‘the moral as well as
the technical right to control the uses of their discipline’ (Freidson, 2004: 222), but with one
major difference: while they ‘should have no right to be the proprietors of the knowledge and
technique’ of that discipline, they ‘are obliged to be [its] moral custodians’ (ibidem). And this
implies, along with the public defense of the necessary conditions for an independent and
competent work, also the surveillance and (self-regulated) control of the good ethical practices
inside the professional group itself: ‘If professionalism is to be reasserted and regain some of its
influence, it must not only elaborate and refine its codes of ethics but also strengthen its methods
of adjudicating and correcting their violation’ (ibid.: 216).
13
Evans (2008) also stresses ‘commonality’ as a ‘key element’ of professionalism: ‘Though I accept that in everyday parlance it is
acceptable to talk of an individual’s professionalism, the majority of definitions (…) suggest a general conception of
professionalism, like professional culture, as a collective notion: as a plurality, shared by many’ (Evans, 2008: n/p). And not
only shared by many, we would add, but also somehow organized and committed at an institutional level.
CECS 22 / 27
7. Conclusions
Trying to sum up, we would point to these main conclusions:
(1) The fact that journalism (and, more broadly, various hybrid forms of public
communication) is increasingly performed with the new technological tools of the online
environment challenges some journalism concepts, practices, standards and ethical norms,
opening the need for a debate that, more than ever, must go beyond the traditional borders of the
profession and involve ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2006). It’s not about
doing the same old things with a new tool, but about doing new things in rather new ways. The
threat commonly associated to a totally new environment should turn to an opportunity to
improve journalism and to redefine it according to new circumstances, new partners, and new
social demands.
(2) Additionally, the fact that many new actors entered the field of diffusion of news and
information in the public space (a field previously closed to professional journalists organized in
media companies), either co-operating with professional journalists or running their own
operations on an autonomous basis, raises new questions as far as ethics are concerned. The
ethics of professionals and of bloggers or other online publishers of news and information may
not be entirely interchangeable14, but they seem to be more complementary than contradictory, as
is argued by Friend & Singer (2007: 133): ‘The relationship between bloggers and journalists
perhaps can best be described as symbiotic’. If the trend is (and we believe it is, and for good
reasons) towards a more complex media landscape where different kinds of journalistic activity
coexist – remember the suggestion made by Ward (2009b) of a ‘layered journalism’, the one that
‘combines professional and citizen journalism through the creative use of new media’ –, it seems
important that all of them gain credibility and trust, doing their share in terms of serving the
public interest. And all these “layers” can learn from one another – particularly in what concerns
the development or renewal of ethical norms more adequate to our new environment – even
without losing their specific characteristics, purpose and identity.
14
Ward (2009b) advances the concept of “ecumenical ethics”, which he explains in these terms: “All communicators abide by
general ethical rules such as to tell the truth. But when we come to different forms of communication, we find different values
and norms. News reporting will value accuracy and impartiality. But online blogging or citizen journalism will value
immediacy, transparency, and strong opinion. The ethics of the future will not be one set of rules for all but a ‘mixed ethics’ of
different forms of journalism. Perhaps ecumenical ethics has always existed. The political cartoonist or the editorial columnist
of a print newspaper is not bound by the same rules of fairness and impartiality that restrain reporters. True, but today such
differences go deeper. People advocate different norms within reporting – depending on whether the journalist is a Professional
reporter or citizen journalist. I do not know whether layered ethics is the best way forward. But it is worth exploring”.
CECS 23 / 27
(3) Journalists always faced some problems and ambiguities in the process of defining,
shaping and legitimizing their profession. The decisions about who should be included and who
should be excluded from the professional group were difficult because of the characteristics of
their activity (frequently balancing between the right to freedom of speech and the right to
information), which contributed to an increasing blurring of the borders of their professional
territory. With the development of online publication and with the multiplication of mechanisms
of self-edition which make it very easy for anyone to produce and disseminate timely information
in the public sphere, the idea of journalism-as-a-citizen-practice has been emphasized, somehow
challenging the specialized field of journalism-as-a-professional-work – or the bare definition of
who is a journalist. If everyone dealing with journalism in any form is expected to know and
respect the ‘practice ethics’ of the activity, only the organized profession can (and is supposed
to) be committed with an ‘institutional ethics’ that engages in guaranteeing the political, social,
economical and cultural conditions necessary for journalism to fulfil its valuable role in a
democratic society. In return, the profession must accept to be responsible and accountable for its
work, developing the means of transparency and self-control which may give concrete substance
to their alleged dedication to the public interest.
(4) The debate of the ethical issues is central to the debate of journalism itself, both in
descriptive and in normative approaches (what it was, what it is, what it is becoming, what it
should be), if we want to grasp and stress its distinctive character among the various forms of
public communication surrounding us nowadays15. We live in a world ‘in which anyone can be a
publisher, but not necessarily a journalist’ (Friend & Singer, 2007: xxiii), and, therefore, ‘a clear
conception of the distinct nature and overriding social value of journalism in a digital democracy”
needs to be developed (Ward, 2008). Following Singer (2007; 2006), we also believe that the
distinction between journalism and other forms of publication ‘rests primarily on ethics’, rather
than on professional categories, labour status or technical skills. But ethics is not just the ability
to respond in a correct way when we intend to ‘do journalism’ on a casual basis. Journalism at
large has an ethical commitment that comes from its social responsibility in order to provide
society with a comprehensive, attentive and meaningful account of the events and processes that
15
This doesn’t mean to disregard or to disqualify other forms of communication, particularly in a time when “journalism no
longer dominates the mediascape as the source for helping a society learn about itself”, as is said by Berkowitz (2009: 290,
emphasis by the author), who adds: “Instead, journalism has become part of a holistic mix of media elements that intentionally
or unintentionally provide people with varied glimpses of the world around them” (ibidem). It just means it is useful to know
what to expect from different forms of communication, in order to be able to make them accountable in due terms.
CECS 24 / 27
help us to live our lives in community and to participate as citizens in the public affairs (in the
‘res publica’). Ethics relates to the way a journalist is supposed to make news and reporting
(verification, interpretation, investigation, background), but it relates also to what happens before
(the active search for relevant news in the public interest, the decision to write or not to write
about this or that, the process of selecting issues and treating them according to some reliable
hierarchy) and to what happens after that process (the consequences to people involved, the
possible harm caused, the need for some follow-up). Dealing with these questions calls, after all,
for a deep consciousness of every factor involved, but also for a complex knowledge and know-
how that go far beyond a couple of technical skills. And all this is about ethics. That’s why
professional journalism, in our view, still has a specific role in modern digital societies and calls
for deep, demanding education and training – although it will more and more coexist with various
other forms of journalistic practices that complement (rather than replace or exclude) it.
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Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade

Journalism is changing – and what about journalism ethics?

Paper presented in the IAMCR 2013 Conference

“Upheavals in journalism have bequeathed to journalists a dizzying whirlpool

Stephen Ward, 2012

1. The professionalization of journalism

2. New challenges to an old problem

3. Freedom of speech vs. right to information

These perspectives don’t necessarily reject or devalue journalism in its professional,

4. Journalists as professionals and / or as citizens

An interesting point would be to discuss whether blogs turn to be more ‘journalistic’

If journalism-as-a-citizen-activity doesn’t need (nor shouldn’t) any kind of license,

5. The central role of ethics

a) New media – new ethics?

And this leads to our second point.

b) Different actors – different ethics?

6. Personal and institutional responsibilities

This perspective on professional ethics underlines the collective responsibility of a

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