{"id":4428,"date":"2009-04-14T12:48:21","date_gmt":"2009-04-14T16:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=4428"},"modified":"2009-04-14T12:48:21","modified_gmt":"2009-04-14T16:48:21","slug":"defending-rule-breaking-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2009\/04\/14\/defending-rule-breaking-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Defending &#8220;rule-breaking&#8221; journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gina M. Chen, a veteran journalist and editor who works at <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">The Post-Standard<\/span> in Syracuse, N.Y., writes an excellent blog called &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/savethemedia.com\">Save The Media<\/a>,&#8221; which is aimed at helping journalists get used to some of the new tools in social media. Chen&#8217;s recent post, titled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/savethemedia.com\/2009\/03\/20\/10-journalism-rules-you-can-break-on-blogs\/\">10 &#8216;Journalism Rules&#8217; You Can Break on Your Blog<\/a>,&#8221; caused a stir in my newsroom at <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">The Globe and Mail<\/span>. One of my colleagues, for example, suggested that the post was irresponsible and that such rule-breaking is one of the reasons there is a &#8220;credibility gap&#8221; between bloggers and mainstream journalists. <\/p>\n<p>You can read Chen&#8217;s post for the full list, but among other things, she suggested that bloggers should:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Use partial or fake names<\/span> because &#8220;there are times on a blog that what a person says as an indication of public sentiment is more important than who said it.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Tell only part of the story<\/span> because &#8220;the beauty of a blog is you can update immediately as more details become apparent or earlier reports are disputed.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Insert an opinion<\/span> because &#8220;I think readers appreciate knowing that journalists have feelings, opinions, lives that shape how they view the world.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Link to the enemy<\/span> because &#8220;with blogging, you can give your readers the best &#8212; even if it&#8217;s not from your staff.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Get personal<\/span> because &#8220;you&#8217;re creating a community; that community wants to know you&#8217;re a person, not a robot.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Answer your critics<\/span> because &#8220;blogging is a conversation with readers. If someone criticizes your post or raises an opposing point of view, you should respond.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Fix your mistakes<\/span> because &#8220;I still don&#8217;t want to make any mistakes, but if I do, I can fix it in real time, not just run a correction the next day that few may see.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So is this list an invitation to be careless, cut corners and risk your credibility as a journalist, as my colleague suggested? Hardly. I would argue that nearly every suggestion on Chen&#8217;s list makes perfect sense. Breaking these so-called rules not only isn&#8217;t bad, it could improve the practice of online journalism.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Linking to reports or releases, and to competitors, is a service to our audience members, and I wish newspapers of all kinds (including mine) did it more often. Chen&#8217;s point about linking to the enemy is very similar to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.buzzmachine.com\/2007\/02\/22\/new-rule-cover-what-you-do-best-link-to-the-rest\/\">Jeff Jarvis&#8217; mantra to &#8220;cover what you do best, and link to the rest<\/a>.&#8221; Getting personal or inserting opinion just makes bloggers a bit more like columnists, who do that routinely in print and other traditional media. They&#8217;re still considered journalists.<\/p>\n<p>My favorites from the list are telling part of the story and fixing your mistakes. I agree that bloggers should get away with telling part of the story. In fact, journalists of all kinds need to get used to doing that more. <\/p>\n<p>We need to realize that journalism and the telling of a news story is a process, and we don&#8217;t have to wait until we have everything before we publish. That doesn&#8217;t mean we should stop at telling just part of a story, of course; but it is fine to publish something short, then update, edit and correct. That&#8217;s what wire services do, after all.<\/p>\n<p>The rule about fixing your mistakes is a particularly interesting one. Newspapers, of course, don&#8217;t like to admit they&#8217;ve made mistakes. They have half a dozen editorial checks to prevent that from happening, and running a correction is an admission that those various defenses failed. In blogging, however, there is an understanding &#8212; readers know that a blog is just one person, and that in return for getting faster information, they may get less accurate information. But they also know that a good blogger acknowledges mistakes and corrects them.<\/p>\n<p>The one bit of advice that I take exception to is the need for full or verified names. It&#8217;s useful to quote people (without knowing their real names) from a social network or site such as Twitter, but I would still prefer to have an actual, verified source. Chen advises bloggers to only do this sparingly, but not doing it enough could lead to significant gaps in credibility.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gina M. Chen, a veteran journalist and editor who works at The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y., writes an excellent blog called &#8220;Save The Media,&#8221; which is aimed at helping journalists get used to some of the new tools in social media. Chen&#8217;s recent post, titled &#8220;10 &#8216;Journalism Rules&#8217; You Can Break on Your Blog,&#8221; caused &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2009\/04\/14\/defending-rule-breaking-journalism\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Defending &#8220;rule-breaking&#8221; journalism&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}