The word “crowdsourcing” was first used in 2006 by writer Jeff Howe in an article he contributed to Wired. As Wikipedia haughtily explains, the term “is a portmanteau of ‘crowd‘ and ‘outsourcing.’”

But just what does that mean?

Wikipedia itself is possibly the most popular example of crowdsourcing . The concept of crowdsourcing involves organizing scores of people who are connected digitally to tackle a task. In Wikipedia’s case, the group creates an online encyclopedia. And while this may sound like a recipe for informational sloppy seconds, in 2005, the journal Nature compared articles about scientific topics published on Wikipedia to those found in the Encyclopedia Britannica. According to a BBC News article,  they “found few differences in accuracy.”

Accuracy notwithstanding, one benefit a leather-bound volume of an encyclopedia does have over an online digital entry is its inherent immutability. Not so for Wikipedia. The digital pages of well-known politicians like Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi have been maliciously changed by their critics. And recently, a journalist was the victim of creative revisionism when his Wikipedia page was attacked in retaliation for something he wrote.

Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi reveled in the death of conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart on a blog post nastily titled “Death of a Douche,” writing, “So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.” Soon after he had spewed out that bile, Taibbi’s personal description on his Wikipedia page was amended to, “an American author and piece of excrement.” It was a literal war of words, as well as quite a chilling warning to any writer with the chutzpah to aggressively critique a subject.

On the upside, the rise of crowdsouring has been a real boon for aspiring journalists and photojournalists,. There are a number of sites on the web,, like Elance and oDesk for writers and iStock for photographers, that have substantially lowered the bar for entry into the journalism market. They give many more people than ever before an opportunity to develop their skills and produce a professional body of work. On the downside, the work they get isn’t usually very glamorous, and the pay is typically meager.

While opening up the profession to more minds has been seen by some as a positive development linked to crowdsourcing, not all of the movement’s results are commendable. One element of crowdsourcing that has major negative ethical implications is the use of video and images posted on social media sites by major news organizations.

For example, on the May 14 edition of NBC Nightly News, the program broadcast a story about the civil unrest currently happening in Syria. During the segment, NBC ran what they described as “amateur footage posted online which we couldn’t independently verify showing burned out tanks in the aftermath of the attack.” That would be like the New York Times writing that they knowingly published an article with unverified information they were told by a single source. In the legal world, it’s called hearsay, and there’s a reason it can’t be used in court. However, running that kind of unchecked footage is a heck of a lot easier, and much less expensive, than hiring journalists to actually be on the ground covering a conflict.

A similar, and equally disturbing practice centered on crowdsourcing occurs when news organizations solicit help from their readers to mine large batches of information for scoops. The idea has a lot to do with the vital importance of speed to market of a brand’s information in the digital world. If you aren’t the first outlet to publish important breaking news, that can seriously impact your ability to show up in search engines, which is now a primary driver in how news is delivered and consumed. The dynamic is a recipe for shallow, skim-the-surface stories.

An excellent example of this occurred last June when a huge cache of Sarah Palin’s emails from her time as governor of Alaska were released. An article on the Knight Digital Media Center ‘s site explained how the New York Times’ handled the situation:

When 24,000 Sarah Palin emails are released this afternoon at 1 p.m. Eastern, news organizations will not only have teams of reporters sifting them for news and database specialists posting them online – outlets like the New York Times also hope for the help of hordes of readers to scour the massive data source.

The Times is asking its users to help “identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight.” No form has yet been posted on its web site, but the news outlet said it would be a simple one to allow readers to describe the nature of the email and then to share their own name and email addresses so they can get credit for their findings.

Could either a Palin supporter or detractor have wanted to participate in this crowdsourcing process in order to skew the Times’ coverage in their ideological direction? Of course not. And why would the Times want to hire and pay enough qualified reporters and editors to do it themselves when they can compensate a horde of unqualified amateurs with their name in print?

It would be wrong to say that crowdsourcing has not been a partially beneficial new practice in digital journalism, especially when it comes to widening the funnel and allowing more voices to participate in the profession. However, crowdsourcing also has substantial downsides, most disturbing of which is its ability to help news organizations cut corners, which can be incredibly tempting in an age when if you don’t publish first, you’re basically dead last.

Hello, open-minded readers. My name is Karen Dybis. I am a freelance journalist in the Metro Detroit area who writes newspaper articles, magazine stories and blogs at night as my two children sleep one floor above me.

Fact or fiction? Luckily for you, the previous paragraph is true. The reality is I could be anyone living anywhere and writing just about anything. And I could be pretty convincing. I am a professional writer, after all.

The key to my identity may be the word “professional.” How I represent myself online matters to me. However, there are others in the wide-open world of journalism profession who have proven to be top-notch hucksters, finding an audience for what they purport to be journalism. And, as anyone who has ever listened to shock-jock radio knows, the public can be easily deceived.

Online hoaxes are hardly new, but there are some situations so ridiculous that they should become standard reading in journalism school. One such example is the story of a 40-year-old graduate student who was able to trick international media – think Fox News, CNN, Huffington Post, The Washington Post – and the thousands of loyal readers of “A Gay Girl in Damascus” into believing he was a young, lesbian Syrian woman named Amina Arraf.

What makes the deception by American Tom MacMaster, the then-medieval studies major at the University of Edinburgh, even more spectacular is how much media his blog received when he posted that Amina had been kidnapped. Little did McMaster know that when his character conveniently “disappeared,” the world would react quickly and strongly.

Meanwhile, the stunned world found out just days later that MacMaster was the mastermind of it all. Several devoted fans of the blog began digging into the story, discovered MacMaster’s ruse and exposed it through articles, their own blogs and television news programs. He had three armed men steal Amina away so he and his wife could have a few days of vacation.

The story was shocking when it first broke last June, and it is no less shocking now. The question now  is what the media learned from the experience – and how easily could it be fooled again. Journalists and bloggers alike can learn from MacMaster’s failings are how necessary it is to take time to examine the author of a blog.

I admit that I took this particular case to heart as I delved into it for this essay. I have been a freelance writer for about six years, and I can honestly say that I have received jobs, handled interviews and completed monetary exchanges for publications entirely through email. Sometimes, there haven’t been any telephone calls or person-to-person conversations. I have worked with editors in places like Alaska and Boston. The only time I saw their faces was when I looked up their profiles on social media sites.

It is obscenely easy to be someone else online. Lots of people love to be anonymous “trolls” – the usually anonymous opinion mongers who torture journalists on websites It is possible to track them down. I’ve done so myself. Thankfully, more legitimate web sites and online newspapers are changing their policies on how people must identify themselves when making comments on storiesto require some transparency.

MacMaster, as many learned later, is an expert at avoiding personal contact with his readers, online commentors as well as interested journalists. As Danny O’Brien wrote in the Irish Times, “In the Amina case, absolutely no one had met Amina, and she wriggled out of any situation that might pin her down. She failed to turn up to press interviews in Damascus; she claimed Skype was not working for online phone calls; when a close online friend wanted to call her, she claimed she had to throw away her mobile for fear she was being tracked.”

But just how easy is it to fool people online? Out of curiosity, I created a completely false online persona. It took all of 10 minutes – and that’s not hyperbole. I chose my middle-school pseudonym, Kim Henley, as my new identity. After all, the lovely Ms. Henley under my direction had written a few letters to the editor of my local newspaper, The Detroit News, in her time, and I knew it would be easy for me to remember her name.

I started on LinkedIn and wrote a professional resume within minutes. I then linked that account to “her” new Twitter and Facebook. I quickly set up a Hotmail account and I was ready to roll. A few keystrokes later, I had my own website and a blog. Instant celebrity was mine to have with some creative writing and marketing. Within a few days, I also had my first request to connect on LinkedIn, a popular professional networking site.

Granted, I was being deceitful. But there are plenty of people who write under an assumed name. Why not start a racy blog? Why not apply for jobs? Why not post things that were inflammatory just to get a few kicks out of it? I care about what would happen when – not if – I was caught.

I spoke with several newspaper and blogging colleagues about the MacMaster case. Many were surprised to hear about it. The majority felt that what MacMaster did was outrageous and the blog should never have lasted as long as it did without the author’s identity being discovered by readers.

Desiree Cooper, a longtime writer and venerable columnist for The Detroit Free Press, said identity is somewhat flexible in cyberspace – mostly because she distrusts the information she finds there on a fundamental level.

“Since I was raised on old school journalism and worked in mainstream media for more than 15 years, I come to the web with a great deal of in-born skepticsm. The fact is that, unless a blog is hosted by a traditional medium, I assume that I’m reading something produced by a hobbyist or a promoter, not a journalist,” Cooper said “There are a few blogs that I sample (not  many) and I only read them to find out what people are talking about. I see them as purely a way to ‘listen in.’”

Stepping away from traditional identities actually is one reason people enjoy being online, Cooper added.

“The Gay Girl in Damascus is an extreme example, but I’m not sure how truly rare it is for people to assume different identities online. Product promoters appear as ‘ordinary people.’ Men and women switch gender identities to explore and express themselves in new ways. People pose as ‘experts’ in order to sell their books/clothing/DVDs. It’s just one more reason to always distrust whatever you read in blogs,” Cooper said.

After all, asked former Detroit-area reporter Anne Marie Gattari, who was making the phone call to find a male voice on the other side?

“This is craziness. And the worst part is the fake blogger and wife become media stars,” Gattari said. “If I’m going to use something in my blog or column that I’ve read on Internet, I confirm the writer’s credentials by checking out his or her website. I also will Google the writer to see if there have been news stories about him or her. If the person has any credentials at all, it’s not hard to find info on him or her.

Gattari said having at least one real, personal contact, even a simple telephone call, is better than conducting all of your exchanges online.

“I typically do not read blogs that are not attached to a legitimate news source,” said Gattari. “I’m not afraid to pick up the phone and call. No reporter or writer should use email only for interviews. It can lead to unauthentic sources being quoted. And besides, it’s lazy.”

Blogger and author Monica Marie Jones said she prefers to see her blog as an online journal, and not as a marketing technique like MacMaster and others see theirs.

“It reflects the thoughts, views, opinions and interests of the writer. If you want to write fiction, just write a book…or create a blog where you showcase your fictional work or a fictional character, but let your readers know that this is the case. I feel that it is just plain wrong to mislead people in that way,” Jones said.

Even my local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists touched on the issue a few months back. A young journalist asked if she could use Facebook posts in her stories. Several veteran reporters were adamantly against the practice, saying that for all you know, they could be a 16-year-old Russian kid with excellent English skills.

Da. I mean, yes. Yes, they could.

Karen Dybis is a Detroit-based freelance writer who has blogged for Time magazine, worked the business desk for The Detroit News and jumped on breaking stories for publications including City’s Best, Corp! magazine and Agence France-Presse newswire.

When Rich Lam went to bed early on the morning of June 16 last year, he had no reason to suspect he’d wake up to a media frenzy.

The night before, Lam was on assignment for Getty photographing riots in Vancouver after the city’s hockey team, the Canucks, lost the Stanley Cup to the Boston Bruins. According to Canadian news reports, several people were stabbed during the riots, cars were set on fire, stores were looted and police carrying shields moved in to control the crowd.

Lam had shot protests and riots before, so the dangerous environment was nothing new to him. At one point while Lam was standing behind a police line, he snapped a few frames of what he believed to be a man helping a woman who’d fallen in the street. The pair were about 30 to 50 yards away, so Lam zoomed in, making sure the woman’s legs were in focus. Then he “never looked at that photo again.”

Lam returned to his editors, who were on-site for the big game to assist with cropping photos and writing captions. “Another photographer told me, ‘Hey, nice picture of the couple kissing,’” Lam recalls. “I only saw it on the screen for about 30 seconds.”

The next day, that photo went viral. Questions about the kissing couple circulated around the globe as the photo was shared on Twitter and Facebook. News media searched for the couple’s identity. Bloggers started to question if the shot was staged or if the photo had been manipulated.

That’s when Lam’s phone started to ring with questions he didn’t have answers to. He hadn’t gotten the couple’s names because they were on the other side of the police line. And if the moment was staged, “I knew I wasn’t any part of it,” Lam says. At the request of his editors, Lam provided other photos from the kiss sequence to prove the moment wasn’t staged.

By June 17, the couple had come forward and an amateur videographer produced video from the scene that showed the photo was authentic. “I felt the weight of the world was off my shoulders,” Lam says.

But the doubts from bloggers were almost insulting. Lam had built a solid reputation as a photographer for the past 15 years. “I understand it’s their job to hear from the horse’s mouth if it was doctored,” Lam says of the journalists who questioned him. “No one could accept a good photo for just that — a good photo.”

So why is the public starting to see problems where there are none?

Part of the problem has to do with the existence of more savvy news consumers, who, ethicists and photojournalists say, have become more skeptical of news photos in recent years, as coverage of photo manipulation scandals becomes more frequent and prominent. Consumers also have seen for themselves what they themselves can do with relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use digital manipulation software like Photoshop.

“The credibility of the photojournalist that we once had as documenters of what’s happening in the world, it definitely takes a big hit when people start fooling around with it,” Lam says. “It’s that whole thing of one rotten apple spoils the bunch. Once you fool the reader… they’ll have that perception of ‘What’s stopping this person or that person from doing it?’”

But that skepticism isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“Your average citizens are learning about journalism and how it works and to not trust everything they see or read,” says Paul Martin Lester, a professor at California State University, Fullerton, who’s written extensively about evolving photojournalism ethics. “I would think you want to be skeptical of what you see. So it’s really a positive influence on the public’s state of mind.”

Lester notes that photo manipulation didn’t begin in 1990 with the release of Photoshop. In his book “Photojournalism an Ethical Approach,” Lester traces the first faked photo back to 1840 when a Frenchman posed as a corpse. Throughout photography’s early history there have been examples of photographers who made photo composites and passed them off as one moment in time, bodies of Civil War soldiers that were moved for dramatic effect and mash-ups done in the darkroom. For example, the popular full-length portrait of President Abraham Lincoln that appears on the $5 bill is actually Lincoln’s head atop a Southern politician’s body.

And in the early 20th century, staging a shot wasn’t considered as unethical as it is today. Lester uses Dorothea Lange’s famous “Migrant Mother” photo as an example. In it, the children were directed to turn away from the camera and part of a distracting hand holding the tent flap was airbrushed from the image.

This changed by the 1950s, Lester says, when academic institutions like the University of Missouri started offering photojournalism majors and professional organizations like the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) started to group photographers together, offering them guidance and making them think more like professionals. Eventually, codes of ethics for photographers were drafted and universities added ethics courses that became integral to photojournalism programs.

Since the 1950s, photojournalism codes of ethics have consistently stated that you cannot add or subtract from an image in a way that distorts reality, Lester says. The current NPPA code of conduct urges photographers to stay away from stage-managed photos and prohibits them from doing anything that deliberately alters the events unfolding before them. The editing process must “maintain the integrity of the photographic images’ content and context.” Images shouldn’t be manipulated in a way that misleads viewers or misrepresents subjects.

The fundamental philosophy of photojournalism ethics might sound intuitive, but that’s because the problem has less to do with ethics than how they are put into practice, says Kevin Connor, president of Fourandsix, (a word play on “forensics”), a company that’s working to develop tools that analyze and authenticate digital images.

Many photojournalists say they stick to alterations in Photoshop that they could have done in the darkroom. But for journalists who were raised on digital cameras, that might be a difficult basis for judgement calls.

To solve this, some organizations provide specific limits on what can be done in Photoshop. For example, the Associated Press allows photographers to make “minor adjustments” such as cropping, dodging and burning, converting to grayscale, toning and color adjustments that “restore the authentic nature of the photograph.” Use of the cloning tool (which copies and pastes part of the picture) is only permitted to eliminate dust on camera sensors or scratches on scanned negatives. Removal of “red eye” is not allowed.

But there are no hard and fast rules as to which Photoshop tools are off limits.

“The challenge here is it is contextual,” says Connor, who worked at Adobe for 15 years, mostly on Photoshop products, and now blogs about photo editing. “Those same things that you do that are valid, if pushed too far can become inappropriate.”

One of the most famous examples of taking photo manipulation too far is Time’s 1994 cover of O.J. Simpson, which darkened Simpson’s mugshot in a way that made him look menacing. Lightening or darkening is not inherently wrong, Connor says, “but if you do in in a way that has a specific meaning or impacts in a sensitive way, that’s out of line.”

Most photo editors and contest judges know to look for certain clues that a photo has been doctored. According to a 2007 American Journalism Review article about photo manipulation, “the most common signs are differences in color or shadows, variations in graininess or pixilation, blurred images or elements in the photo that are too bright or much sharper than the rest.”

Of course, many photo manipulations are too slight to see with the naked eye, which is why increasingly sophisticated methods are being developed to tell a user where and how an image has been changed. Known as “digital image forensics,” the field is still rather new and niche, but companies like Fourandsix see the image verification tools they are developing as being useful not only to newsrooms but also within the scientific community and for law enforcement.

In a 2008 feature for Scientific American, Hany Farid, Fourandsix’s chief technology officer and a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, wrote about the algorithms he’d developed to help detect if a photo had been manipulated. Because there are many different ways to manipulate a photo and many degrees of manipulation, Farid worked on several methods.

One algorithm estimated the direction of light sources to see if a photo composite had been made. Another determined the consistency of light being reflected back into people’s eyes, to see if they’d actually been photographed in the same place and time. A third looked for identical blocks of pixels repeated throughout an image that would suggest the cloning tool had been used. A fourth examined the image’s pixel correlations, which if incorrect for the camera used would suggest spots of the photo or the entire image had been changed.

But a major problem, Farid wrote, is that as software continues to improve, “forgers will work on finding ways to fool each algorithm.”

“As with the spam/antispam and virus/antivirus game, not to mention criminal activity in general, an arms race between the perpetrator and the forensic analyst is inevitable,” he continued. “The field of image forensics will, however, continue to make it harder and more time-consuming (but never impossible) to create a forgery that cannot be detected.”

Connor says that ideally, future manipulation detection products will have a suite of tools that look for different signs of what’s been done to an image. But he doubts any photo manipulation detection software would ever be completely automated, since it depends on how far one takes an editing tool, not whether it has been used at all. “You really can’t remove the human judgement from it,” he said.

Part of the NPPA code of conduct dictates that “visual journalists should continuously study their craft and the ethics that guide it.” And as photographic technology evolves, newsrooms and photojournalists are constantly reevaluating and redefining the boundaries they follow, often becoming more specific in their code of conduct language, Connor writes.

Lester says it’s possible that certain technologies that are frowned on now could become more acceptable as they’re used more frequently. He uses an an example HDR, or high-dynamic-range imaging, which is a technique that involves taking multiple pictures at different exposure levels. Those pictures are then “stitched” together in a way that better shows dark and bright areas.

On its Jan. 13 cover, The Washington Post used an HDR image of a bridge at sunset with a plane flying overhead as the water and sky turned a bright orange color. The caption the Post decided to use accompanying the photo read: “This image is a composite created by taking several photos and combining them with computer software to transcend the visual limitations of standard photography.”

Poynter spoke to the Post’s director of photography, Michel du Cille, about the choice; du Cille said he wanted his photographers to experiment with new techniques and technologies, reasoning, “Ten years from now, HDR may be built into cameras, and who will know it?” But NPPA’s president told Poynter that HDR is a digital manipulation “not appropriate for documentary photojournalism” because it goes against the organization’s code of ethics tenant to “respect the integrity of the photographic moment.”

The use of camera phones as a reporting tool has become increasingly accepted, though the use of camera phone applications still raises quite a bit of controversy. Critics have lashed out at journalists who use apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram, which develop photos with a vintage feel, arguing that they produce images that are just as unethical as those that have been manipulated in Photoshop.

But other photojournalists say you can’t categorically dismiss such apps as “always wrong,” in the same way Connor says that no Photoshop tool is always used to mislead.

Deciding whether a certain camera or an app is appropriate to use all boils down to two questions, says Chicago-based photojournalist Sally Ryan: “What are you shooting and what are you trying to say?”

Ryan, who shoots for the New York Times, says that as a photographer, you need to decide before you shoot what message you’re trying to convey and how you’ll present the image after it’s taken. It comes back to context, she says.

Last year, New York Times photographer Damon Winter won an award from Pictures of the Year International for a series of photographs taken on his iPhone using Hipstamatic. The photos accompanied a feature story that detailed the unglamorous day-to-day life of soldiers in Afghanistan.

Critics argued Winter should not have won the award, or used the app to take the photos, and after some time, Winter responded in a lengthy post on the Times’ photo blog.

He argued in support of using the camera phone, which is more discreet and less intimidating for soldiers. In adherence to photojournalism ethics, no content was “added, taken away, obscured or altered,” he wrote. The issue that inflamed critics, he argued, involved not content, but aesthetics, something that, like the field of photojournalism itself, is subjective. Ultimately, viewers must accept that photographers are in control of the image they present, and trust them to tell the truth, if only a version of it.

“We observe, we chose moments, we frame little slices of our world with our viewfinders, we even decide how much or how little light will illuminate our subjects, and — yes — we choose what equipment to use,” Winter wrote. “We are not walking photocopiers. We are storytellers.”

Kalyn Belsha is a freelance journalist based in Chicago whose work has appeared in The Texas Observer, Time Out Chicago and Hoy Chicago. She holds a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. kbelsha@gmail.com

In a fit of professional panic late one night, I surveyed the political leanings of my Facebook friends. How many supported Democrats? How many favored Republicans? Who had plastered their profiles with images promoting Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club or the National Rifle Association?

It was late 2006, and I was a reporter covering politics in New Hampshire. When Facebook had opened to the pubic that fall, I’d joined mostly to keep in touch with my younger brother. Pretty soon, I’d accepted friend requests from many of the political operatives I’d met covering the 2004 elections. They weren’t my friends in a traditional sense, but I saw value in those connections. Still, I worried about how publicly linking myself to these people would affect the unbiased image I cultivated as a journalist.

I was reminded of that night earlier this year when the Associated Press released new guidelines for staff members sharing, or retweeting, information on Twitter. The rules, which are part of a broader social media policy, direct AP staffers to avoid repeating opinionated tweets without quotations, colons or another indication that the opinion belongs to someone other than the journalist themselves.

Within hours of the release of the new guidelines, debates were unfolding on media blogs, Facebook and even Twitter itself. But the discussion was about more than the AP’s policy. It revealed something most of us have known for years: There’s no such thing as an objective reporter. There never has been, and there never will be – except perhaps that computer that started writing sports stories last year.

The question facing digital journalists isn’t whether or not we have opinions or community connections. Journalists, like other human beings, have friends, families and personal experiences that shape the way we see the world. Our backgrounds influence the questions we ask and the types of stories we like to tell. What we’re struggling with is when (or if)  it is appropriate to disclose details about ourselves.

Sue Burzynski Bullard, an associate professor in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, spends part of each semester coaching her students on proper use of social media. She tells them to consider anything online public and to ponder how they would feel if their tweet or Facebook post landed on the front page of the paper. Grammar and verification still matter, she says, as does the need to minimize harm.

The questions surrounding objectivity are important, she says, but not necessarily new.  

“Well before social media and digital news, I realized the objectivity I was taught during the post-Watergate journalism school days was not completely realistic,” Bullard said via email. “As an editor in the newsroom…my background – as a woman, a mother, a Catholic, a first-in-the-family college graduate, etc. – all played into what I thought was an interesting story.  It made me a strong believer that none of us were really objective and that it meant we needed diverse voices around that table arguing for stories from different viewpoints.”

Yes, we’re all individuals, but most of us agree that the work we produce must be unbiased and should adhere to certain standards. The particulars of these standards vary among newsrooms, but the basics are the same:  Don’t make stuff up. Don’t steal other people’s work. Clearly attribute your information. Stay out of the story. Seek out all sides of a debate. Be accurate and fair.

Avoiding public disclosures of personal politics still makes sense for journalists working for news organizations with established brands. Readers can decide to trust—or decry—a publication based on its history, its ownership or its editorial philosophy. Though increasingly, journalists are brands of one, lone storytellers peddling their work online. Those independent voices may choose to share personal information as a means of building trust with readers. A growing number of bloggers and freelance writers publish information about themselves, their background and in some cases, the source of their income.

“I’ve inched toward the idea that if we’re transparent about our biases, we’re more credible than if we pretend we don’t have any biases,” Bullard said. “At the same time, I still wouldn’t want folks covering politics to declare their love or affection for any candidate – in a yard sign, on Facebook or in a Tweet.”

Rob Pegoraro, a former Washington Post reporter who now freelances about technology, draws an important distinction between personal opinions and personal involvement in a blog post about the new AP guidelines. Pegoraro compares the standard to The Prime Directive – a fictional, but useful, noninterference philosophy from the Star Trek universe.

“What makes us journalists is not some magical firewall in our heads that blocks after-hours contemplation of our reporting, but a willingness to look for evidence that disproves whatever theory we’ve been working on in a story,” Pegoraro wrote. “We fail our obligation to the truth not by developing opinions, but by letting them divert our research.”

Blog posts like Pegoraro’s, as well as the public debate to which they contribute, are important as we continue to understand what it means to be a digital journalist. Best practices for using social media and other tools are still emerging, and it’s important they evolve based on the experiences of the people who need them most. John Wayne Ferguson, a copy editor and graduate student at Boston University has seen how difficult it is for the industry to keep up with such rapid technological changes.

“It’s hard, I imagine, to find people to teach the best practices of social media, when the best practices are still being defined,” he said in an email. “I think in a couple years, there might be more agreement about what works and what doesn’t.”

Ferguson tweets regularly, but doesn’t use his account for official business. That may, however, be a function of his position.

“As a copy editor and paginator, I’m already a behind-the-scenes kind of guy,” he said. “I think I want my social media persona to stay back too. But, work-related or not, I try to source things accurately, favor the (retweet) button over retyping other people’s tweets and to not spread rumors. I think I just naturally try to live by the same ethics I work by.”

It’s been five years since my midnight Facebook panic, but I still struggle with how to conduct myself online, especially now that New Hampshire’s 2012 presidential primary is underway. Some of the social media personas of the people covering the race areas are as prominent as the candidates themselves, and virtually every campaign and special interest group is reaching out to journalists like me over Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Some things are obvious: I wouldn’t, for instance, share my personal opinions about a candidate’s economic policy or decorate my profile with images from a special interest group’s website. Nor do I “like” Facebook pages belonging to campaigns or special interest groups. I visit those pages often, and have linked to them from blog posts when pertinent, but the term “like” is just a little too enthusiastic. On Twitter, I don’t follow the candidates. Instead, I group them into a list, as much for convenience as maintaining the appearance of neutrality.

When it comes to sharing information, things get trickier, which is probably why the AP wrote its guidelines for Twitter in the first place. Those of us who spend a lot of time on social networks know the culture, and understand that retweets or Facebook shares mean we found something interesting, not something with which we agree. That distinction might not be so clear to casual visitors to those networks.

It’s rare for me to retweet something directly from a candidate’s official account, but not because I fear it will imply favoritism. I want my Twitter feed to be a curated mix of the most interesting observations about politics, journalism and my community, a sort of high-tech reporter’s notebook. A canned statement from a PR guy seldom fits the bill. I also try to avoid posts dripping with sarcasm because Twitter leaves little room for adding context.

As for the political leanings of my Facebook friends, they were – and are – pretty diverse. And that’s the way I like it. Google and other search engines filter the Internet using keywords and algorithms. Social networks present information based on the personal interests and opinions of users. And, as a journalist, it’s my job to connect with and listen to them all. I routinely connect on social networks with people I’ve met in all sort of ways: at the yoga studio, in writing groups and through the political campaigns I have helped cover. My comfort with this might, however, have something to do with an evolving understanding of what it means to be connected.

Earlier this fall, The New York Times reported on a study by the University of Milan that examined relationships among the world’s 721 million Facebook users. According to the findings, we’re all separate {wc} by an average of just 4.74 people.

“We are close, in a sense, to people who don’t necessarily like us, sympathize with us or have anything in common with us,” Jon Kleinberg, a Cornell professor involved in the study, told the Times. “It’s the weak ties that make the world small.”

Meg Heckman is the online editor for the Concord (NH) Monitor, where she has also worked as a reporter covering politics, government and issues related to aging and elder care.  She can be reached by email at mheckman32@gmail.com or on Twitter @meg_heckman.

“If not yet the world, robots are starting to dominate the news headlines,” writes Patrick Lin in his introduction to Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics.  For years, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence have been performing tasks in factories and making mass production easier than ever. The automation process has slowly transitioned into other areas as well. Robots now are used by militaries to attack enemies and serve as caregivers for infants and the elderly. There are robots used as sex toys, and robots that facilitate surgeons in performing difficult operations.

With new qualities and new responsibilities come new ethical questions. Who is responsible for the actions carried out by a robot? What happens when something goes wrong? Are there laws that prevent humans from abusing robots, and vice versa? What happens when robots start making ethical decisions? Wherein lies the ethical boundary between which tasks robots can perform, and which ones they can’t?

To prevent any misunderstandings about the ethical questions, it is well worth defining “robot ethics.” Wendell Wallach, lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University and co-author of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, defines robot ethics the following way:

“Robot Ethics tends to break down into two different fields. One looks at the societal and ethical issues that arise in the adoption of robots by humans, and the other looks at the prospect that the robots themselves may be capable of factoring ethical sensitivities and legal concerns into the very actions and choices that they make. Many scholars distinguish the two fields by calling the later Machine Ethics.”

While the first field deals with the appropriate use of robots in social contexts, the second field goes beyond mere programming. Instead, it addresses “whether increasingly autonomous robots will in some circumstances be able to engage in explicit ethical decision-making,” Wallach says.

To this day, there are “no laws, and no need for laws, about how humans should treat robots,” Wallach notes.

With robots entering a variety of new fields, taking over roles previously performed by humans, academics are investigating the human-robot relationships in more detail. For their article “The crying shame of robot nannies: an ethical appraisal,” Noel and Amanda Sharkey researched whether robots should be used as nannies, stating that “The whole idea of robot childcare is a new one and has not had time to get into the statute books. There have been no legal test cases yet and there is little provision in the law“ (180). In the case of robot nannies, Sharkey & Sharkey explain,

“The various international nanny codes of ethics (e.g. FICE Bulletin 1998) do not deal with the robot nanny but require the human nanny to ensure that the child is socialised with other children and adults and that they are taught social responsibility and values. These requirements are not enforceable by the law.” (180).

In fact, in “Robot Rights,” Guo and Zhang say that, “because different cultures may disagree on the most appropriate uses for robots, it is unrealistic and impractical to make an internationally unified code of ethics.” (Guo, S. & Zhang, G. (2009). Robot Rights, Letter to Science, 323, 876).

So if there are no laws for robots, who is ethically responsible for them? The “people who create and deploy them [the robots] for specific purposes are responsible,” Wallach states. Even though robots are beginning to make moral decisions, they are still simple machines and those who build, design, and deploy robots are responsible for their actions. Wallach points out that “the robots we have today are just migrating beyond being very simple machines and they have no intelligence, no smarts of their own.” He adds that, “they have no right either as moral agents, but more importantly as moral patients, as someone to whom we should give ethical regard or give any ethical concern.”

Nevertheless, Wallach recognizes that the recent advancements in robotics are adding intricacies to question of responsibility. “It is becoming more and more difficult for those who design and build semi-autonomous robotic systems to predict how those systems will act in new situations with new inputs,” he says. It is this fact that “makes the ethical question [of “Who bears responsibility when something goes wrong or someone is harmed”] more difficult,” Wallach explains. Nevertheless, he is convinced that “that does not mean that the robots are in any way shape or form responsible for their actions.”

The responsibility still lies with the humans; it is “the same kind of responsibility we have for any other tool we use,” Wallach says. Each time a robot assists in performing a surgery, you can still thank, – or blame, – a human. A similar situation is presented when robots care for children. “We could say in absolute terms that it is ethically unacceptable to create a robot that appears to have mental states and emotional understanding,” claim Sharkey & Sharkey. “However, if it is the child’s natural anthropomorphism that is deceiving her, then it could be argued that there are no moral concerns for the roboticist or manufacturer.” (172). 

In fact, Sharkey & Sharkey even raise a point that takes the question even further. One of their article’s sections is even entitled “Is robot care better than minimal care?” By asking this question, they raise an important point: whose ethical responsibility is it when you don’t create or deploy a robot to perform a certain action?

Given the evidence of benefits occurring as a result of the use of robots by children in the home, in the classroom and in therapeutic applications (Sharkey & Sharkey, 162), it appears that humans in fact have an ethical responsibility to use robots in certain situations.

Despite this responsibility, however, the question isn’t as close as those in the Discovery News suggest. Wallach concludes, “those of us working in the field of robotics think that it is going to be a long time, if ever, before we will cross thresholds that we would be giving robots any kind of rights.”

Isabel Eva Bohrer is a writer and photographer who has dispatched pieces from over twenty countries across five different continents. She is based in Madrid, Spain, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of MADbudget, a local’s guide to Madrid. Learn more about her work at www.isabelevabohrer.com

When conducting marketing for sites such as holidayapartments.net, I hand-select websites and blogs to place advertisements. In this manual selection process, several factors are taken into account, including the site’s Google page rank, the number of backlinks, meaning the number of incoming links from other websites, as well as its number of Facebook and Twitter followers. To advertise on a site, for example, it has to have a Page Rank of 3/10 or more, or at least 500 Facebook and/or Twitter followers.

We all know that Facebook and Twitter aren’t the only social media portals out there – just look at the recent spike in Pinterest users. But Facebook and Twitter continue to be the main networks that determine a person or a brand’s social media influence. Websites such as Search Engine Journal even provide entire articles on “Facebook Fan Acquisition Strategies.” In fact, many companies have already taken these strategies to heart, providing discounts exclusively for Facebook users, as well as an “incentivized like,” where Facebook users can access specific content only when they “like” the Facebook page in question. “Get Fans. Get Revenue,” reads the slogan of the Search Engine Journal article by Brian Carter.

It appears that social media is gaining increasing popularity and power; after all, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world, according to socialnomics.net. Advertisers in particular have come to rely on the number of followers to determine where to situate their commercials. 

But what if the number of followers has been manipulated? What if they are being bought and sold, just like any other product on the market?

I came across this issue when conducting marketing work for MyCityCuisine.org. Founder Jim Zhu advised me only to trust Google Page Rank to evaluate a website’s popularity. “Facebook followers can be purchased at a very low cost,” Zhu said, adding:

“For example, out of 638 mycitycuisine followers, about 500 of them were purchased through a company that offers social media marketing service at very low cost – I did it as an experiment to see if the social media marketing can produce real result. None of these followers have participated in any discussions. I suspect many are fake accounts. So I don’t trust the number of Facebook followers.”

With a simple Google search, I came across a plethora articles that mentioned how Twitter and Facebook followers could be bought through numerous websites, such as Twiends. What’s more, followers were even being auctioned on eBay for pennies, as TechCrunch reports. Many times, the differences in prices were determined by whether the followers to be bought were “targeted” or “non-targeted;” that is, whether they would be relevant to (and thus possibly interested in) your company. In a response to the TechCrunch article, one user said that he conducted an experiment purchasing both targeted and untargeted followers. He concluded to “buy only targeted followers” since they resulted in a high number of clicks to his products, and thus “are worth investing money.”

But is it ethical to purchase social media followers? Isn’t this misleading for advertisers who rely on number of followers to determine whether a site has a wide impact? Social Technologist Christian Payne (@Documentally) opines, “it is very misleading to those that you are meant to be engaging with.” By purchasing followers, people are “basically hid[ing] behind this number of fake followers and a network that [they] haven’t at all nurtured, according to Payne.

Companies have an ethical responsibility to not obscure their number of followers by purchasing fake ones. In fact, companies such as Twiends pride themselves on providing “ethical community building.” Their guidelines read:

“Unfortunately, some groups will attempt to grow their audiences via any means possible, including means that can be considered unethical, a violation of twitter’s terms of service, or in some cases criminal too. Twiends decided to make its mark in the Twitter ecosystem by being the “good” community growing service. We recognized that our long-term success would only come about if we played by ALL the rules, consistently and fairly. Our number one priority is to always take our guidance from Twitter and to conform to their terms of service always. We recognize that failure to do this will result in our service not enduring through the years.”

Advertisers, in turn, need to be aware of this issue and instead use other tools to determine a site’s popularity. Payne suggests that a viable alternative is to look at the number of lists that a Twitter follower is on. The Twitter blog explains: “Twitter users can organize others into groups, or “lists”. When you click to view a list, you’ll see a stream of Tweets from all the users included in that group.”

Payne adds, “For me, that is way more important than how many followers someone has, because people are taking the time to curate your Twitter account into a particular list.” He also warns that Twitter “has managed to bury [the visibility of lists] now in the new interface.” He also advises that, “if someone follows me and they’re not on any lists and have masses of followers, and they’re not necessarily following that many people, I tend to report them as spam.”

As everyday Twitter users who aren’t advertisers, we might ask ourselves why we should care whether others are purchasing followers or not. According to Payne, there not only lies a vacuum behind purchasing fake followers, but doing so would also ruin Twitter for what it is. “For me, some of the people in my Twitter network have become my best friends,” he says. “There’s people that make me laugh, there’s people who make me cry, there’s people who hire me for business, there’s people that I hire for business…If everybody went out and [purchased masses of followers] tomorrow, you’d be breaking how Twitter works for everybody.” As Erik Schonfeld writes, “you can’t buy real followers. They come to you.”

Isabel Eva Bohrer is a writer and photographer based in Madrid, Spain. She specializes in travel writing and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of MADbugdet, a local’s travel guide to Madrid. Learn more about her work at www.isabelevabohrer.com.

Is there such a thing as a perfect work of art? You could argue that Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Picasso’s “Guernica” come close, but perfection is an abstract concept and not really something that is ever attainable.

Conversely, are there works of art that are entirely without worth? The big screen oeuvre of Rob Schneider and the entire genre of hair metal come to mind, but again it’s impossible to argue that something is utterly and completely devoid of merit.

That being said, there are more and more websites that are trying to turn critical appraisal into mathematical precision, often giving creative works either perfect scores of 100 or scores of absolute zero. I have taught a class on reviewing the arts for several years now, and while I encourage my students to use sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic to find reviews to read and study, I caution them about those sites’ overall scoring systems.

I recently took some time to examine how the sites calculate their scores and discovered some disturbing trends. On the surface, they both mean well and attempt to provide consumers with a valuable service—by aggregating and averaging the critical appraisals of various works of art, they try to give a clear, objective sense of whether something is worth your time and money.

The process appears pretty straightforward when critics use some type of scoring mechanism themselves. For example, Roger Ebert gives the films he reviews a score of one to four stars. That means that if he gives a film three stars, Meta Critic averages him in as a 75. But wait, a 75 is a C at an academic institution, and anyone who reads Ebert knows that three stars from him is a heck of a lot better than a C. So, the math is already fuzzy when it comes to these critical averages.

But what happens when a critic doesn’t use a rating system? Many A-list critics do not use these systems (Ebert is an exception), so how do the sites average in these reviews? Rotten Tomatoes says it doesn’t use a review in their averaging if the critic does not use a scoring system. According to their site: “Each critic’s original rating scale (star, letter grade, numeric) is converted to a number between 1 and 10, and then the numbers are averaged. Reviews without original ratings are not counted, and a minimum of five reviews with original ratings is required.”

That would mean the opinions of many of the most influential and experienced critics are not computed into the Rotten Tomatoes average. But wouldn’t that seriously skew the rating? Things get even stranger when you search on Rotten Tomatoes for the work of the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, an esteemed critic who does not use a scoring system. You actually find scores next to her reviews. For example, the site lists a score of 3.5/5 stars for the recent film “Chronicle,” and at the top of her index page on Rotten Tomatoes it says, Manohla Dargis “Agrees with the Tomatometer 76% of the time.” Something definitely does not compute.

Dargis’ reviews on the Times’ site actually do include a 1-5 rating system. However, this rating mechanism is for readers who want to weigh in on a film, and it is not used by Dargis, herself. If Rotten Tomatoes is actually averaging in that information as Dargis’ opinion, then the math is way off. (I reached out to Rotten Tomatoes for some clarification, and I have yet to receive a response.)

How does Meta Critic handle using reviews by a reviewer like Dargis who does not include a scoring system? Their approach is quite subjective. The site explains, “our staff must assign a numeric score, from 0-100, to each review that is not already scored by the critic. Naturally, there is some discretion involved here, and there will be times when you disagree with the score we assigned.” So basically, if Dargis won’t score her own reviews, Meta Critic will do it for her.

Where the practice of Meta Critic assigning scores falls apart most is on reviews where the website says Dargis felt a film was perfect (100) or worthless (0). The site lauds 33 of her film reviews with a perfect score of 100, and it slaps seven films with a complete goose egg. However, when you dig into some of the critiques, nothing is really perfect. In her review of Avatar (100 on Meta Critic), Dargis derides the film for “some of the comically broad dialogue,” and when writing about Moneyball (also 100 on Meta Critic), she opines, “There are some overhead shots of the A’s emerald field too, including one of a large American flag being unfurled, that feel like the efforts of a director needlessly looking for big symbolic moments, perhaps particularly post-Sept. 11.”

In the end, where does all this crazy critical computing leave us? It underscores the fact that reviews of the arts are always subjective and cannot be turned into hard numbers. I encourage my students to use both Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic because both sites aggregate and organize the work of a lot of smart and creative critics. But I advise them to avoid the numbers, focus on the words of the critics and decide for themselves.

There has always been a fine line in being ethical when advertising. In the quest to sell and beat the competition, it is easy for advertisers to pass from telling the truth to making exaggerated, or even entirely false claims. Further unethical behaviors, such as bait-and-switch offers, have existed since the advent of advertising. Even in the traditional (by that I mean “paper”) media, the difference between advertising and actual, non-endorsed content has become obscured.

Jessica Gottlieb describes herself as “an empowered consumer and a mom blogger in Los Angeles.” She recalls that “when the LA Times sold its front cover to NBC with an ad that was easy to mistake for news, [she and her husband] started thinking about cancelling [their] subscription.” To demonstrate her discontent, she even made a video that documented the scandal for the world to see.

In fact, this isn’t the only time Gottlieb has used technology to combat what she believes is unethical. In 2009, she started the #motrinmom hashtag, protesting against a Johnson & Johnson campaign for Motrin which advocated “baby wearing.” Specifically, the advertisement included a 20-something voice reading the following text:

“Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s the front baby carrier, sling, schwing, wrap, pouch. And who knows what else they’ve come up with. Wear your baby on your side, your front, go hands free. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the body tend to cry less than others. But what about me? Do moms that wear their babies cry more than those who don’t. I sure do! These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean, I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain; it’s for my kid. Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. And so if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.”

As the New York Times reported, consumers, including Gottlieb, were “offended by the suggestion that they carry their babies to be “fashionable”.” Via Twitter, YouTube and other online media, Gottlieb and her followers began boycotting the advertisement and succeeded – Johnson & Johnson eventually pulled the advertisements from public circulation.

Gottlieb herself is “not convinced that [the ethical hazards of conventional advertising] are all that different” from online advertising. “It might be easier to confuse advertising and content online than it would be in old media, but as the web evolves, the consumer does too,” she says.

However, one might argue that there are plenty of consumers who have not yet undergone such an evolution and who are subject to the ethical hazards of online advertising. Leanne Hoagland-Smith, a sales coach and author of Be the Red Jacket in a Sea of Gray Suits, recalls:

“From my own personal experience, I responded to an online ad to join a website that would guarantee me traffic, send me leads and made a lot of promises.  I did some research, but at that time I was quite ignorant of some tools that I now use. The claims were fraudulent and today my website gets more traffic than the one I paid $700 for a lifetime membership. Unfortunately, I was naïve and trusting. Their customer service was a run around. Later I was able to track other people who had been duped by this unethical advertiser.”

As a sales coach, Hoagland-Smith has moreover come across “clients who sought the expertise of online marketers for improved search engine optimization and received less than desirable results.” She explains, “the challenge was in the fine print and once again the ignorance of the buyer resulted in thousands of dollars being spent with little to no results.”

Reading the fine print of terms and conditions has been around since the first written contracts were developed. Similarly, the code of ethics put forth by The American Marketing Association (AMA) does not specifically adapt itself to the new digital circumstances with its constantly evolving technologies. According to the AMA’s code of ethics, marketers must:

1. Do no harm. This means consciously avoiding harmful actions or omissions by embodying high ethical standards and adhering to all applicable laws and regulations in the choices we make.
2. Foster trust in the marketing system. This means striving for good faith and fair dealing so as to contribute toward the efficacy of the exchange process as well as avoiding deception in product design, pricing, communication and delivery of distribution.
3. Embrace ethical values. This means building relationships and enhancing consumer confidence in the integrity of marketing by affirming these core values: honesty, responsibility, fairness, respect, transparency and citizenship.

The code goes into detail on each of the ethical values, which are geared towards marketing in general. Similarly, Hoagland-Smith mentions that, “in the USA, there are federal agencies such as FDA that attempt to ensure what is being said is truthful along with state governments through their agencies.”

But are there guidelines, laws or codes that specifically address online advertising? What is it that is new in the digital age? “One of the key differences is the immediacy to share with much larger communities and how that sharing can go viral in a matter of hours,” says Hoagland-Smith. “Someone can quickly Tweet about his or her experience and suddenly the company is engaged in countering a negative PR campaign,” she adds. This is precisely what happened with Gottlieb’s use of Twitter and the #motrinmom hashtag. As Hoagland-Smith notes, “the adage “buyer beware” still rings as true today as it did 200 years ago. Being educated now is much easier than ever before because of access to information through the Internet.”

Christopher Bauer works with organizations that want to develop and maintain a culture of ethics and values-driven business through his Bauer Ethics Seminars. He adds: “Consumers have a responsibility to be informed simply to be knowledgeable consumers. I don’t know that I would call that an ethical responsibility in most cases, however. One exception might be that consumers would be ethically compromised if they used products harmful to others because they did not educate themselves about readily-available, documented risks.”

Kapil Rampal, CEO of Creative Crest, is a veteran in the online industry with 19 years of leadership experience at major online companies. To combat unethical online advertising more effectively, Rampal proposes what he calls “self-regulation”:

“Despite strict laws against spam email it has increased tremendously. Self-regulation such a spam filters, RBLs, IP rating, etc. are much more effective. In online advertising self-regulation can be more powerful than laws.”

So what of the future of ethical online advertising? Rampal calls for “stronger self-regulation by publishers, advertising networks, advertising agencies and advertisers to follow ethical practices. Many publishers associations have banned specific unethical ad formats.” Hoagland-Smith, in turn, affirms that the trend is moving towards mobile advertising. But the format—paper, online, or mobile advertising—appears to be secondary. “Ethical people will behave ethically and unethical people will behave unethically,” says Hoagland-Smith. “My sense [is that] there is greater visibility for those companies that are less ethical. Bad news always travels faster than good news.”

Isabel Eva Bohrer is a writer and photographer who has dispatched pieces from over twenty countries across five different continents. Learn more about her work at www.isabelevabohrer.com

I recently was on the receiving end of a rather humorous correction to one of my articles when it appeared online. An Op/Ed feature I wrote for the Chicago Tribune went through copy edit, and the word “their” was changed to “tits” when they actually meant to change it to “its.” I laughed when I saw the silly mistake, sent an email to my editor about it and the change was quickly made. No muss, no fuss.

Changes and corrections in the world of journalism are not always so funny, though. Newspapers don’t like to make them, but most do so diligently. Print and digital are very different in this regard, though. If a change is made to an article that originally appears online and did not come from the print edition, if that change is not called out prominently then the reader assumes the mistake or error never occurred in the first place.

That dynamic got me thinking about how journalism corrections are handled in the digital age, and so I investigated how some major news sites handle the process.

The New York Times’ site may have the gold standard for dealing with this issue. The term “Corrections” is clearly called out in the home page navigation, and when you click on the link you go to a simple, well-organized page that lists corrections two ways. At the top of the page there are links to corrections that occurred on recent dates, and beneath that are links to articles that have been recently amended.

When you click on a date, you see a list of the changes and a concise explanation of why they were made. On the day I looked, they ranged from correcting a quote made by presidential candidate Mitt Romney to re-indentifying a hockey player in a photo caption. When you click on the link to the article in which the mistake occurred, that page also contains the correction, noted prominently at the bottom of the story. The only real issue with how the Times handles this is that it can be a bit difficult to tell if the article is from the newspaper or was original to their site.

On their corrections index page, the Times also encourages its readers to contact them about errors they may see, and they list an email address and a phone number to use to send them in. And then the Times does something really interesting – they go a step further in the process of assuring their readers that their concerns will be taken seriously. The Times gives another avenue if someone is unhappy with the response they receive about an error: “Readers dissatisfied with a response or concerned about the paper’s journalistic integrity may reach the public editor at public@nytimes.com or (212) 556-7652.” The Times is anything but perfect, however their commitment to accuracy in this regard is both commendable and fairly water tight.

How does CNN’s website, which gets substantially more traffic than the Times, handle corrections? Unlike the Times, there is no link on the site’s home page to a section that aggregates corrections. I then used the site’s search engine to look for a “corrections” section, but the results only took me to articles in which the term is used as part of the story.

I then resorted to doing a Google search for “corrections on CNN.com.” That generated a link to an index page of corrections on CNN Money’s site, but not one for CNN. CNN Money’s page was similar to that of the Times – a chronological list of corrections with links to the articles, with the corrections notice also repeated at the end of the article.  The URL for the CNN Money corrections page is http://money.cnn.com/news/corrections/.

So, would the elusive CNN corrections page exist at http://cnn.com/news/corrections/? That link actually leads to the dreaded “Page not found” page. OK, well what about just http://www.cnn.com/corrections/? Again, no luck.

I am not the only one who has been frustrated with CNN’s way of handling corrections online. In Dec. 2010, PBS.org ran an article on their Idea Lab blog about the process of contacting CNN to ask them to correct a mistake in a video report in which the prime minister of New Zealand was misidentified. More than a month after sending in a report about the error, CNN had still not responded. Frustrated, the blog author wrote, “for all we know, the network may have already issued a correction on the air weeks ago. The problem is, there’s no way to find out on its website because CNN.com has no corrections content at all.” (CNN eventually did make the correction, but it was almost 6 weeks after the fact.)

But what about across the pond? Do papers in other countries handle the process any differently? I surfed across the sea to check out The Guardian’s site, which attracts more than 4 million users a month. There is a prominent “Corrections” link on the home page that links to a detailed section devoted to “Corrections and clarifications” that is organized chronologically, much like the Times. Accuracy, it seems, is a priority at The Guardian as well.

The three preceding examples are all from news organizations with reputations for liberal/progressive points of view. What about a news organization that emphatically leans right?

There is no link on the home page of Fox News’ site to any sections dealing with corrections. A search of the site for “corrections” results in the same thing I found at CNN – a list of articles that include the word. Could Google get me there?

The top result for searching “corrections on Fox News” was a link to the “Fox New Corrections” Twitter feed. However, this was not run by Fox, and its last Tweet was in 2009. Could it be that Fox News has yet to make a mistake? Given the network’s rather high opinion of itself, it’s a safe bet that some people there may think so.

All kidding aside, though, what does this survey say about correcting journalism mistakes in the digital age? First, because of the massive amount of information being generated, it’s a difficult, time-intensive process that requires the audience to be actively involved. And second, if a site does not do it well, it not only will alienate and frustrate its audience, but also it will eventually be a credibility killer.

Chicago-based writer John D. Thomas, author of the novel Karaoke of Blood, is currently finishing a book on the cultural history of saliva.

If there is one thing that should matter to reporters – online or elsewhere – it is the sacredness of the quote.

The quotation marks and what falls between them are the blood and guts of any article. They set the tone of the story and give life to what could otherwise be a plain statement of facts. A good quote means you found the right source, you know how to ask the right questions and you are a competent note-taker. And it’s no exaggeration to say where quotes are placed and how they move the narrative along can be the difference between the Pulitzer Prize and what lines the bottom of a bird cage.

How you use quotes in a modern context also determines something else – whether you are a hack or a professional. Because in this new age of texts, blogs, chat rooms, Facebook walls and everything else in between, there needs to be guidelines as to how people’s words are found, shared and conveyed within the written word, virtual or not.

The questions for today’s reporter are many. If you write for a blog, how do you know what is appropriate to use and what shouldn’t be mentioned? If you write for a newspaper, do you have to tell the reader that your quotes are from an email and not through a face-to-face conversation? Can you use a quote from a chat room without someone’s permission?

The answers, once clear and definite, are now clouded by gray areas that bear discussion. With so many new places to write – and so many new writers – there needs to be a new conversation about how we talk to sources, how we write what these sources say and whether quotations still carry the weight they once did, given how first-person posts are considered newsworthy and relevant.

Is blogging or writing for online news sources less serious or less requiring ethical standards than traditional reporting? The apparent answer is a resounding, “No.” But a variety of news-gathering experts agree that there needs to be more disclosure of how quotes are gained, where the conversation took place and whether the source agrees that the statement was communicated to the reader correctly. And the digital world actually gives reporters more leeway to fix mistakes and make the record of someone’s statements correct if there was an error when first published.

Reporters are taught from their first newspaper class in high school that quotes spice up a story. In an ideal world, you meet with a source in person and have an in-depth conversation about the topic. Wide-ranging questions are asked and answered honestly and thoroughly. The conversation is taken down in notes or recorded. Those words are then translated, edited and included in the story. Boom – you have journalism in a nutshell.

The rules really haven’t changed. But these days, people are emailing their questions in advance and using written answers in their stories. A reporter might text a source during a deadline or on a breaking story to have their comment faster than the competition. A chat room for ex-employees might glean new insights or conversations that a reporter might otherwise not be privy to in traditional reporting. All these are fair ways to gain information.

Bonnie Caprara, a Metro Detroit freelance writer who works for daily newspapers and online blogs told me via a chat session that she once did the rounds at cop shops and the like. Now, she follows her sources on Twitter and Facebook. She uses their comments there as launching points for stories – but she feels the ethical thing to do is follow up with an email to set up interviews for her articles. Some reporters, however, take those comments straight from Facebook without informing the reader where they came from.

As Caprara argues, that reporter should disclose where they gained the quotes and why. I’ve noticed that many newspapers and blogs are starting to do this. For example, a reporter might note that they talked to a source on the phone You see this particularly in exchanges between an entertainment writer and a Hollywood-based celebrity. It seems fair that all reporters do the same, especially when the conversation takes place on a telephone texting exchange, where information might come fast and furious (and misspelled or auto-corrected, but that’s a problem for another time).

Meeting in person also gives a story one more bonus, points out Paul Bradshaw, publisher of the Online Journalism Blog and founder of Help Me Investigate. He also is co-author of “The Online Journalism Handbook: Skills to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age” and leads the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University and is Visiting Professor at City University.

“As always I think there are subtleties here that are often missed: in-person interviews are generally better because you get more color (if you’re a good writer) and the interviewee has less time to prepare their answer,” Bradshaw told me during an email exchange on Facebook. “I think it’s often too easy for a journalism student to hide behind email and easily copy and paste the Q&A format into a piece.”

While there is space within journalism for experts to write first-person or original blog posts, Bradshaw does believe in traditional standards when it comes to good journalism.

“I do, however, every year urge students not to rely on email for interviews, but instead to use it as a last resort (it’s too easily ignored or put off). In fact, this year, I had one session where the students had two hours to get a story and were not allowed to use email!” he wrote.
 
On the other hand, some bloggers may find their editors do not require quotes at all. These exchanges between the reader and writer are more intimate in a way; you know all of the information is coming from what is presumably an expert in their field. One such writer is Melissa Preddy, who does a daily blog for the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, a part of the Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in Phoenix.

“I have relaxed my standards about email interviews a bit – haven’t really done any but I would if need be due to time constraints – and I think it is good to say ‘wrote in an email,’” Preddy told me via an email exchange between us.

She does have issue with bloggers that fail to do what insiders call primary-source reporting. That’s where a reporter gains the information on their own rather than through other reporters, sources or materials.

“I seems certain ‘factoids’ get picked up and repeated, rinse and repeat so many times, that they become gospel and no one bothers to check them out. Like ‘agriculture is Michigan’s second-largest industry’ (it’s not) or ‘it’s cheaper to buy fast food than fruits and vegetables.’ (NYT just did a piece attempting to debunk that.) I think many bloggers rely too much on links and the written word of others,” Preddy wrote.

This essay did lead me to talk to one source on the phone – that was Jack Lessenberry, a full-time member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University. He also is WUOM-FM’s senior political analyst as well as a writer for many national and regional publications, including Vanity Fair, Esquire, George, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. (I would have talked to him in person because he does live and work by me; but the poor man’s schedule has him too busy to chat…our phone conversation took place in part as he navigated a parking garage.)

What are quotation ethics for today’s digital journalist? Lessenberry made his thoughts plain: “They are no different than those for print, broadcast, radio or television journalists. You don’t steal stuff. You don’t plagiarize. You find the facts and you report them.”

Reporters have one primary job, Lessenberry added. That is to make the significant interesting, and a lot of the interest takes place between quotation marks. No typical Joe on the Street understands the national debt. But if he reads great articles about it in the Wall Street Journal, chances are he walks away better informed that he previous was. And he might have enjoyed the education in the process.

“If democracy is going to work, we need an informed citizenry,” and good journalistic ethics are an important part of that, Lessenberry said.

Sloppier reporting is so much easier to find in the digital age, Lessenberry said. There are more ethical breaches because there are more people (trained and untrained) writing. Having a journalism degree isn’t necessary to have a blog that people follow religiously. You don’t need to have aced your ethics class to get a gig on the Huffington Post. All you have to do is have a few fired up rants on the latest celebrity scandal and you’re an overnight sensation in the reporting world. Or, at least, you have a blog that can be monetized for personal gain. And when you blog to get attention or write to get ads on your site, you’re probably not going to be that concerned about whether what you write is true or right or even has two or more sources.

“We have an obligation (as journalists) to be fair and responsible,” Lessenberry said. “You’ve got to filter out the significant from the trivial. … If aliens came to Earth, they would think we’re all homicidal sex perverts who steal money. Everything is about Jennifer Aniston or the Kardashians. It’s easier and sexier to write about the latest blond woman lost in Aruba than the debate over affordable education. And the missing blond has no impact on my life or the lives of my children.”

The other side of the coin for digital reporting is that everything is under the microscope. If you do make a mistake, then it’s there for the public’s massive consumption. “Everybody hears it, everybody sees it and everybody reads it,” Lessenberry said. “Everything is recorded. … I’m convinced that what happened to Don Imus would have been forgotten if it had happened before everything was recorded and replayed over and over again.”

Good quotes, as is true for good ethics, take time to develop. If you’ve been counting, you’ll notice I talked to pretty much everyone for this essay via phone, chat room, email or Facebook. And that’s how I’ve written for the past six years as a freelance writer. Perhaps this is the way I’ll continue to do it. But I do appreciate the difference between in person conversations and those that that place in other ways. What I do – and how I write it – does indeed matter to me as a writer and to the reader. And that can never get lost in translation.

Karen Dybis is a Detroit-based freelance writer who has blogged for Time magazine, worked the business desk for The Detroit News and jumped on breaking stories for publications including City’s Best, CORP! magazine and Agence France-Presse newswire.