Journalism Ethics and Technology

To say that technology can have a negative impact on certain aspects of journalism and the practice of journalistic ethics isn’t necessarily wrong (in fact I’m sure it’s true in a lot of cases), but it is a little bit misleading. Technology does bring added pressure to be the first with the story, to tell the story in a flashy way, even to tell the story people want to hear rather than what they probably need to hear. But desire to be first rather than best has been around for over 100 years, since Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst squared off in the late 1800's. It is not by any means a new phenomenon, and I’m sure there were people denouncing the rise of yellow journalism as a byproduct of the new desire for speed (weeklies had become dailies) and sensationalism then as there are now.
Of course, the numbers have changed a little bit. Days have become hours, minutes and seconds, and there’s no doubt that the pressure to post stories early and often has heightened over the past several years. But keep in mind, we are talking about newspapers, here. The argument that technological advancement in the print industry has led to the ability to move quickly, which has in turn led to a greater propensity for error, hinges on the idea that newspapers have really bought into the hype. And I think that’s a difficult argument to make.
In other media, I’d agree, the need for speed really has changed the game. In the early days of television, for example, the news was updated only a few times a day, once in the morning and once or twice at night. That changed in the early ‘80s with the advent of CNN. Suddenly, the news spun on a 24 hour cycle. Not only did producers have to come up with more news to fill the void, they had to do it more quickly and in the face of greater competition. This of course led to some mistakes, a notable one I can remember involving the West Virginia mining tragedy of a few years ago, when news outlets initially reported that all but one of the victims had survived. They eventually had to go back and inform the public (and some of the families) that somebody had heard wrong, and that they’d jumped the gun. In reality, all but one of the victims had died. In this case, the desire to be the first with the story led to a tragic bit of misinformation.
But when newspapers hit the stands the next day, they got the story right. There wasn’t a mention – outside the coverage of the original gaffe – of the error that had caused the broadcast media so much embarrassment. The point is that newspapers remain the most poured over, edited medium, even the online versions. In certain cases, they have the luxury of watching the news cycle evolve from outside it. They can take their time and decide what to report and what not to report, what is credible and what isn’t. On that front, I’d be curious to know how many newspapers actually update their websites on a regular basis more often than once a day. I’d venture to say the online aspect doesn’t change error frequency as much as one might think. The paper I grew up reading (the Post-Dispatch) very rarely updates their website more than once per day (unless it’s to run new AP stories or to run updated versions of stories from the previous day), so the likelihood of error on that front isn’t all that great.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems on the horizon. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that there is panic spreading through the newspaper community: readership is falling, apathy and competition are rising. But there will always be a niche for newspapers in some form. Online readership, while low relative to circulation numbers, is at an all-time high, and there will never be a better way to produce and distribute local news than through the newspaper. As long as the editors and reporters who make up the medium keep in mind that there will always be room for newspapers – and by that I mean for informative, accurate and trustworthy information – maybe the pressures of technological innovation won’t be too much to bear.