Tag Archives: Ethics

Ethics Must Come from the Heart As Well As the Head

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MUD day 11:

For anyone interested in the ethics of new-media journalism, the past 24 hours have been painfully instructive. For me, it’s been a reminder that in any ethical decision, you have to be guided by your heart as well as your head.

The episode began when, in response to an inquiry by a Columbia Journalism Review reporter, the Poynter Institute’s director of publications, Julie Moos, wrote a blog post criticizing Poynter’s celebrated columnist Jim Romenesko. According to Moos, Romenesko had a years-long habit of insufficiently attributing quoted comments. The episode concluded with Romenesko’s resignation, several months ahead of a planned retirement.

For those unfamiliar with these events, Nieman Lab’s Mark Coddington provides a superb overview. But the gist of the story is this: in summarizing what was written in other publications—essentially all he does or claims to do—Romenesko sometimes did not put quotation marks around verbatim quotes. For Moos, this was grounds not for dismissal, but a well-meaning but severe and public hand slapping. For almost everyone in journalism, her comments were an undeserved and self-important rebuke.

I admit to feeling some sympathy for Moos. The current climate of scandal mongering and blame placing make any public ethical decision difficult; no matter what she did, a large number of people would have second-guessed her.

I’m also very uncomfortable with the failure to use quotation marks around verbatim borrowings. When Steve Buttry, for whom I have boundless admiration and respect, argues that Romenesko’s fault was simply a punctuation problem, I find myself in the rare position of questioning his call. Leaving out a comma or semicolon can mean a difference between clarity and obscurity; leaving out a quotation mark can mean the difference between an original insight and blatant theft. I know that I’m nitpicking, and agree that Romenesko was absolutely not stealing. My point here is not to claim Buttry is wrong, but to demonstrate my mixed feelings.

I’m certain that Moos had similarly mixed feelings in deciding how to handle the discovery she was handed so unexpectedly. But it’s clear that she overreacted in reaching for what Theodore Bernstein used to call an atomic flyswatter. Like many a well-meaning but misguided official, she felt obliged to adopt a zero-tolerance policy for ethics. But in ethics, zero tolerance is, by its nature, unethical.

In a situation like this, the question that should be asked is not “What rules were broken?” but “Who was hurt?” The fact is, Romenesko’s occasional failure to use quotation marks hurts no one. It was not an issue of plagiarism, which does hurt people. As many of his supporters have pointed out, no one Romenesko ever covered has objected to his attribution habits. Their heart tells them that Moos’s reaction was wrong. I suspect hers does as well.

Neither the heart nor the head is an infallible guide; every moral decision involves some balance between the two. This time, Julie Moos got the balance wrong.

Attribution and Linking Are Essential to Transparency

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MUD day 4:

If you’re a B2B journalist or a journalistically inclined content marketer, you should be faithfully following Steve Buttry’s blog. Although he’s a died-in-the-wool (UPDATE: um . . . I meant “dyed-in-the-wool”) newspaper guy, he deals frequently and insightfully with issues that also plague trade editors and reporters. A good example is from Buttry’s post on Monday, in which he offers advice on attribution. It’s an age-old issue for trade journalists that has only intensified in the online era.

Though by all means you should read his entire post, I want to cover a few of his points that particularly apply in the trade press. The first is the thorny issue of press releases. As Buttry says, the idea of a press release is that you can freely crib from it—the company that sent it to you will be perfectly happy if you do. But you may do your reader a disservice if you don’t explicitly attribute the copy to the press release.

This is particularly true of quotes within the press release. Too often editors pick up the quote and attribute it directly to the speaker, as though they had interviewed the source or attended a press briefing. But instead of “… CEO Smith said,” it should be ” … CEO Smith said in a press release.”

A related issue that Buttry brings up has to do with what he calls recycled quotes. As he says, “If you didn’t hear the person say something, you should probably attribute the quote not only to the speaker but to the medium that reported it.”

A few years ago, I had an editor who handed in a story with fantastic quotes from a variety of C-level executives. Thinking he had interviewed them all, I complimented him on being able to get through to so many elusive sources. He blanched, then told me he’d taken the quotes from various sources on the Internet. Needless to say, he rewrote the story with proper attribution.

Some writers have the opposite problem, and turn guidelines into fetishes. Rather than focus their lead on the story, they focus it on the attribution. More frequently than I liked, our writers would start a story with a sentence such as “Ellis Q. Stone, Assistant Vice President for Research and Development at Mondo Widget Corp. (New Paltz, NY), said ….” That would be followed all too often by other background information before the key point of the story would be raised. As Buttry suggests, “If you start a story with attribution, consider whether the person speaking is more important to the reader than what he or she is saying.”

In theory, attribution is easier and more useful online because you can link readers to the source. In practice, though, the trade press doesn’t link nearly enough. They should do better. As Buttry argues,

Linking is an essential part of attribution in online journalism. Linking lets people see the full context of the information you are citing. Even when readers don’t click links, the fact that you are linking tells them that you are backing up what you have written, that you are attributing and showing your sources.

If you want to see some examples of this shortcoming, you only need to read through a few stories from the leading publication for the magazine industry, Folio:. In an article entitled “Editors Share Best Practices for Twitter,” for instance, you might expect at least a link to each of the Twitter pages for the four editors profiled, if not also links to their magazines. But there’s not a single link in the story.

In the new-media era of journalism, the arguably most important ethical principle is transparency. As Steve Buttry reminds us, attribution and linking are essential tools for achieving it.

Editorial Quality Vs. Revenue: A False Dichotomy

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On its blog earlier this month, the American Society of Business Publication Editors published an anonymous and despairing note from one of its members. In it, the magazine editor described a frustrating planning meeting with his counterparts in advertising sales. Though the editor had done thorough reader research in proposing editorial topics for an upcoming magazine project, the sales staff would have none of it:

The topics I suggested would provide the basis for good editorial quality; however, our sales team deemed them too difficult to sell sponsorships. Eventually, the group decided to develop a project series based on what sponsorships could be sold, not necessarily what has proven popular with readers.

To the editor, this was a clear case of sales priorities trumping editorial quality. Indeed, the editor now feels like a publishing pariah: “I don’t feel like I can talk to anyone at my company without seeming as though I was anti-revenue.”

Though I’m deeply sympathetic to the editor, and generally agree with the wise counsel of the commenters on the story, my immediate reaction to this issue is that it’s framed with a false dichotomy. As an editor myself, my instinct is to say that those sales people just don’t have the brains and creativity to sell good content. But that’s not fair. The problem really is not that one side champions editorial quality and the other does not. What both sides feel but can’t or won’t say is that they have no clue how to make money anymore.

As the old advertising model that powered trade magazines for so many decades withers away, it’s getting harder and harder to sell independent, reader-oriented content. What ad sales staff are reduced to doing is essentially selling marketing materials—it’s the only thing left that still makes sense to advertisers.

And that approach, of course, is a dead end for third-party publishers. In the era of search-based inbound marketing, advertisers no longer really need third parties and their lists of subscribers. Nor in a digital world do they need publishers’ hulking print production and distribution apparatuses any longer.

Where does that leave us? It beats me. I suspect that this dilemma for magazine producers is just another symptom of what Seth Godin described yesterday as the “forever recession.” The trade magazine business of yore was built on inefficiencies, wherein it was difficult if not impossible for businesses to reach out to their customers on a large scale. But the internet, Godin explains, “has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.” B2B communications, of course, is one of those systems, and legacy editorial and ad-sales jobs are among those imperiled.

Though it may sound deeply depressing, Godin argues that the revolution that has sparked the forever depression has an upside. It creates, he writes, “all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities.”

If Godin’s vision is accurate—and I think it’s close enough—the type of problem our anonymous editor describes is not going to be solved. Rather, it is going to be replaced, by some system so new, so as yet unrecognizable, that we can’t see exactly what it is.

In the meantime, watch out. Though the outcome may please us, the process of getting there will be very messy.

Six Tips for Effective Editorial Advisory Boards

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In an article published last Monday, Joe Pulizzi advocated the use of editorial advisory boards for content marketers. In keeping with his July 4th publication date, Pulizzi made his case with revolutionary zeal.

Having worked for many years with editorial boards, I share his appreciation for them. But while I second his advice, I do so with a few words of caution. Advisory boards only work well when you put sufficient energy and thought into forming and maintaining them. So before you leap in, consider the following six tips for ensuring their effectiveness.

1. Ask yourself if you really need or want a formal board. An advisory board is most useful when you cover a fairly narrow range of technical or complex issues. If your topics are too diverse, a small group of niche experts won’t help much of the time. You should also make sure you have the time and resources to maintain a formal editorial board. If you do it right, it’s a lot of work. Many advisory boards wither on the vine. Don’t let it happen to you.

2. Know your board members. Resist inviting people onto a formal board until you’ve worked with them enough to be certain that they are genuine experts and that they truly want to help. If you keep your board small—Pulizzi wisely suggests limiting it to six members—you’ll want to make sure every one of those members is an active, insightful contributor.

3. Beware editorial board disenchantment. Even when editorial board members start out as enthusiastic participants, they may well start to lose interest or become too busy to offer meaningful help.  When that happens, you have to be ruthless (in a nice way, of course) and ask them to step down. Unless your board is just for show, you should expect every member to be an active participant. One way to deal with this problem is to make appointments to the board for a clearly stated period of time, such as a year. If a board member doesn’t work out, you simply don’t renew the appointment.

4. Be conscious of potential conflicts of interest. Even the most objective board members will have blind spots, particularly when their business interests are involved. Keep that in mind when you ask their advice, and avoid putting them on the spot. Concern about conflicts of interest goes both ways, of course. Board members will want to make sure your own business interests won’t compromise them. This is not a problem for most independent publishers, but for content marketers, the potential for editorial bias is much higher. Assure your board members that you want them to counteract your bias, not to provide a cover for it.

5. Think about compensation. Though Pulizzi didn’t mention this sensitive topic, it’s bound to come up sooner or later. I don’t recommend honoraria or other payment for services—it complicates and limits your relationship with your board members.  But there are benefits you can and should offer. In the trade magazine world, for instance, publishers give board members perks like VIP passes to conferences they sponsor and free copies of special publications. At the very least, send your board members an annual gift.

6. Don’t ask for too much. It may be slightly optimistic to suggest, as Pulizzi does with Independence-Day spirit, that an “advisory board will completely revolutionize your content marketing.” That is an unrealistic expectation for most boards. You can avoid disappointment by defining in advance what goals you have for your board and sharing them with board members. When it comes time to measure the results, you’ll likely be pleased.

Though my passion for them falls slightly short of Pulizzi’s revolutionary fervor, I think we would agree on this: well-managed editorial advisory boards can make the difference between good publications and great ones.

Innocent and Malignant Typos and the Case of Filloux v. Jarvis

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Picture of a fainting heroine

Overdosed on typos?

As one who cares more than he should about such things, I’ve been spending way too much time today mulling over Rob O’Regan’s recent post on eMedia Vitals, “Can you spare 15 minutes in the battle against typos?”.

Like O’Regan, I suspect, I have an unhealthy sensitivity to typographical errors. To this day, I’m still suffering post-typographic stress from the discovery 27 years ago that in my first published book review, for the Nashville Tennessean, I asserted that the novel’s protagonist died from an overdose of “heroine.”

Much of the pain of that error came from the fact that it was permanent. That day’s press run was done forever. The only comfort I could take was in the knowledge that few people would read the review, fewer would notice the mistake, and all would throw the paper out a few days later.

In today’s online media, of course,  it’s easy to repair such mistakes (as I’ve done in my archived version of that fateful book review). What’s odd is how few people bother. Though O’Regan is too nice to name the writers or publications, he notes that three of the four errors he cites have yet to be corrected, several days after publication. (Me, I’m not so nice: Come on, Stefanie Botelho and Folio: magazine—Silicone Valley is almost as embarrassing as heroine.)

In those rare moments when I can look at them dispassionately, I can see that most typos are innocent. Some people will be amused by Silicone Valley; no one is hurt by it.

But there’s another class of typos that, left uncorrected, suggest a subtle malignity. For the reader, they are indications that the writer’s argument might not be trustworthy. A recent example, for me, is Frédéric Filloux’s critique earlier this month of a Jeff Jarvis blog post on the status of the article in journalism.

In my opinion, Filloux simply gets it wrong. I could respect his view, however, if I thought he was actually trying to get it right. But a critical typo, uncorrected now for nearly two weeks, suggests that he isn’t trying, and worse, that he doesn’t care to. “To support his position,” Filloux writes, “Jarvis mentions Brian Settler’s coverage of the Joplin tornado.”

Settler? Nope. The New York Times reporter’s last name, of course, is Stelter.

Is failing to spell Stelter’s name correctly an innocent mistake? Maybe at first (though even then it’s a sign of carelessness). But after two weeks, it starts to fester. It would undercut even the most thoughtful argument, not just Filloux’s impulsive rant.

In a subsequent attack on Jarvis’s advocacy of process journalism, Filloux says, “personally, I’d rather stick to the quest for perfection rather than embrace the celebration of the ‘process.’” I would suggest to M. Filloux that the quest for perfection begins at home.

Fortunately, it’s not too late. As Jarvis says in a comment on Filloux’s post, “publish first and correct later has *always* been the rule, except now we can publish earlier and correct sooner.”

Should you care as much as I do about typos? I don’t recommend it. To be a productive writer, you need a tolerance for innocent slip-ups. But if you care about the truth—not to mention perfection—you’ll make sure they don’t turn into malignant ones.