Ethics and Social Networking

After Reading the AJR Limits of Control, I considered the journalistic ethical values that should be timeless. Despite the constantly changing technology, journalists should still uphold one of the biggest values, transparency. With new networking sites I will have to agree with many media outlets’ decision to set limits on social networking. While the copy editor from the Seattle Times felt comfortable sharing her political beliefs on Facebook, I find it unethical. Kuramoto-Eidsmoe believes that journalists should be seen as “complete people”, and this can be true in terms of their private lives’, but when they are visible in their profession as journalists, their political opinions need to stay discrete for the sake of the profession.


The real question lies in how to allow journalists a private life without disrupting their professional careers? The AJR article touches on many solutions to this question; I believe that the best way to go about this is through two separate social networking accounts. Social networking can be a great way to find sources and information and so as a journalist this can be used as a tool. In this article describing twitter’s positive impact on journalism it goes without saying that journalists will get left behind if they don't utilize the fast-pace technology like twitter. That being said, journalists would have a page dedicated to social networking in a public and professional manner. There still are concerns as to how accurate Facebook can be in terms of journalism in this article by AJR, one journalist brings up the identity problem in which you never can know for sure who is really accessing their own Facebook.


However, journalists are still human and deserve the right to their own site where they can speak their opinions, in my mind this site should be under a completely different name. When people search for a specific journalist online they should only be able to find their professional page, and when friends and family wish to reach this person they can take extra measures to find their new name in order to protect the privacy of the journalist. Therefore ethically speaking journalists as humans deserve the right to free speech, but as journalists they owe it to the public to stay transparent in their opinions.