http://strom.com/awards/383.html
My comments on blogging
last week have prompted Deb Radcliff to write the following. I thought it was
worth sharing. Deb (www.deb.radcliff.com)
is president of the Freelance Business and Technology Writer's Association (www.fbtw.org). Since 1994, she's specialized in
computer crime and security. Lately, she's been spending much of her time
trying to educate the non-technical masses about online safety. Take it away,
Deb.
While addressing a room full of computer
science faculty last spring at the
"That's simple," I replied. "We
want the front page stories."
They tried like crazy to get my dander
up, and finally, one of them did. "Why does anyone want to read
traditional press anymore when self-publishing is so easy on the Web?" That
got me thinking. And my answer to him is the same response I felt when reading Strom's
Web Informant #382.
Traditional media offers protections to
the readers you can't get with self-publishing. It also offers more protections
to the writers.
For starters, traditional journalism has
built in safety mechanisms to ensure quality of information to the reader is
worthy of their trust. We have trained writers (which Strom discussed in his essay),
fact checkers and trained editors who vet out the information. Publishers have
had eons to work this stuff out. True, some of stories fall through the cracks,
even at big publications like the New York Times. But for the most part,
readers of traditional media can be assured that what they're reading has been
researched and written with professional techniques applied.
The second issue that concerns me about
self-publishing is liability. I took a semester-long course on media law and
ethics when I was in college. I know the difference between defamation and
libel, about reasonable expectations of privacy and how they don't apply the
same way to public figures. I also know about protecting my sources, and
cross-checking my information before it goes to press. And if all that fails, I've
got the protection of my publisher should I ever face a legal challenge.
But what of the
self-publisher? What happens when someone claims libel or defamation or invasion
of privacy against an unrepresented, unprotected blogger
type? And believe me, this will happen. When I wrote a story for Better Homes
and Gardens about Internet manners for kids, I covered blogs
extensively. Many teens and pre-teens use these things to ruin one another's
reputations, to comment on the size of a girl's breasts and other things that,
under today's laws, could rightfully be litigated against. I envision a huge
can of worms opening up here.
The other issue is privacy. Young
people, in particular, give away far too much information about themselves on blogs. When I was a columnist at Computerworld, I wrote a
story about college age girls posting their pictures a vanity site called "AmIHotOrNot.com".
In the HTML code of their pictures, they included addresses and phone numbers –-
against the site's privacy policy. All it took was a right click to track them
down. When I confronted two of them, the response was the same. "The
younger generation is different than you, we don't
care about privacy so much." (Ouch! When did I get so old?) The other
response: "I've been stalked before. And I don't care. I still want my
information public so people can find me if they want to." Mark my words:
Web-based self-publishing can be DANGEROUS.
But what rankles
me most is that of believability. When I first got on the 'Net back in 1994,
one of the first SPAMs I received was the
Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe story. The story was about a customer of
Neiman-Marcus who liked a cookie she ate in the dining area. When she asked for
the recipe, the waiter wanted something like $1000 for the recipe. So, being a
journalist, I called the merchant's PR director. She sighed and said she wished
the story would go away. It was an old folk tale that the company thought had
died in the 70's only to resurface again on the 'Net. More recently, my
ex-mother-in-law, a devout Christian woman, read an email that circulated
around Christian groups claiming that a famous British writer worshipped the
devil and sacrificed children. She -- and hundreds of thousands in the
Christian community -- believed the story. I appealed to her that if someone
were in a famous position, they probably wouldn't do something so stupid and
ruin their image, but still she believed the email.
Naïve readers are everywhere. They
believe because it's in writing, it must be true. And this is truly scary. To
further prove my point, I'll end this with something America Online did just
after 9-11. Like all journalists, I was searching for some way to help people
deal with this crisis by coming up with an important story angle. So I went
into some of the AOL chat rooms which claimed to have "live psychologists"
moderating to help people deal with their anger and grief. People were spilling
their guts. They were angry and wanted revenge. And the moderator was spurring
them on with canned questions such as, "That must make you angry."
"Damn right, I'm angry," wrote
one of the users.
"So tell me about your feelings."
"I think President Bush should go
after those sons of bitches and cut their throats out. I think we should nuke
the entire middle East."
People in the chat room got angrier and
more violent until I chimed in. "You know you're talking to a computer
program, right? This is not a real psychologist. Notice that the questions keep
repeating???"
All of a sudden the room got real quiet.
Then everyone exploded again. Against AOL. And I went
from room to room letting everyone know they were talking to a recording,
hopefully preventing people from getting guns and shooting people with
coffee-colored skin and eastern accents.
Entire contents copyright 2004 by David Strom, Inc.
David Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
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