Scan-N-Land

In praise of gatekeepers

At the paper, we've been having a lot of debates about interactive journalism. The philosophical dilemmas are fascinating.

My paper is aggressively neutral and (ever since we ran into some problems with a former colleague a few years ago) scrupulous about accuracy. I would say one of our strengths in the market place is that readers see us as less biased than some of our competitors.

Will becoming a more interactive news portal jeopardize that reputation? In theory, it's great to allow readers to post comments to our stories and link to other relevant material. But what if they post information or link to stories that we know are WRONG? The dinosaurs in our debate argue we should intervene; web purists seem to believe that would be violating the freewheeling ethic of web communications.

I worry that, if we give readers wide-open access to our website, we will leave ourselves open to being manipulated by savvy political propagandists. there's lots about crowd sourcing that's inspiring -- how wonderful to get retired accountants involved in ferretting out corruption in a community, as one of my company's papers did! -- but there's lots of room for abuse too. The crowd didn't police itself too well in Bosnia, when milosevic started using the media to foment ethnic hate.

I honestly don't know what the right answer is. Basically I think the most intelligent response to change is to embrace it -- because it's damn hard to stop. But should we be setting some limits on how far we go? Or is that a futile exercise?

Kathy K

posted by Mark H. @ 11/30/2006 06:47:00 PM