Response to the reader: “What ethics should bloggers have?”

Of course, in my point of view, every blogger should have a standard ethic, that is report the fact without any purpose, a kind of ethic that blogger should have is that they should be in justice, report the fact and lead the reader of the blog into a right way.

First of all, from the reader (Dan, p24) states that the fundamental thing for creating a blog is to gather facts. Then obey the principals of thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, transparency and independence. Accuracy emphasizes to be factual; fairness is hard because you should accept many different ideas and teach us learn to listen.

About the aspect of transparency, a way to be transparent is to find a good way to present a story. From my research, which is on blogging. Cell journalism is a form of citizen journalism, or the process of citizens reporting news, sidestepping traditional news media, and creating their own form of journalism. Ethical problems faced by cell journalists include all the problems associated with photojournalism in general: the digital manipulation of images, privacy concerns, and the use of graphic images.

Anyway, learn to listen, ethics needs listening, this is also how we learn.

Citizen Journalism

With the development of the Internet and the universal use of digital cameras and DVDs online citizen journalism is quietly on the rise. Citizen journalism allows the public opinion to easily appear in our life. With the fast development of new media that is represented by the internet, the producing and operating ways of news has changed a lot. One of them is that common persons have become a kind of important power in news reporting with the help of improved technology. Different from traditional media where news craft are the dominant power in news reporting, this kind of grassroots news is called citizen journalism.

In my understanding, citizen journalism become more and better known is because of that in nowadays, almost everybody has digital camera. Even you do not have a camera; you would at least have one webcam or a mobile imaging device, e.g. your mobile phone, PDA... These mobile imaging devices are lightweight and highly portable digital cameras.

Almost everyone can carry a mobile digital camera everyday. Whenever you come across an interesting thing in your life, you take a picture with your mobile camera. At night, you may upload these pictures onto their blog and write a simple story for each photo to share with your friends. These blogs with photos are called photo blogs and they are getting more and more popular. After all, a picture tells thousands of words. With photos, your blogging writing job gets easier. If you have high-quality mobile camera, you may just use it as a normal Point-And-Shoot camera and the quality is usually not a problem. If you have mobile camera phone with good quality, you may choose to become a citizen journalist.

Citizen journalism is simply that journalism work done by the normal citizens. The news agency in Singapore has started promoting and encouraging the journalists' job from the normal citizens. The rational behind this is simple. Down to street, simply count, how many are normal citizens and how many are the real journalists. Compared to the number of public, the journalists are few. When some news-worthy events suddenly happens, e.g. volcano burst, plane crush, most likely there have been no journalists around but only public. After the nearest journalists arrived at the news site, they may have missed the best moments to shoot the scene. That is why in the news program, we rarely see scenes of one car hitting another in car accidents news. However, if the news agency can turn 10% of public into citizen journalists and ask them to send their newsworthy photos or videos for their news program. Their news program would be able to show more interesting pictures and videos and the news program will certainly be more competitive. Now in Singapore, however, if the public want to share their newsworthy photos, they can do so in http://www.stomp.com.sg . That website was set up for the purpose of sharing newsworthy photos from the public. Some of the newsworthy photos initially appear on that website have already been selected to publish on the Straits Times.