As the Internet grows in terms of volume and pervasiveness within America’s general population, an increasing number of companies, groups and organizations have published Web sites to deliver content, products and services to the consumer. Nearly every professional industry is represented on the World Wide Web, forcing practitioners to develop ways to reformat and redirect resources to achieve their online goals. Often, these activities stretch professionals across discipline previously unfamiliar to them.

Additionally, the explosion of e-commerce has blurred the line between content and advertising or promotional content across the commercial side of the Web. Online newspapers and content providers have struggled to capitalize financially on the information they gather, and more traditional businesses have tried to use the new technology to connect with their customers.

This study was conducted to examine the intricacies of blending journalism ethics and business ethics in the online environment.

Ethics

The institutional ethics of journalism are not grounded in a static sets of rules, but rather evolve from an evolving set of accepted practices generated in an ongoing state of conflict (Iggers, 1999). Individual journalists may have highly developed ethical sensibilities, but journalism as a whole, unlike professions like law or medicine, has no licensing procedure, no disciplinary panels, no agreed-upon code of behavior. Practices that are forbidden at some major news-gathering institutions -- such as going undercover to expose wrongdoing -- are acceptable at others. At most places, no sin is automatically a firing offense.

According to the 1993 Gallup Poll, less than a third of Americans polled believed that journalists had high ethical standards (Henry, 1993). Phillip Meyer, in an article examining the changing nature of the business end of journalism practice proposed recovering this trust is the most critical aspect of the future of journalism:

"How information is moved … will not be nearly as important as the reputation of the creators of the content. Earning that reputation may require the creativity and courage to try radically new techniques in the gathering, analysis and presentation of news. It might require a radically different definition of the news provider's responsibilities to the community, as well as to First Amendment responsibilities" (Meyer, 1995).

Practicing journalists rarely express their social responsibilities in terms of ethical theory. There are a number of potential reasons for this phenomenon. In his book After Virtue, philosopher Alasdair McIntyre suggests this is caused by the convergence of several incompatible journalistic discourses, resulting in confusion for journalism practitioners (McIntyre, 1981). An alternate possibility is the journalistic tendency for practitioners to break down accepted moral norms in the course of reporting, making news practitioners unwilling to publicly subscribe to any set value system.

An additional set of explanations for this phenomenon can be found in James Carey's essay "Journalists Just Leave." In this essay, Carey says that neither journalists nor philosophers know how to discuss journalism ethics. He explains that journalists fear that public discussion of ethical norms may lead to regulation, that journalists are defensive due to the public nature of their practice and that journalists do not serve the needs of individual client like other professions (Carey, 1987).

Jeremy Iggers suggested that journalists are able to discuss ethics, but only in terms of past cases and current conflicts (Iggers, 1999). And finally, it has been widely noted that many journalists pursue ethics to the point that they can defend their actions to their peers. This last theory may serve to explain why seemingly similar actions can be judged by professionals as acceptable or unacceptable at different times.

Advertising/Editorial Conflict

The main conflict addressed by this study involves the concepts of institutional objectivity and profitability. Traditional Social Responsibility theory has led to a desire for journalistic institutions to remain separate from outside influences. However, the changing ownership trends of media have placed an increased focus on profitability as a factor of news production, causing many content providers to compromise these traditional separations.

This shift has led to the mixture of promotional content with editorial content, with the rationale that this mixture does a better job of serving the needs of the consumers of the media product.

In his book Good News, Bad News, journalist Jeremy Iggers summed up this conflict:

This conflict is even more dramatic in the arena of online media. Due to the increasingly interactive nature of online news presentation, many online publications have adopted integrated content packaging as a strategy.

This practice of blending news, opinion and advertising together into packets organized by topic has further removed online journalism from the traditional model of journalism ethical discourse, by introducing the principles of business ethical discourse. The seeming incompatibility of these two sets of norms is the heart of the conflict. The norms of journalism center around enlightening the public and the norms of business center around maximizing profits over an indefinite period of time (McManus, 1994). The latter norms change the role of journalism significantly, as the goal becomes to attract audience attention in order to capitalize on advertiser revenue (Bagdikian, 1989).

The blending of professional responsibilities has led to several levels of this conflict. On the conservative end of the spectrum, this clash in values has led content managers to instruct journalists to become more acutely aware of what the public desires in news coverage by monitoring what kinds of news reports are most highly valued in the marketplace (Underwood, 1993). On the extreme end of the spectrum, this clash can lead content managers to treat advertisers and audience alike as customers (McManus, 1994).

Treating advertiser as customers in news production seems to raise two issues problematic for traditional journalists. Advertisers seek news environments that create "buying moods" for their wares (Bagdikian, 1997). In addition, advertisers desire to surround their ads with news content that yields credibility to their persuasive claims (Meyer, 1987).

Credibility concerns

The ethics that journalism relies upon were developed in order to build credibility. Without credibility, a medium provides no reason for consumers to buy its wares. Thus Credibility has a distinct economic value to a news medium.

Credibility, when dealing with communication, was initially defined by Hovland, Janis and Kelley as a combination of expertise and trustworthiness (Hovland, Janis and Kelley , 1953). Kelman and Hovland soon expanded this definition to include the variable of objectivity (Kelman and Hovland, 1953). Homer and Kahle defined expertise, in turn, as the extent to which the source of a message is perceived to be capable of making correct assertions by virtue of having relevant skills (Homer and Kahle, 1990).

The discipline of journalism has also yielded several studies on this topic, often dealing with measuring what impact quoted sources have on a story’s perception by the audience. Weaver, Hopkins, Billings and Cole (1974) found no significant difference in audience perceptions of newspaper stories with direct quotations and stories with paraphrased quotations. To evaluate the relationship between the presence of sources and credibility in online newspapers, Sundar (1998) found that subjects rated online news stories with quotes as significantly more credible and of a higher quality than online stories without quotes. Finally, Higgins (1999) performed a study that concluded that source credibility and time influenced decisions, but when time and credibility were analyzed concurrently, the effects of source weakened.

For advertisers, the credibility of a news medium is critical, since it draws the audience into an area of influence. In their functional search to connect with one another, both advertisers and customers tend to gravitate towards the dominant medium within a given market. One centrally located meeting place is enough, for neither wants to waste the time or money exploring multiple channels (Meyer, 1995).

The drive to become this dominant medium has caused the central role of the management of media to change to a more market-driven focus. Instead of focusing on internal processes and reporting, editors have begun to spend hours soothing the feelings of advertisers and readers. Instead of driving for truth through news values, they listen to focus groups. Instead of staunchly defending the proverbial wall between advertising and editorial content, editors are forced to wrestle with how to make the "product" more "reader friendly" (Peterson, 1997).

A New Environment

The Internet is the vast conglomeration of networked computers and servers that allow users to communicate with one another. The Web is a method of locating and utilizing Internet resources by utilizing a graphical interface, called a browser, and hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are encoded text strings that allow a user to jump from one document to another on the Web. Sites on the Web are maintained by Webmasters, sometimes called system administrators.

In the last 20 years, the Internet has grown out an experiment from a U.S. Department Defense network with a few hundred users to a globally decentralized domain with an immeasurable audience. Today, when a Webmaster posts material on a Web site, it can be seen by millions of potential virtual visitors.

The Web’s nature has created a culture of free public access without overriding controls. To date, the closest form of standardization of Web documents exists in the form of the World Wide Web Initiative, a cooperative organization based at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland and birthplace of the WWW (Lemay, 1995).

The World Wide Web Initiative devotes much time and resources to the development of the WWW. Each year, its members present papers and multimedia presentations to educate the global community about current Web issues. Unfortunately, the World Wide Web Initiative has thus far addressed subject matter related only to style standards and functionality in programming content and has not attacked the problems of standardizing a stylistic method for distinguishing between advertisements and editorial content.

Online Journalism

The number of newspapers offering online products continues to increase rapidly, with the count topping 2,000 in early 1999 and more than 2,900 a year later, including more than 1,800 from the U.S. (Singer, Tharp, and Haruta, 1999; Chyi and Dominic, 1999). Though many of these products feature content repurposed from print-based counterparts (Martin, 1999), those that produce content unique to the Web have found the news presentation process to be different from print (Lowery, 1999).

A trend that has caused some concern from both consumers and researchers involves a change in news production culture. As news media are increasingly owned by fewer and fewer public corporations, the control of information is being allocated to fewer and fewer individuals (Bagdikian, 1997). This trend has placed considerable tension on the walls that have traditionally separated the culture of the newsroom from the advertising office.

As a result, there has been a transformation in the professional communicator's role. This transformation is a fundamental shift from a focus on news (the information important to readers as citizens) to a focus on market-driven packages (information important to readers as consumers and private individuals). As a result, the "reader" becomes a "customer," the "news" a "product," and the "public" a "market" (McManus, 1994). Where the traditional model of journalism told then audience what it needed to know, the new model tells the audience what it thinks it wants to know (Coyle, 1998).

Portals

The tremendous growth of the WWW has meant an increasing number of companies, groups and organizations have published Web sites to deliver content, products and services to the consumer. Furthermore, the high-profiled earnings of investors in online media who offer initial public offerings has created a boon of participants in the online information world.

Additionally, the explosion of e-commerce has blurred the line between content and advertising or promotional content across the commercial side of the Web. Online newspapers and content providers have struggled to capitalize financially on the information they gather, and more traditional businesses have tried to use the new technology to connect with their customers.

The result of this explosion of Web growth has been the development of the portal site as a new format of mass medium. Portal sites are Web initiatives launched by companies with the intent of giving users an entry point to the Web. The general business model of the portal site market is to attempt to provide enough benefits to the consumer to attract a critical mass of users in order to in turn attract advertisers (Outing, 1998). The goal of a portal is not to provide for all of the consumer’s needs, but to serve a guidepost for finding the information on the Web to serve those needs (Black, 1997, p. 109).

Nearly every professional industry is represented on the Web, forcing practitioners to develop ways to reformat and redirect resources to attract eyeballs. Portal sites are an informal way for an industry or company to develop traffic. In order to do this, many companies offer free email services, Web space, customizable news briefs and customizable online shopping guides. Often, these activities stretch professionals across disciplines previously unfamiliar to them.

Traditional media send out a constant stream of printed and broadcasted messages intended to inform, entertain and influence the public’s perceptions and activities. The emerging popularity of the Web as a consumer medium has added another dynamic outlet for these activities.

A lifetime’s exposure to traditional media gives the consumers a set of criteria by which they evaluate the mediated messages they receive. Often these criteria are internalized into the subconscious so that the consumer is not aware of the judging process. Because of a general lack of intensive experience on the Web, this process is most likely not as automatic with new media.

However, the same criteria used to judge traditional media could be adapted to develop a process to evaluate new media sources. In particular, five specific judgement criteria play an essential role in this process: accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency and coverage (Alexander and Tate, 1999, p.2). In addition, certain other factors play important roles in the consumer evaluation process. These include the existing standards and guidelines (laws) and the consumer’s sensory perceptions. Traditional information providers have historically been obliged to adhere to such well-established standards and conventions regarding communication activities. However, it remains to be seen whether or not new media communication practitioners (and users) will adopt similar standards.

Online Ethics

Ethics and ethical models do not evolve in a vacuum. As Roger Fidler, author of Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media, points out, certain trends are inherent in media change, which he describes in his principles of "mediamorphosis," a term Fidler coined in 1990. "By studying the communication system as a whole, we will see that new media do not rise spontaneously and independently — they emerge gradually from the mediamorphosis of old media. (Fidler, 1997, p. 23)

When approaching ethics for portals, Fidler would argue that rather than generating a new model strictly from the sentiments and codes of the current situation, it would be wise to take the useful components of previous models and build upon their foundation. The problems faced by new media are not new problems, they simply are occurring in new environments and cross the boundaries of new combinations of society and professional discipline.

However, the first step is to identify some of the major ethical dilemmas facing content-production staff of online portals.

Abstract

Introduction and Literature Review

Case Study

Conclusions

Reference List