Karen Schneider Talks About Blog Ethics
December 10th, 2004Karen talks about librarian weblogs and ethical considerations:
“For some time I’ve grumbled and groused about the practices of librarian bloggers. Too many of us want to be considered serious citizen-journalists, when it suits us, but fall back on ‘hey, it’s only a blog’ when we’d rather post first and fact-check later, present commentary as ‘news,’ or otherwise fall short of the guidelines of the real profession of journalism. (This is doubly ironic, considering how librarians squeal when people without library degrees claim to practice ‘librarianship.’)”
I don’t know of many librarian bloggers who want to be thought of as “serious citizen journalists”. I’m sure there are some out there. Most of us just want to get our thoughts and ideas across without having to be labeled. I’ve always fought the notion of me being a “journalist”. I’m a librarian who happens to have a blog and wants to show off some interesting tools and comment on various issues. Does that make me a journalist? Maybe. I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that when the PLA Blog goes live (next week I hope), I will be representing my profession in a different capacity than I do now. I will be blogging for an organization, one that I trust (and one that trusts me), write for in another capacity (my Internet Spotlight column), and respect. I’m also bringing other people on board (some whom I know and others whom I don’t) to blog as well, which brings up a whole other set of issues (am I an editor now?) My point is that I’ll feel more like a journalist when I blog for PLA than when I blog for Library Stuff. Thus, I’ll have to work on my typos and grammar.