This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. User-generated content and ethical constructs at the Guardian Jane B. Singer and Ian Ashman
Permanent repository linkAbstract: This case study examines how journalists at Britain's Guardian newspaper and affiliated website are assessing and incorporating user-generated content in their perceptions and practices. A framework of existentialism helps highlight constructs and professional norms of interest. It is one of the first data-driven studies to explore how journalists are negotiating personal and social ethics within a digital network.Around the developed world, journalists are producing a steadily decreasing portion of the editorial content on their own newspaper websites. The rapid growth of various forms of "user-generated content," from comments to hosted blogs to "hyperlocal" news stories, means the journalist has far less control over what was once an essentially industrial process of making news. The website has become a shared space, filled with constantly changing content produced by a broad range of individuals and informed by relationships among those contributors.The changes raise not only a host of practical issues for journalists but also a great many ethical ones. What might an optimal relationship between journalists and users/contributors -the people Bruns (2007) This ethnographic case study draws on interviews and a brief questionnaire to examine how journalists at Britain's Guardian newspaper and affiliated website -part of a media organization with a strong and explicitly articulated normative culture --are assessing and incorporating user-generated content in their perceptions and practices. A framework of existentialism, which highlights issues including authenticity and the potentially conflicting constructs of freedom and responsibility, is used to inform a consideration of related professional norms. Although earlier works have offered a conceptual groundwork for exploring these issues, this study is one of the first to collect data indicating how journalists are negotiating personal and social ethics within the digital network in which they now work.
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