Blog about Blogging

The Coconut Grove Grapevine blog is devoted to keeping the Coconut Grove community up to date on happenings, community events, etc. It combines facts with opinions, and some of the entries are much like press releases. 

The reads more like an opinion column more than a news article, with few in-article links. It does have sidebars of links to past blogs. News sources are generally not cited.

One thing that I didn't really like about this particular blog was that it was easy to mistake advertising for content. There is a sidebar of "Quicklinks," that one would expect to be to other articles but actually link to paid advertisers. The links to other news sources and community resources is much farther down the page, after a number of ads and an extensive list of other local blogs. 

As a whole, though, this blog is an interesting example of how citizens experience their community in the 21st century. The town square used to be the place to go to meet fellow community members, hear about upcoming events or how past events turned out. This mode changed after our society moved it's home base to the suburbs. Now individual neighborhoods may have their own forums of interaction, but the larger community generally doesn't have anything resembling a town square or city center. This, I think, is the modern replacement. 

Ethics

The trend that I find the most troubling in the field today is the degradation of news quality because news organizations are scrambling to beat each other to post stories-- to get the scoop has become a 24-hour obsession instead of a 5:00 deadline. It seems that news organizations are more interested in quantity and timing than overall quality.

(Although perhaps Capp's Good Enough Tech idea probably works with news articles as well-- they aren't as great as they used to be, but I can follow them on Twitter from my phone, so they're good enough.)

This 24-hour feeding frenzy that technology has enabled seems to have weakened our sense of ethics as well.

I have to wonder if having a deadline be as soon as possible, all the time, makes people forget to step back and look at a bigger picture. How does tweeting from a funeral while it's in session fit into the larger picture of news coverage?

It's the fastest for keeping people up to date.

It breaks the events down into the bite-sized pieces most people seem to prefer these days.

Perhaps it even makes an event more immediate, making a reader feel more connected to a story, maybe humanizing the situation more.

And in this case it's ridiculously insensitive and self-serving.

The media can be invasive enough when it's covering an important issue. There are times when it serves the greater good to go up to a family in mourning and ask the hard questions. But this was a situation where no public good came from up to the minute updates. It just fed consumer voyeurism and benefitted the paper. It was insensitive to the family to make the intimacies of their tragedy into an online spectacle.

Just because a technology is available doesn't mean we should use it whenever we can. There are situations where updating from Twitter could be really great for the public-- like in sports, for example. But issues like funerals need to be handled with more delicacy. General readers could have waited the three or four hours until the reporter could get to a Starbucks, pound out an article and upload it.

Ethics continually evolve. We need to ensure that they evolve as quickly as our technology does. News organizations need to step back and continually weigh the advantages of technology against their potential harms.

Just because you can post it, doesn't mean you should.