Bloggers take ethical practices seriously

A major survey conducted by researchers in Singapore and involving 1,000 participants discovered that both personal and professional bloggers paid a great deal of attention to ethics, accountability and attribution when they published news material to the internet, despite the fact that there is nothing even remotely close to a widely accepted code of conduct for the blogosphere. The vast majority of bloggers, however, understand the importance of providing readers with reliable news content, opinions and analysis underpinned by facts, and not polemics, as well as proper citation and attribution of pieces written by other writers. According to the survey’s findings, bloggers feel that the most important ethical issue they face relates to attribution. As such, there is a widely-held belief that producing original content, and always properly citing material taken from another news source forms the very core of good blogging. The second most important value held by bloggers is producing content based upon reliable, newsworthy information.

The international survey suggests that approximately 40 percent of bloggers are university or college students, while 10 percent are professionals employed in the IT sector. These two groups together often produce blogs written in a personal, colloquial-style and place a strong emphasis on developing a relationship with their readers. The other 50 percent of bloggers, however, are generally dominated by professional, university educated males over 30 years of age, who focus on producing less personal, but more newsworthy and journalistic content. When the survey asked bloggers to list the importance of each ethical value from a scale of one to seven, accountability and reliability received a very high score of 5.7.

Thank you to John Trimmer of ArsTechnica for the initial report.