New phase of Ethics - A step towards change!

Media revolution is transforming, fundamentally and irrevocably, slowly and gradually in the nature of journalism and its ethics. Publish is now in the hands of citizens, while the internet encourages new forms of journalism that are interactive and immediate.

Our media is a chaotic landscape evolving at great pace.  Professional journalists share the journalistic sphere with tweeters, bloggers, citizen journalists, and social media users.Every revolution, new possibilities emerge while old practices are threatened. Today is no exception. The economics of professional journalism struggles as audiences migrate online. Shrinkage of newsrooms creates concern for the future of journalism. 

Yet these fears also prompt experiments in journalism, such as non-profit centers of investigative journalism.

The main question which arises is to what extent existing media ethics is suitable for todays and tomorrow’s news media that is immediate, interactive and “always on” – a journalism of amateurs and professionals. Most of the principles were developed over the past century, originating in the construction of professional, objective ethics for mass commercial newspapers in the late 19th century.

We are moving towards a mixed news media – a news media citizen and professional journalism across many media platforms. This new mixed news media requires a new  mixed media ethics – guidelines that apply to amateur and professional whether they blog, Tweet, broadcast or write for newspapers. Media ethics needs to be rethought and reinvented for the media of today, not of yesteryear. what are its global responsibilities? Should media ethics reformulate its aims and norms so as to guide a journalism that is now global in reach and impact? What would that look like?

The changes challenge the foundations of media ethics. The challenge runs deeper than debates about one or another principle, such as objectivity. The challenge is greater than specific problems, such as how newsrooms can verify content from citizens. The revolution requires us to rethink assumptions. What can ethics mean for a profession that must provide instant news and analysis; where everyone with a modem is a publisher? There is lot of tensions and problems like traditional journalism v/s online journalism, their differences, values, culture etc.