A Consultation Paper for ABC Staff
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Consultation Paper 1: Blogging: A consultation paper for ABC staff July 2007 Advise. Verify. Review ABC Editorial Policies Editorial Policies The Editorial Policies of the ABC are its leading standards and a day-to-day reference for makers of ABC content. The Editorial Policies - • give practical shape to statutory obligations in the ABC Act; • set out the ABC’s self-regulatory standards and how to enforce them; and • describe and explain to staff and the community the editorial and ethical principles fundamental to the ABC. The role of Director Editorial Policies was established in 2007 and comprises three main functions: to advise, verify and review. The review function principally involves a focus on the text of the Editorial Policies to ensure the standards stay up to date in light of technological and other change. Instead of periodic reviews every few years, the Editorial Policies are to be kept under constant review, with the Director identifying areas that may require amendment, consulting and making recommendations to the Managing Director and Board. The ABC Editorial Policies Division welcomes your comments on this consultation paper and seeks your response to the issues raised. These should be forwarded by email to [email protected] by 28 August 2007. Acknowledgements Director Editorial Policies acknowledges the contribution of Michelle Fisher, Manager Research (Editorial Policies) in the preparation of this Consultation Paper. This report is published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation © 2007 ABC For information about the report, please contact: Director Editorial Policies ABC Southbank Centre GPO Box 9994 Melbourne VIC 3001 Phone: +61 3 9626 1631 Email: [email protected] ABC Editorial Policies Consultation Paper 1 Blogging: A Consultation Paper for ABC Staff July 2007 Table of contents I. What this Consultation Paper is about ...........................................................................................1 II. Why the ABC is thinking more about UGC and Editorial Policies ...............................................3 III. Why blogging is in focus..................................................................................................................4 A. Focus on blogging by ABC staff and blogging by our audiences...................................................4 1. ABC-hosted blogs on ABC internet sites ........................................................................................5 2. Proposed audience-hosted blogs on ABC internet sites ................................................................5 3. Audience blogging and engagement ..............................................................................................5 4. Public broadcaster affiliations with independent bloggers..............................................................5 IV. Legal context .....................................................................................................................................7 A. General legal obligations ................................................................................................................7 B. ACMA regulation of online content.................................................................................................7 C. Limited immunity for civil and criminal liability ................................................................................7 V. Editorial policies................................................................................................................................9 VI. List of issues, and an invitation to comment ...............................................................................10 A. Issues for consideration................................................................................................................10 1. Question 1: What aspects of our experience with audience interaction in other contexts can be usefully applied to blogging?......................................................................................................................10 2. Question 2: What Editorial Policies should apply to users’ comments and UGC? ..........................................11 3. Question 3: Do audience expectations and standards relating to online content differ from those relating to broadcasts? ..................................................................................................................................11 4. Question 4: Assuming we should moderate, how?..........................................................................................13 5. Question 5: How should we (and our audience) facilitate access to the best of the comments and foster productive discussions on our blogs?...........................................................................................16 6. Question 6: If we invite audience members to help us handle blogs, how do we best support them? Should we look at partnering with independent bloggers instead? ..........................................................17 7. Question 7: Should we more readily allow linking to external sites? ...............................................................18 8. Question 8: Is sufficient guidance already provided for staff who have personal blogs or who contribute to independent (non-ABC) blogs? ....................................................................................................20 B. How you can make a submission.................................................................................................22 Endnotes .......................................................................................................................................................23 ABC Editorial Policies I. What this Consultation Paper is about This paper informs and consults ABC staff, seeking the views of the people who comprise the national public broadcaster about the issue of blogging. Blogging is one item among several usually grouped under the label User Generated Content (UGC). Unlike most jargon terms, this one means precisely what it says: content generated by the users of a media organisation and submitted to that organisation for it to disseminate. It is not new. Talkback radio is a form of UGC. But new information and communications technologies are facilitating more UGC, of greater variety, and all of it arriving faster than traditional media organisations have received it in the past. A blog (short for “web log”) has been described by Dan Gillmor as: an online journal comprised of links and postings in reverse chronological order, meaning the most recent posting appears at the top of the page. …[W]eblogs are “post-centric”—the posting is the key unit—rather than “page- centric,” as with more traditional web sites. Weblogs typically link to other web sites and blog postings, and many allow readers to comment on the original post, thereby allowing audience discussions.1 Common features of a blog include the informal tone adopted, the use of links to external sites, and the enabling and encouragement of interaction with audiences through the posting of user comments and other content. The paper is structured like this: Part 2 gives the wider context, demonstrating why blogging is worth thinking about, on its own and as part of a changing media environment to which the ABC must adapt if it is to thrive. Next, blogging is examined more closely and the main distinction is made between blogs by ABC staff and blogging by audience members on or in affiliation with ABC sites (Part 3). In Part 4, the legal framework relating to blogging and UGC is outlined and some questions raised (but not solved; in many ways the law is a long way behind developments in media and the way people are using new communications technologies). Part 5 describes how the current Editorial Policies are relevant to blogging. The feedback to this paper will form part of a broader revision of Section 9 of the 2007 Editorial Policies, “Links and Interactivity”, which dates from 1995. The need to revisit such areas of policy should be evident from this excerpt from a recent BBC Trust report: Even in the short period since the publication of the [BBC’s] Editorial Guidelines (June 2005), the meaning of UGC has changed. It then was applied to message boards and public contributions to other online sites. Now, two years later, it is more often understood to mean amateur stills and video sent to newsrooms from mobile phones. This reflects the way such UGC has mushroomed in that period – along with video news releases (VNRs) from those with causes to promote. Before that, amateur stills and video were available to news networks – but for a long time were not given either the credence or the value of their professional equivalents. Now that has changed. Sometimes they themselves become the story, as with the pictures of prisoner abuse in the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. Amateur digital pictures are different only in the speed with which they can now be transmitted around the world, between individuals or via broadcasters. BBC News first used such pictures in quantity after the London bombings of July 2005 (300 were sent in), and then again after the Buncefield oil depot fire (when, only five months later, 15,000 images were received). Now the mobile phone operator 3 is planning a direct channel to broadcasters, by which its subscribers may feed images of a news event straight into newsrooms, so that citizen journalists become, in effect, news agency reporters. There are