Few websites cover and critique the ever-changing face of modern journalism and the techniques involved in it as well as OJB, or the Online Journalism Blog. Right from the start, the blog offers a refreshing and unbiased look at the world of online journalism and the issues confronting the medium. Perhaps its most enticing characteristic is the ability for many authors to contribute to the website’s postings, thereby increasing the scope of topics discussed and making the discussions more helpful. Indeed, the blog’s unapologetic motto is: “This is a conversation.”
My particular interest in this blog began when I discovered a posting titled “Do blogs make reporting restrictions pointless?” Here the blog is directly addressing, in my opinion, one of the most pressing issues in journalism today. With the invention of the blog has come an unprecedented ability and power to reach worldwide audiences with little effort. But, with this new swiftness in reporting speed has come the possibility of publishing articles without much proofreading for factual errors. In several cases in the past this has resulted in stories being picked up by larger news organizations and wrongly published. Such a problem can have dire consequences in the future as more and more of the public obtains access to the online world of “citizen journalism,” and I was pleased to find a blog that addressed the issue.
Another piece contained within the blog that I was very happy to see was one written about how some journalists will do anything for a story, even violate privacy. The blog posting tells of reporter Paula Murray, who “managed to inveigle her way into a Facebook friendship with teenagers from the town [of Dunblane] and write a salacious piece about their ‘antics,’ based on information culled from their profiles.”
Although the original article was quickly taken down, the story nevertheless shows how some reporters need to approach their coverage in a more ethical manner, lest the entire journalistic community be given an even worse image than it already has developed over the years (it has been deteriorating for quite some time). In this way, therefore, OJB is quite useful in its role as critic of journalistic methods and initiator and mediator of important online public discussion.
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