The study “Journalism (Ethics) in the Loop: Software Development as a Cultural Competency for News Organizations” by Damon Kiesow from Missouri School of Journalism looked at how news organizations can better assess, avoid, or mitigate ethical risks coming with digital economy.
According to the author, every modern news organization is also a technology company, but notes that journalists do not like the categorization. Nevertheless, three decades since the birth of the World Wide Web, digital technologies have transformed the content of the journalistic occupation. adding new tasks up to producing code by journalists.
When adopting technologies uncritically, the sociocultural assumptions of the creator come with it leading to journalistically undesired outcomes. However, even internally created projects are not immune to values-based failures. Thus, the “human in the loop” with journalistic needs to be as close to product design as possible.
It is then self-evident that journalistic values should be embedded in the technologies used by newsrooms. The proposition that the technologies are value neutral, as per the author, cannot be seriously considered. Thus the values of the Silicon Valley are “smuggled” into the newsroom.
Therefore, software development should be seen as a fundamental expression of tech logics into news work. There should be a renegotiation of job skills, team structure, strategic planning practices, and the project management of highly technical tasks within the organization.
In the article, the author proposes a battery of questions to assess technologies used by news organizations. These questions are:
- Is news gathered, written, or published to it or with it?
- Is it otherwise directly exposed to readers?
- Does it supplant human decision-making?
- Could it have asymmetrical impacts on segments of the community?
- Are its features and terms of service mature and stable?
Further, mitigating factors for potential risks include:
- Low switching costs
- Open-source
- Modular or customizable
- Built for purpose technologies.
These questions and mitigating factors are further elaborated on in the full article. The author concludes that including product managers and software developers who understand the complexities of digital systems and the mission of journalism are required for news organizations.
The article “Journalism (Ethics) in the Loop: Software Development as a Cultural Competency for News Organizations” by Damon Kiesow is in Digital Journalism. (free abstract).
Picture: A computer screen with a bunch of code on it. By Chris Ried.
License Unsplash.
