IIf blogging is about voice and reading is a function of taste and trust, then every writer is responsible for his or her own ethical stance. That’s how I would recast this provocative remark by Dana Blankenhorn in a post titled, We”re All Publishers Now :

“Journalism schools need to become business schools. If writers are publishers, then they are subject to business ethics, not some “professional” ethic foisted on them by an employer … Every journalist must hold their own credibility account. This is the value of trust placed in them by readers. They can’t just hold the account of an employer, benefitting from it, perhaps adding to it, perhaps subtracting from it.”

I quite agree that bloggers, citizen journalists, personal publishers, call them what you like, must take their own ethical stand because that is part and parcel of having a personal brand.

I recently put together some thoughts along these lines and ganged them together in a post titled Media Minutemen 2.0.

Blankenhorn’s notion that J-schools should become more like business schools also makes sense. Future journalists may have no choice but to be self-employed as mass media paychecks become more rare.

I noticed Blankenhorn’s comments, incidentally, on Pamela Mahoney’s site New Media and its Implications. This is a part of the Personal Bee — a new aggregation and ranking system that I don’t yet understand well enough to write about. For now here’s a Silicon Beat blurb on what it’s about. But getting up to speed as a “Bee Keeper” is on my list of to-dos.

FYI: I read Blankenhorn’s post on Mahoney’s site — where she had also posted one of my blog entries.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media