Just in case anyone was interested this was lukes foray into the question of journalistic ethics at the LAtimes Lukes hands covered in blood or filth?



Dear Eric,


If my hands are not covered with blood, then they are covered with a filth that will never go away. It's my fault that I'm such a shoddy journalist, but I never could have hurt so many innocent people without blogging. The horrible things I've done online would never have happened if I wrote for a high school newspaper, let alone a professional news organization:

In April 1998, I confused "Catalin" for "Kaitlyn" and incorrectly posted to a newsgroup that a certain actress had tested HIV-positive.
In numerous online postings in the spring of 1997, I ran paragraphs of quotes published by others without attribution.
I repeatedly taunted my esteemed colleague Michael Louis Albo (in addition to plagiarizing a few of his jokes), provoking this mild-mannered gentleman into first dumping my ass out of his car in Boyle Heights, then smacking my head into a lightpole in Beverly Hills and finally dragging me around a parking lot in Chatsworth while delivering a lecture to me on journalistic ethics.
Not only have I repeatedly slept with people I blog about (and sometimes borrowed money from them), I've gotten many of my best scoops while horizontal.
I've made up stories about businessmen in the San Fernando Valley, costing them sleepless nights and a lot of money. In my mind, what I was doing was constitutionally protected satire, but many of my readers didn't realize the difference between my reporting and my cruel attempts at humor.
Eric, you don't have to convince me that bloggers are dangerous. Out of the more than 50 million blogs online, I'm sure that fewer than 1% are reliable journalism. But in the information game, there is something more important than journalism — and that is merit.

If tomorrow I break a story by violating every journalistic principle, but it is an important story containing new information that positively affects thousands of lives, then I've done a good thing, even if it is bad journalism.

Individual bloggers, just like news organizations, develop reputations. For instance, if I'm reading ERSnews.com or LAObserved.com, I'm reading something every bit as reliable as the Los Angeles Times. If I'm reading an anonymous comment on mayorsam.blogspot.com, then I have to compare what I'm reading to everything else I know about the subject and then make a judgment.

I've never been a blog triumphalist. I've never pushed people to read blogs. The smart person will read a blog when it is to his advantage to do so — meaning that there is information there that he can find nowhere else.

You're a general assignment reporter. You can't be expected to have the depth of knowledge that thousands of bloggers out there have on their niche.

When bloggers get a story wrong, they can be sued for defamation just like any print journalist. I know. I've been sued five times. (One of those suits was dropped, and another was thrown out. One was settled when my insurance company paid $100,000, and the other two were settled when I deleted some content from my site without making a retraction.)

Luke Ford of lukeford.net has earned his living from blogging for a decade. He's the author of five books, four of them self-published.