Peer pressure

In the age of online journalism, many a news site feature some form of content curation—that is, compiling content on a niche topic from external news sources for delivery to your audience. Some sites use this model exclusively with varying levels of ethical validity. (The Huffington Post, for example, often has been criticized for its liberal repurposing of others’ content.)

The site at which I’m employed executes a limited form of content curation via our e-newsletter. I say “limited” because, in truth, we use it sparingly. When we put together our newsletter, most of our content has been created in-house. If there are gaps in our editorial coverage—a four-person reporting staff can’t cover the going-ons of the entire world—we supplement our offerings with external links from outside news sources, such as the International Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal.

Where we run into difficulty, and some shades of ethical grey, is when we encounter a particular article or subject that, in a vacuum, we wouldn’t necessarily cover; however, all of our competitors are doing so. Watching our industry peers is typically a good way of establishing an editorial benchmark. If everyone is reporting on a particular issue or topic, that issue or topic generally has some value to our readers.

But that’s not always the case. There are times in which we still challenge the worthiness of a particular topic even despite the widespread attention given to it by our peers.

Therein lies the dilemma: Do we stick to our guns and familiarity with our unique readership and not include article in question, thus providing a consciously edited, concise offering of news? Or do we include the article in question, ignoring our own judgment in an attempt to arm our readers with as much information as possible?

Both options are “right,” in an ethical sense. And depending on the situation, we’ve sided with both sides of the dilemma.

The question can most accurately be framed within the context of gatekeeping. The Fourth Estate has long been valued for its news judgment. Journalists can’t cover everything; therefore, they use their discretion to cover the most newsworthy events of the day. This concept was especially important when folios provided a finite space in which to run editorial copy.

In the limitless expanse of the Web, however, it’s tempting to include as much as everything—an attempt to be all things to all people. But the online journalist should be mindful of his gatekeeping responsibilities; choosing not to include particular articles, I think, does as much to clarify your editorial philosophy as those articles you do include.

Like I mentioned above, editorial peer pressures is a good way to benchmark your efforts against your competitors. If we see a sudden spike in coverage of a particular topic, we’ll discuss why this has happened, decide if we should present our own unbiased take on the subject, or if we don’t have the time our resources to do so, select the most thoroughly reported article and include it in our own e-newsletter. One thing we don’t do: include content simply because others are doing so. As I’m sure Kidder and my peers would agree, there is no ethical right in caving to peer pressure.