Stealing information from Facebook is no better than leafing through someone’s diary

A big debate in Journalism at the moment is whether or not it is ethical to take personal information about people from websites in the public domain such as Facebook or MySpace.

Ethics! I hear you cry. What do journalists care about ethics anyway!?

The debate started with the Virginia Tech massacre, where for the first time, journalists liberally took information from killer Seung-Hui Cho’s websites and printed it across various forms of media.

It continued when British student Gavin Britton died and journalists took pictures and descriptions from his Facebook page for their newspaper articles.

But Kim Fletcher of the NCTJ says that once information is published on sites like Facebook, as it is in the public sphere, journalists are free to use it.

“These internet sites fulfil a fantasy many of us have had from our first day as cub reporters. Suddenly no one shuts the door in our faces; no grey-faced, grief-stricken relative tells us we are ghouls and makes us think worse of ourselves.”

Frankly, it astounds me that the Chairman of the organisation that trains journalists and gives them qualifications is advocating, and even encouraging such lazyness from journalists.

It is simply stealing. The information is not there for the journalist’s use. It is not published with them in mind. You would not break into a person’s house and root through their belongings and read their diary, so why would you steal their personal information from a website like Facebook?

Fletcher seems to ignore the fact that only so much stuff can be taken from outside sources and primary information is still crucial to giving a piece some identity to make it stand out from the crowd. If all journalists are taking their information from the same page online, their stories are going to be almost identical. It is from going out and talking to people that this changes, with more colour and drama added to a piece. We are not information-gathering monkeys. There is a skill to it.

This of course is added to the shocking working conditions journalists now put up with. They are effectively chained to a desk with one hand permanently holding a phone to their ear. This is not how it should be. And encouraging yet more use of the internet, which lest us forget is unregulated as yet, cheapens the profession even more.