Reporting tittle-tattle: twitter, gossip and the changing nature of journalism

Abstract

ABSTRACTIt is understood that, at times, ‘the public has a legitimate need to know information that other people would like to keep private’ (Jones 2008); and journalists are frequently faced with a moral dilemma when disseminating private information – how far should they infringe on an individual's right to privacy in the midst of mass public self-expression? Ethicists generally agree that ‘it is just for a journalist to violate the privacy of an individual only if information about that individual is of overriding public importance, and the public need cannot be met by any other means’ (Hodges 1994, 203). But how relevant is this discussion in the current climate of new media technology? Website applications such as Twitter encourage users to collapse distinctions between public and private, and concentrate on sharing information and ideas. This, one could argue, could undermine the authority attributed to the press, as individuals turn toward unrestricted information found on social networks. This article debates whether journalists should be at liberty to use private information circulating throughout social networks, or if gossip can be used as a community-building mechanism in journalism, and how journalists should deal with appropriating information from social networks when dealing with ‘publicly private’ knowledge.