News Media Innovation Reconsidered: Ethics and Values in A Creative Reconstruction of Journalism María Luengo and Susana Herrera-Damas

News Media Innovation Reconsidered:
Ethics and Values in a Creative

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News Media Innovation Reconsidered
News Media Innovation Reconsidered
Ethics and Values in a Creative Reconstruction of Journalism
Edited by María Luengo

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Madrid, Spain
Susana Herrera-Damas
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Madrid, Spain
Copyright © 2021. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
News Media Innovation Reconsidered : Ethics and Values in a Creative Reconstruction of Journalism, edited by María Luengo, and Susana
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Table of Contents
Introduction:
Journalism’s Creative Reconstruction: How Innovation in News
Is Embracing Enduring Professional and Civil Values vii
María Luengo
Journalism, Ethics, and Innovation in Times of Digital Turbulence 1
1 An Inquiry into the Ethics of Innovation in Digital Journalism 3

José Alberto García-Avilés
2 Democratically Engaged Journalists: Ethical Invention amid

Unreasonable Publics 20
Stephen J.A. Ward
3 Journalism Innovation in a Time of Survival 40

Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young
News Ethics and Emerging Journalistic Narratives 53
4 Ethics in 360-Degree Immersive Journalism 55

María José Benítez de Gracia, Sara Pérez-Seijo, and Susana Herrera-Damas
5 Quo Vadis, Newsgames? Ethical Boundaries Between

Journalism and Games 73
Salvador Gómez-García and Juan Martín-Quevedo
6 Guiding the Adoption of News Storytelling Design Through Ethics: The Use of
Stories in Google’s AMP Project 92
Mariché Navío-Navarro and Laura González-Díez
vi Table of Contents
Interrogating
Data, Algorithms, and Automatization Through
Journalism Ethics 105
7 Data Journalism, Massive Leaks, and Investigation: What the Panama Papers
Have Taught Us About Ethics 107
Helena Cortés and María Luengo
8 Semi-automated Journalism: Reinforcing Ethics to Make the Most of Artificial

Intelligence for Writing News 124
José Luis Rojas Torrijos
9 Ethical Challenges in Incorporating Artificial Intelligence into Newsrooms 138

Teresa Barceló-Ugarte, José Manuel Pérez-Tornero, and Pere Vila-Fumàs
Journalistic Innovation at the Service of the Public 155
10 Journalism, Algorithms, and the People’s Right to Know 157

Michaëla Cancela-Kieffer
11 Ethical Dilemmas in the Personalization of News from Voice Interfaces 174

Luis Miguel Pedrero-Esteban and Beatriz Gas-Gozalbo
12 Transparency, Innovation, and Journalism 187

Rogério Christofoletti
13 Innovative Tools for Citizen Empowerment in the Fight Against

Misinformation 202
Óscar Espíritusanto and Inès Dinant
Conclusion 222
Susana Herrera-Damas
Index 228
vii
Introduction
Journalism’s Creative Reconstruction: How Innovation in News Is
Embracing Enduring Professional and Civil Values
María Luengo
News media are suffering a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” (Schumpeter, 1975

[1942]). This has been the received wisdom among scholars and media watchers eval-
uating the impact of digital technology on journalism today. However, is “creative
destruction” an appropriate term in this case? The use of it to explain this recent period
of upheaval in journalism usually involves reductive techno-economic paradigms that
overlook critical cultural and ethical dimensions.
This collective book aims to understand technological innovation as “creative recon-
struction” (Alexander, 2016). The idea of creative reconstruction was coined by cul-
tural sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander around 2014, after he and a group of cultural
sociologists and journalism scholars expressed frustration at how academics and pun-
dits were narrowly theorizing in purely technological and economic terms the current
“crisis of journalism” and the consequent changes and innovations in news. This per-
spective was crystalized in The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered (Alexander, Breese,
and Luengo, 2016), a book that shows how crisis and change in journalism are equally
caused by cultural and ethical factors. The empirical investigations in The Crisis of
Journalism Reconsidered demonstrate that intense alarm over digital change implies
the strength of both journalistic ethics and democratic values (Carlson, 2016; Luengo,
2016). The book argues that the compulsion to defend these ethical and civil commit-
ments actually energizes a search for new organizational and technological forms.
In line with this previous cultural sociological theorizing and research, this book
focuses on the energizing of journalism’s ethical and civil ideals by looking at emerg-
ing journalistic practices and products such as 360-degree immersive journalism,

newsgames, the automatization and personalization of news, artificial-intelligence
news production, and data journalism. Our book theoretically and empirically explores
new concepts, models, initiatives, and practices that show how forms of professional
ethics that overlap notably with civil ideals—truth seeking, transparency, accuracy,
accountability, and civic engagement, among other ethical values—are invigorating
the innovative dimension of journalism. If Alexander, Breese, and Luengo’s cultural
sociological perspective issued a significant challenge to the technological and eco-
nomic view of a so-called “crisis” in the sector in a recent context of dramatic changes
within journalism, this new collective book entails a fresh turn of the screw against
reductive explanations, this time specifically within the area of news innovation.
News Media Innovation Reconsidered: Ethics and Values in a Creative Reconstruction of Journalism,
First Edition. Edited by María Luengo and Susana Herrera-Damas.
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
viii Introduction
The Ups and Downs of Techno-economic Explanations
It is becoming increasingly evident that new digital technologies and new forms of
news production and distribution have gradually led to the emergence of innovative
and consolidated journalistic organizations. Many pure digital media born more than
a decade ago have survived the current crisis facing the news industry and now com-
pete alongside major legacy media nationally and globally. On the other hand, many
other initiatives have failed, and well-established national and local journalistic enter-
prises have cut jobs drastically or just disappeared from the market. And news media
companies are continuing to suffer enormous hits to advertising as a result of
COVID-19.
Media experts and scholars explain the emergence of new actors (and the erosion
and digital reinvention of old ones) in the Schumpeterian economic terms of “creative
destruction” (Bruno and Nielsen, 2012; Schlesinger and Doyle, 2014; Nee, 2013;
García-Avilés, 2016; Negredo et al., 2020). Schlesinger and Doyle’s exploration of how
major UK media groups have responded to the crisis in printed newspapers draws on
this economic pattern. They argue that, because of advancing technology, “the value
of large, dominant incumbent firms that fail to transform themselves eventually
becomes eroded and, in some cases, completely destroyed” (Schlesinger and Doyle,
2014, p. 2). In Bruno and Nielsen’s pioneering report on journalistic online start-ups in
Western Europe (2012), pure digital media players, which are first tentatively located
on the “creative” side of this Schumpeterian process, are also seen as subjects of
destruction in the same way as inherited business models are. Explanations of the rise,
survival, success, or failure of new players and the destruction of old ones seem to
reflect a process through which new technologies and new markets cause the “muta-
tion” of journalistic organizations (Boczkowski, 2004) and the whole media system
from within.
Just as technology and economics bring the “destructive” element, they also embody
the “creative” one. Responses to the transformations of journalism include technologi-
cal innovations, innovative ways to measure and analyze audience figures, and new
business models (sources of revenues, ownership, and financial sustainability). The
success or failure of new media are also measured and assessed according to techno-
economic factors. Through the process of creative destruction, technology and eco-
nomics impose “a regime of trial and error and of making wagers,” as Jean-Gustave
Padioleau puts it. The image of creative destruction establishes a present scenario and
foresees a digital future in which new players are forced to compete with old ones, and
new arrivals successfully win niche markets using up-to-the-minute technology.
Padioleau observes that “under the guise of innovation, activities disappear to make
room for newer, more ‘creative,’ more reliable/efficient ones. According to Schumpeter,
creative destruction is at the heart of economic growth” (Padioleau, 2006, p. 110).
Schumpeter’s economic reductionism parallels a narrow technological understand-
ing of journalism innovation. Drawing on research on journalism in Canada, Hermida
and Young’s thought-provoking Chapter 3 in this book examines whether legacy
newsrooms’ defensive adoption of innovation “as a technological-led solution” to eco-
nomically navigate financial turbulence has been to their detriment. By entering into
“the cycle of the never-ending pivots in the search for the killer innovation that will
save the media,” Hermida and Young say, journalistic organizations get trapped in it.
Seeing Creative Destruction as Creative Reconstruction ix
And in times of survival, they argue, few can afford to adopt the latest shiny new
technology.
Seeing Creative Destruction as Creative Reconstruction
Padioleau (2006, p. 10) is critical of the use of the term “creative destruction” in describing
the crisis facing the media, on the basis that it is misleading. Is creative destruction
a deceptive label? This terminology focuses mainly on economics and ignores the critical
cultural and ethical component when explaining current changes in journalism.
This book aims to put current technological innovations of journalism into the broader
context of professional ethics and civil values. It examines journalism innovation from
the energizing of ethics, looking at specific arenas of such innovation, from new forms
and narratives to processes and ways of dissemination.
Without denying the tangible role played by digital technology and market conditions
in reshaping the news today, this collaborative book takes a different angle to interpret
recent changes in news media. Contrary to reductive techno-economic explanations,
the contributors’ analyses of new journalistic forms and practices help show the power
of journalistic and civil values for invigorating the profession. By looking at the ethical
dimension of different initiatives and innovations in various countries, the chapters in
this book seek to advance cultural and ethical insights into journalistic innovation.
Alexander (2016, p. 2) points out that:
Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are
coded by social meanings … Cultural codes not only trigger sharp anxiety about
technological and economic changes; they also provide pathways to control
them, so that the democratic practices of independent journalism, rather than
being destroyed, can be sustained in new forms.
Following Alexander, contributors to this book were invited to look at news media
innovations from the ethical values that make technological innovation sustainable.
The various contributions to this book make it possible to identify the ethical and
professional codes that are invigorating the profession through digital technologies.
The selected innovations are characterized by an online-only or online-first approach,

conveying the news via websites, mobile apps, or social networks. They integrate
experienced journalists, journalistic entrepreneurs, reporters, and computer
scientists.
The ethical perspective deployed to cross-examine the different innovations dis-
cussed also serves as the basis for the theoretical argument behind this book: ethics
and values can be envisioned as pathways to a creative reconstruction of journalism.
This new conceptualization transcends the economic logic of a creative destruction,
which, according to Alexander (2016), would result in the destruction of the economic
foundations of journalism. “Journalism would become Exhibit A of capitalist ‘creative
destruction,’” he observes [p. 7]. In this vein, in the following two sections, I wish to
briefly draw attention to the performative power of journalism for innovative repair by
looking at the professional and civil values that may be generating and sustaining new
entrants in the news media digital ecosystem. To what extent does the ethics of
x Introduction
journalism prevail and foster quality journalism through innovation within new dis-
ruptive digital scenarios? How are these ethical values shaped by new journalistic ini-
tiatives? To address these questions, I first use some of the closing remarks of Breese
and Luengo’s (2016) “News Innovations and Enduring Commitments” chapter as scaf-
folding to semiotically map the arena of news media innovation as a symbolic place
where journalism’s entrenched ethical codes are being re-signified. Then, I apply this
theoretical framework performatively to new journalistic forms and practices at the
intersection between ethics and technological innovation. This last section will serve
as a more explicit introduction to the specific content of the chapters.
Mapping News Innovation Culturally
A cultural sociology insight into news media innovation allows us to reconsider how
the core journalistic values of long-established new media organizations are now
being re-signified by new technologies, work processes, and forms of news production
and distribution. While the meanings of technologies and practices quickly change,
the symbolic codes of journalism remain. Professional values such as “truth,” “accu-
racy,” “independence,” and “criticism” represent some of the cultural codes of profes-
sional journalism, while “falsehood,” “bias,” “inaccuracy,” and “dependence” often
describe counter-values of professionalism (Breese and Luengo, 2016). When journal-
ism entered the digital era, the printing press and legacy media had a monopoly over
codes of professional journalism, whereas the Internet and new digital media have
stood for opposing values. García-Avilés’s Chapter 1 reflects the way in which these
values and counter-values of professionalism explain the initial uneasy relationship
between ethics and digital technologies in journalism. From 2008, enduring journalis-
tic values have been incorporated into a narrative of “crisis” (see Hermida and Young’s
Chapter 3) shared by many practitioners, experts, and scholars (Alexander, Breese,
and Luengo, 2016). The crisis narrative associated technologies, forms, and practices
of traditional media, particularly printed newspapers, with professional journalism.
Many forms, practices, and processes of well-established news organizations around
the world had already become potent symbols of professionalism. Traditional media
were “signifieds” (meanings) of a broader “signifier”—professional journalism. As
Figure I.1 shows, there is an ongoing relationship between signified and signifier.
What was signified becomes possible signifier. By combining signifier and signified,
many traditional forms of journalism became signs (symbols) of core journalistic and
democratic values. Based on this signification, digital technologies have been coded as
tangible sites of the threat to the profession.
Digitalization broke this monopoly power. In the recent context of rapid technologi-
cal change and economic upheaval, new digital ventures have proliferated, and the
pace of change in the signifieds associated with them has accelerated. The continuous
work of re-signification progressively places digital technologies on the side of journal-
istic standards. As Breese and Luengo (2016, p. 284) explain,
When blogs, Twitter, online-only news, live-streaming news, and other tech-
nologies enter newsrooms as new avenues for presenting news to the public,
they tend to be greeted with anxiety. At first, mainstream journalists distance
Mapping News Innovation Culturally xi
Print / legacy Independence

media Truth-seeking
Fairness
Signified Accuracy
Symbolic codes
Professional
Journalism
Signifier
Figure I.1 The “Crisis in news narrative:” print/legacy media as meanings associated with
professional journalism.
themselves from the technologies and related practices, dismissing them as

antithetical to journalistic standards. Over time what had represented a threat
to the news when it was “new” comes to successfully represent the civil codes
of professional journalism.
Matthias Revers’s (2016) comparative analysis of how Twitter was adopted by journal-
ists from the official press corps in New York and Bavaria shows the different ways in
which digital media encounter specific journalism cultures “which draw from
entrenched symbols and sacred discourses of journalism” (Revers, 2016, p. 231).
Revers explains how these symbolic codes stand for boundary work that protects the
journalistic profession against “competing occupations” as well as “deviant insiders.”
He conceives the amalgamation of digital culture and professional journalism as a
“cultural performance” (Alexander, 2004), “in which collective representations of pro-
fessionalism provide the symbolic strength and substantive basis for scripts to act pro-
fessionally in concrete situations” (Revers, 2016, p. 232).
This boundary process and cultural performance implies a symbolic struggle for
newcomers to meet and assert journalistic standards so that they can be considered
full players in themselves. New media have produced a discourse seeking to purify
past negative characterizations that have positioned them as a threat to journalism.

Thus, newly-founded ventures distance themselves from the polluting effects of the
market and claims about the financial sustainability of their innovative business
models. Once considered the cause of massive layoffs of journalists, falls in advertis-
ing revenues, drastic cuts in newsrooms, and other catastrophic consequences in the
news business, digital technology is now presented as sustaining journalism. Online
news start-ups, for example, have become for many the safety valve of journalism.
Born-digital small companies successfully fill market niches of information, reaching
where mainstream media cannot. The characterization of news websites, clicks,
social networks, or web statistics has shifted from their being seen as sources of
aggregative, superficial, sensational, and commodified news to their becoming tools
for reporting original stories, breaking news, and conducting in-depth investigative
journalism. Figure I.2 conveys this re-signification of the symbolic codes of profes-
sional journalism.
xii Introduction
Figure I.2 The re-signification of professional journalism through new digital forms.
New Journalistic Performances on Stage: Ethics Vis-à-Vis

Innovation
In Chapter 2, Ward offers the challenging notion of “democratically engaged journal-

ism” to reconsidered journalism’s civil morals today. Ward contextualizes his concep-
tual proposal within a “toxic sphere of partisan, global media.” In many cases, digital
technology has helped to feed our complex civil spheres with polarization and exclu-
sion. In turbulent times of “irrational publics” (Ward, Chapter 2) and dizzying political
shocks, the association of digital forms’ new meanings with the signifier of profes-
sional journalism must go through a cultural process in which moral values such as
civil commitment, solidarity, social justice, dialog, and inclusion are highlighted (see
Figure I.2). Contributions to this book show how, intermingled and reinforced by
these civil and democratic values, truth seeking, fairness, independent reporting, and
other enduring symbolic codes of journalism not only inspire new journalistic initia-
tives but also help to ensure journalism’s long-term survival.

The journalistic innovations examined in this book raise the value of engagement.
In line with other recent studies on journalism’s immersive storytelling (Jones, 2017;
Kukkakorpi and Pantti, 2020), Benitez, Pérez-Seijo, and Herrera (Chapter 4) empha-
size audience engagement as one of the specific characteristics that makes 360-degree
video journalism disruptive and innovative, along with first-person experience, the
illusion of presence, and empathy. However, as Benitez et al. show, to be success-
fully incorporated into journalistic practices and organizations, immersive journal-
ism needs to reflect more than the audience’s emotional engagement. It needs to
become civil engagement by the way in which narratives cathartically bring compas-
sion and solidarity into the audience experience. Social connectedness goes beyond
empathy, and the feeling for others and putting oneself in the place of another per-
son represent more than a mere illusion of presence recreated by technological
effects. To foster civil engagement, 360-degree immersive journalism must be based
New Journalistic Performances on Stage: Ethics Vis-à-Vis Innovation xiii
on credible stories that preserve the accuracy and integrity of spaces, images, and
sounds and that are constructed using a careful search and selection of news sources.
The case studies in this chapter show the way in which successful journalistic
approaches to 360-degree news have been guided by professional codes of transpar-
ency, truthfulness, and responsibility.
Gómez-García and Martín-Quevedo’s Chapter 5 reflects a similar tension between
the audience’s emotional engagement and accurate reporting of the facts. The
authors describe successful performances of new forms of interactive journalism
that incorporate gameplay. These performances involve an ongoing cultural struggle
against the immorality of playing with real-world events, deaths, and suffering. In
this struggle, entertainment and triviality give way to the design of relevant social
and political simulations that progressively include more investigative sources and
perspectives. Stories based on biased, personalized objectives, which guide the
gamer by targeting groups and individuals, turn into innovative newsgaming pro-
jects that ensure transparency and responsibility without losing the engaging and
emotional dimension of gameplay.
New journalistic narratives may reflect how journalistic institutions are producing
news in a more engaged way. In their analysis of “stamp story” formats, Navío-Navarro
and González-Díaz (Chapter 6) argue that this new way of disseminating the news
helps to reach and engage with, for instance, Gen Z and Millennial audiences immersed
in a digital culture, by maintaining journalism’s complexity and interpretation.
The use of big data has brought into journalism new ethical concerns in relation to
transparency and the quality and bias of the data sets being used. These polluting
effects of data available through digital technology, however, seem to have been par-
tially overcome by some new forms of collaborative investigative journalism. Drawing
on the metajournalistic discourses on the Panama Papers from different newspapers
that investigated the leaked documents of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca,
Cortés and Luengo (Chapter 7) observe that data journalists place themselves on an
unpolluted side of new investigative reporting, in which, far from activism, data serve
democratic-accountability journalism.
Other current ethical concerns specify the cultural performance of new journalistic
forms, practices, and processes within the area of algorithms, bots, and automatiza-
tion. Rojas Torrijos’s Chapter 8 focuses on the ethics of journalism generated by
machines. Barceló-Ugarte et al.’s Chapter 9 explores the specific incorporation of arti-

ficial intelligence (AI) into Spanish public television’s workflows, emphasizing the
ethical challenges posed by the different phases of newsgathering, documentation,
writing, publishing, archiving, and audience analysis. As Chapters 8 and 9 explain, AI
is changing the way in which news is created.
Most of these changes—to give an example, in May 2020, Microsoft was accused of
sacking journalists working at its MSN website and replacing them with AI software
(Waterson, The Guardian, May 30, 2020)—are interpreted as threats to journalism. Yet
layoffs of journalists by digital publishers are not the only reason for seeing automated
technology as foreshadowing journalism’s extinction. A few weeks after the layoffs at
Microsoft, MSN.com published a news story about the mixed-race pop star
Jade Thirlwall’s personal reflection on racism; the story was illustrated with the wrong
mixed-race member of the singer’s band, Little Mix. Thirlwall had been attending a
Black Lives Matter protest in London. The anecdote triggered widespread criticism
xiv Introduction
within the media of Microsoft’s employment of robots that cannot differentiate mixed-
race individuals. More significantly, it echoed current ethical debates on alleged racist
biases (and other types of human distortions) in AI software coding.
Rojas analysis of some of the best practices of AI journalism shows that a “semi-
automated” journalism, in which human reporters and robots work together, might
help to overcome criticism focused on software’s biases as well as another ethical chal-
lenges that AI poses to journalism. The selected initiatives show how algorithms and
bots are used by leading journalistic organizations to broaden news media coverage
and enhance high-quality reporting on public-interest issues, such as police informa-
tion on homicides (Los Angeles Times) or earthquake warnings (Los Angeles Times and
Oregon Public Broadcasting). These journalistic projects bring to the forefront of news
media innovation the combination of old and “new guiding principles” for a new digi-
tal era of journalism (McBride and Rosenstiel, 2014)—for example, verification, rigor,
depth, civil engagement, or community.
Taking the British Press Association’s automated news service RADAR
(Reporters and Data Robots) as an example, Rojas Torrijos (Chapter 8) highlights
the community value of algorithmic journalism, which is currently meeting “the
increasing demand for fact-based news for local communities” by delivering data-
driven localized versions of stories to the UK’s local newsrooms (PA Media Group,
2018). Likewise, in other countries around the world, semi-automated news is
filling the gap left by the disappearance of local reporting, and consequently it is
contributing to building a sense of community. The combining of speed and veri-
fication, as well as of reporting and investigation, and the providing of both public
interest news and community-driven stories are, among other professional and
civil values, the basis of journalism innovation achieved through AI. New semi-
automated journalistic practices mirror the way in which journalism is, to quote
Rojas Torrijos, “acquiring a new vision that can cope with change so as to make
professional ethics the guiding thread that anchors and stimulates innovation”
(Rojas Torrijos, Chapter 8).
This book ends with a section devoted to the public. Contributions to this section
revisit core ethical debates on big data (Cancela-Kieffer, Chapter 10), the personaliza-
tion of news (Pedrero-Esteban and Gas-Gozalbo, Chapter 11), transparency
(Christofoletti, Chapter 12), and verification (Espíritusanto and Dinant, Chapter, 13),
posed by the previous chapters, to reflect on journalism’s mission to inform the public
in times of post-truth, distrust of institutions, echo chambers, big tech, and social and
political shocks.
Christofoletti’s Chapter 12 questions transparency to rethink journalism’s profes-
sional culture. When promoting transparency, does journalism itself become more
open and contextualize its own products, practices, and modus operandi? For
Christofoletti, transparency in journalism “is not an end in itself, but a path” to replace
arrogance with humility, narcissism with dialog, and to create and develop newsrooms
that are more publicly exposed and more willing to review procedures. The author
explores new civil and journalistic initiatives based on this new culture of transpar-
ency that are helping journalism to implement new trust-building strategies. By the
same token, Espíritusanto and Dinant (Chapter 13) use verification and the question
of how people can ascertain the truthfulness of a news story to explore innovative
technological tools to empower citizens to fight against misinformation.
References xv
In Chapter 10, Cancela-Kieffer argues that the only way for journalism to navigate a
disrupted data-driven society is to fully embrace its core mission: “safeguarding ‘the
people’s right to know.’” She advocates for creativity and for a “radical collaborative
journalism” involving other disciplines—for example, mathematics and coding. She
appeals to a journalistic culture of objectivity (the separation of facts from opinion)
and self-criticism to combat subjectivity and self-defensiveness. Cancela-Kieffer
argues that technology allows journalists to bring “personalized experiences” into peo-
ple’s lives. “Small data,” a simpler and more local form of data journalism, she observes,
has demonstrated the significant contribution that the “granularity” of data (detailed
demographic maps of neighborhoods, crime statistics, sensors, etc.) can make to
“uncover disparities and inequalities.”
When journalists attempt to stand on the side of their public by choosing, preparing,
and telling stories in a way that helps the public to be informed participants in demo-
cratic society, the ethics of news innovation become a real challenge. Too often media
scholars offer only more reasons to despair. Overall, the reader will find grounds for
optimism in these pages. This positive spirit was what inspired this collective book
project.
Some of the texts in this book were first drafted for the IAMCR preconference “News
Media Innovation Ethics: Activating Human and Civil Rights Through Core
Professional Values,” held at Carlos III University (Madrid, July 6, 2019). An enriching
dialog between participants (including scholars and practitioners specializing in news
media innovation) and organizers (the editors of this book) started before the confer-
ence and kept going during and after it. Our book reflects this continuous conversa-
tion as well as the further engagement with each contributor that was undertaken by
the editors to unify the various texts around the aim, themes, and scope of the book.
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1
Journalism, Ethics, and Innovation in Times of Digital

Turbulence
3
An Inquiry into the Ethics of Innovation in Digital

Journalism
José Alberto García-Avilés
Universidad Miguel Hernández
An Ethical Perspective on Journalism Innovation
Research into the evolution of journalism ethics from the perspective of innovation
offers wonderful insights. Throughout the past decades, journalists have embraced the
innovations implemented in many newsrooms and, at the same time, they have met
the ethical challenges brought about by these innovations. In this process, we could
establish a pattern. Initially, journalists tend to regard the new practices as a challenge
to the established standards, that is, as something alien to the shared ethical guidelines
and therefore, they tend to believe these new practices should be questioned on ethical
grounds. This attitude often translated into a veiled rejection of those innovations that
at first sight seemed to collide with the traditional professional practices. However, as
the innovations gradually take hold in the newsrooms and the journalists accept them,
ethical standards are adapted accordingly to this new reality.
In the digital media ecosystem, the boundaries between producers, audiences, con-
tent, technology, and business tend to fade away as the platforms and algorithms
increasingly gather and distribute information through multiple channels, with a mas-
sive offering of news and entertainment that is seamlessly integrated into people’s
lives (Ruotsalainen and Heinonen, 2015). Traditional sources of income based on
advertising show symptoms of fatigue, and the competition between legacy media and
digital pure players increases, as the business strategies that worked for decades have
become obsolete (Küng, 2017).

After several stages of adaptation and integration into this digital ecosystem, the
media are living up to constant change. However, what is new is not change itself but
the pace and the degree of change in journalism: a constant and deep transformation
accelerated by the simultaneous impact of different technologies (virtual reality, arti-
ficial intelligence, blockchain, voice, data mining, etc.) in the gathering, production,
distribution, and commercialization of content. In addition, technological companies
have burst into force, competing with the news outlets for users’ attention. These pow-
erful players (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) monopolize a large percentage
of advertising investment, as well as many successful live streaming platforms (Netflix,
HBO, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Spotify, etc.).
In this complex scenario, aggravated by the worldwide crisis of COVID-19, the
media have less control over how and where their contents are consumed, while
News Media Innovation Reconsidered: Ethics and Values in a Creative Reconstruction of Journalism,
First Edition. Edited by María Luengo and Susana Herrera-Damas.
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
4 1 An Inquiry into the Ethics of Innovation in Digital Journalism
their relationship with audiences is weakened by a more interactive, horizontal,

and collaborative communication. On the other hand, digital-only media have
been able to fully understand the mobile, social, and global ecosystem and, what is
more important, they have rapidly adapted to the consumption habits of hyper-
connected users. Therefore, when facing disruptive competition, legacy media
companies need to focus their strategies on sustainability, market penetration, and
innovation.
In this context, media innovation has been invoked as a “mantra,” which offers a
solution to the complex industry problems. However, innovation advocates often lack
a clear conceptual background about how innovations are differentiated from change,
when exactly is something considered to be innovative, and at what level of analysis
(individual, organizational, product, or process) does innovation lie (Prenger and
Deuze, 2017). As both authors argue (p. 235), “epistemological challenges further
amplify these wide-ranging questions, as innovation is invariably a moving object,
raising the issue of how to adequately study something so dynamic.”
Any kind of innovative journalism should also be an ethical one. Without the essen-
tial component of ethics, no journalism is capable of innovating because the very pro-
fessional activity of reporting itself is based on the commitment to the truth.
Accordingly, journalistic ethics and quality are synonymous terms since all quality
journalism is necessarily ethical. In Tony Harcup’s words, “ethical journalism is cru-
cial for the health and well-being of a society” (2006, p. 144).
Journalism ethics is the result of multiple and complementary forces. Ethical rea-
soning is a unique and indivisible reality, which is individually, institutionally, and
culturally based. Professional ethics cannot be isolated from individual or social
ethics. When news organizations face ethical quandaries, they often implement
regulations, norms, and codes that soon tend to become obsolete (Whitehouse,
2010).
We can distinguish three problems when making ethical decisions in journalism:
(a) Technological determinism: When focusing on the role of technology, we can

easily exaggerate the influence technology as the driving force of media inno-
vation and overlook the impact that emerging journalistic practices have on the
development of innovative technologies. Technology plays a role in facilitat-
ing change, but overall, we do not find sufficient evidence to conclude that it
induces disruption in journalistic activity. Technologies must also be balanced
with prevailing standards that have guided the journalistic field, for these stan-
dards play a role in how journalists conceive of and perform their social roles
(Singer, 2003).
(b) What we might call “normative apriorism:” That is, to regard ethics just as
the result of the application of a series of norms embodied in codes and reg-
ulations. Ethical guidelines often become an excuse for ineffectiveness and
reflects managements’ short sightedness when facing the challenges of making
the right decisions. A focus on prescriptive ethics tends to ignore that there are
competing views on how to address moral questions within the context of eth-
ical reasoning (von der Pfordten, 2012). Hence, an ethical examination should
focus on the correlation of moral principles, rather than on the single norms
and codes.
An Ethical Perspective on Journalism Innovation 5
(c) Relativism: There are no universal or absolute ethical principles, so that

performance depends on the conditions in production, social, cultural, political
factors, etc., as well as the personal approach of everyone. Since this view con-
siders that ethics is purely subjective, based on individual interpretations, any
decision can be ethically correct if one justifies it according to their own beliefs.
My proposal about the ethics of journalistic innovation relies on three essential aspects
that shape professional decision-making: the ethics of the ends, the ethics of the pro-
cedures, and the ethics of the values, following insights from scholars such as Friend
and Singer (2007), von der Pfordten (2012), Ward (2018), and Ward and Wasserman
(2010), among others.
The ethics of the ends are based on the question: Why do I do this?—that is, what do
I intend to achieve with this project, product, or service? It could be a matter of inves-
tigating an issue, exposing corruption, expanding knowledge, acting in a responsible
manner, or being accountable to society. Ethical goals could be related to the right to
information, formulated in article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. The ends also relate to freedom of expression, the right to privacy and
honor, professional secrecy, and public service, and they deal with ethical problems
such as sensationalism, misinformation, and data manipulation (Suárez-Villegas and
Cruz-Álvarez, 2016a, p. 7).
Procedural ethics focus on the question: How do I do it? What processes do I follow
to carry it out? The ethics of the procedures raise the constant and recurring question
of whether the end justifies or not the means that are used (von der Pfordten, 2012).
Journalists’ practices include verification processes, collaboration with third parties,
confidentiality with sources, digital image manipulation, etc., which demand trans-
parency and accountability.
The ethics of values, ultimately, raises the question: What principles guide my work?
The list of values is very broad: truth, respect, trust, credibility, justice, accuracy, equa-
nimity, solidarity, dignity, honesty, professionalism, impartiality, etc. According to the
work of Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001, p. 24), based on interviews with hundreds of
journalists in the United States, these principles should rule in the profession:
Seeking the truth; loyalty with citizens; a verification discipline; independence

in regard to those who are informed; exercise control of power; become a public
forum for criticism and commentary; offer suggestive and relevant information,
as well as comprehensive and proportionate; and respect the individual con-
science of the professional.
How can we evaluate the ethical consequences of innovations? Moreover, how can media
ethics help us in this task? The report “Good and bad innovation: what kind of theory and
practice do we need to distinguish them?” by Geoff Mulgan (2016) deals with the ambiva-
lence of innovations. For example, the use of surveillance technologies to increase pro-
ductivity and safety in the workplace also can generate a high level of stress in the
workforce, as well as limitations to their privacy. Examples of negative innovations, such
as concentration camps for mass extermination, can be extreme but most innovations
have both positive and negative consequences. We can better address this ambivalence if
we define the concept of innovation in journalism and its practical implications.
Defining Journalism Innovation
Scholars are paying a growing attention to the culture of innovation in news organiza-
tions (Dal Zotto and van Kranenburg, 2008; Küng, 2013; Sádaba, García-Avilés, and
Martínez-Costa, 2016). However, the literature on media innovation tends to focus on
adoption, implementation, and diffusion of products and technologies, with little
emphasis on the design, development, and management stages of innovation (Dogruel,
2014). Research has largely ignored the question of how journalists learn in the news-
room and how they implement innovation (Porcu, 2017). The role of newsroom man-
agers in innovation strategies is usually invisible and empirical measurements of
in-house innovation within the media are scarce (Bleyen et al., 2014). As Weiss and
Domingo (2010, p. 1158) put it, a deeper theoretical framework is needed regarding
“the actors, dynamics and factors involved in the processes, theories that acknowledge
the changing nature of journalism.”
Innovation “combines discovering an opportunity, blueprinting an idea to seize that
opportunity, and implementing that idea to achieve results” (Anthony, 2012, p. 17).
Translated to the media industry, this means that innovation must involve something
more than the repetitive cycle of everyday news production. For this study, we define
journalism innovation as:
the capacity to react to changes in products, processes and services using crea-
tive skills that allow a problem or need to be identified, and to be solved through
a solution that results in the introduction of something new that adds value to
customers and to the media organization.
(García-Avilés et al., 2018, p. 29)
This definition, provided by a group of researchers from the Miguel Hernández

University, was applied to the design of the Journalistic Innovation Index of Spanish
media (De-Lara-González et al., 2015). We further analyzed how many newsrooms
disseminate these innovations and what factors accelerate or slow their implementa-
tion (García-Avilés et al., 2019), also in particular case studies such as digital-only
news outlet El Confidencial and the Spanish public broadcaster RTVE innovation lab
(Zaragoza-Fuster and García-Avilés, 2020).
The brakes on innovation are mostly cultural, rooted in the newsroom as systemic
practices and preferred work patterns (Ess, 2013). There is no successful single recipe
of media transformation and adaptation to the new realities. Going from products to
services, from hardware to software, and from audience to users, includes changing
mindsets, unlearning the trade and experimenting with bold ideas (Storsul and
Krumsvik, 2013). The individual mindset determines what ideas lead to innovation in
the newsroom: “Inventions within a variety of newsroom structures support the gen-
eral truth that innovation and change usually start with the ideas of individual crea-
tors” (Gynnild, 2014, p. 720). Experimentation produces mixed results on what works
or could work when it comes to creating commercially successful services and
products.
A holistic perspective on innovation must include the pre-phase of the innovation
process, considering for example goal setting, customer research, or observation of
competitors (Dal Zotto and van Kranenburg, 2008). Taking a step further, Bleyen et al.
Innovations and Journalism Ethics: 2000–2020 7
(2014, p. 48) established a typology of media innovations based on five categories: busi-
ness model, production and distribution, media consumption, inner form, and core
product. The first three categories are related to innovation processes, and the latter
two highlight product innovations, such as a groundbreaking television news program
or an original podcast.
Therefore, media innovation encompasses complex processes that involve people’s
motivations, strategy, structure, administrative processes, and systems that could cre-
ate value for the organization, because the characteristics of the media sector differ
from those of other industries (Küng, 2017). Specific features include the perishable
commodity of the news product, creative employees, intricate organizational struc-
tures, and a public service role, among others. As Sádaba, García-Avilés, and Martínez-
Costa (2016) argue, strategic innovation leads to better services and increased
responsiveness to users and, therefore, an increase in sales, subscriptions, or audi-
ences. In Pavlik’s words (2013, p. 190), “innovation is the key to the viability of news
media in the digital age.”
Innovation does not only relate to products and technologies but also relate to the
reinvention of social processes and the creation of services that improve people’s lives
(Fagerberg, Mowery, and Nelson, 2005). Innovating consists of providing a novel solu-
tion for a problem that is more effective, efficient, or sustainable than existing solu-
tions. Innovation should not be reduced to technology. In fact, non-technological
aspects such as storytelling, creativity, commercialization, or interaction with audi-
ences are important areas of journalism innovation. If innovations emerge only through
the reaction to the threats from the instability of the news market, technological disrup-
tion, and the competitive commercial environment, the change could be slow and
erratic. However, when management takes the lead, innovations increase in number
and quality. Incorporating new practices and experimenting with different ideas is
essential for innovation to flourish in media companies (García-Avilés et al., 2019).
We argue for a holistic approach to research in this field by considering many aspects
that influence journalism innovation processes, being aware of the conflicting ten-
sions that emerge.
Innovations and Journalism Ethics: 2000–2020

In 2000, I began to explore the consequences of the digitalization of television news-

rooms in the work of broadcast journalists. Between 2007 and 2014, I studied the
convergence models implemented in several European media outlets. Since 2014, I
research journalistic innovation, to find out where and how it occurs and what kinds
of changes it brings about (De-Lara-González et al., 2015; García-Avilés et al., 2018).
According to our findings in the Spanish market, most innovations take place in the
areas of product and service, content distribution, and interaction with the audience.
Most innovative initiatives were “incremental”: smaller advances or gradual
improvements of existing products or services. A few “radical” innovations occurred,
mostly within online-only sites. The number of technology-related innovations out-
weighed the non-technological, leading us to conclude that “while innovation is not
necessarily associated with technology, it is an important driver of change” (García-
Avilés et al., 2018, p. 38).
Taking one further step, we analyzed how media companies implemented innova-
tions in four main areas: production, distribution, organization, and commercialization
(García-Avilés et al., 2019). Each area has its own goal within the company: launching
innovative products, improving the distribution channels, innovating in the work
structure and newsroom organization, and incorporating new sources of revenue.
Within different historical media contexts, a combination of internal and external
forces helped bring about change and resulted in the innovation of digital journalism.
A recurring theme in my conversations with journalists over the years has been the
reaction to change. I have often discovered an attitude of distrust by most profession-
als. Before each wave of changes, many journalists invoked news quality and ethical
principles to justify their willingness to stay out of innovation, because they regarded
innovations as a problem, something that demanded a lot of time and work, or that
could threaten their job stability. It is interesting to find out that journalism has tradi-
tionally been a profession reluctant to embrace change.
In this study, necessarily short due to space limitations, I present in chronological
order some the ethical implications derived from the adoption of innovations in digital
journalism.
The Emergence of Journalism in the Internet

Between 1995 and 2000, thousands of newspapers and television channels worldwide
launched their websites and began generating content to feed them. The initial con-
cerns of journalists with the advent of the Internet focused on privacy, falsehood, and
loss of autonomy (Deuze and Yeshua, 2001). The new medium was quickly associated
with a high potential for spreading falsehoods involuntarily or deliberately. It was dif-
ficult to differentiate the truth in the Internet content, since anyone could easily repli-
cate the credibility indicators without taking any responsibility. Many journalists
feared that instant dissemination of information would undermine the processes of
journalistic verification that protects them against errors and lies, so that they would
be accountable for their ethical standards (Eberwein, Fengler, and Karmasin, 2019).
The value of professional autonomy also went into crisis. Journalists defended their
role as “independent gatekeepers,” based on their ability to make their own judgments
about what news is and, therefore, reinforce their public interest service (Suárez-
Villegas and Cruz-Álvarez, 2016a). The argument was that a careful selection of news
by professional gatekeepers would make it easier for citizens to receive truthful and
relevant information on the issues that are supposed to be essential for democratic
functioning: politics, international relations, economics, the performance of institu-
tions and social agents, etc. However, from the beginning, the ability of users to select
and access content directly was evident; journalists were losing their monopoly as pro-
viders of information in society, which caused them considerable frustration
(Boczkowski, 2004).
Convergence and Multimedia Content

There were two main trends at the beginning of the new millennium: experimenting
with convergence by combining news, products, and processes in separate newsrooms
of print, television, and online media; and producing multimedia content for several
outlets (Singer, 2006). Convergence soon became a buzzword that shook most news-
rooms: editors asked newspaper reporters to record videos at the scene or to make
their own summaries of the news for radio or television. Managers commissioned
broadcast journalists to write articles for the newspaper and to promote the stories
included in the print media. Thus, journalism became “convergent” and journalists
more versatile, as they had to generate content simultaneously for several platforms
(García-Avilés, Meier, and Kaltenbrunner, 2016).
Regarding the production of multimedia content, there was a lot of resistance by
journalists. Some of them admitted that this was due to fear of the unknown. However,
others justified their fear on ethical grounds, emphasizing the detrimental effects on
the news quality, the limited time available to produce more pieces, and the increasing
pressure to develop pieces for radio, website, print, and/or television. Work overload
often reduced journalistic quality and increased tensions among staff in multimedia
newsrooms (Carvajal and García-Avilés, 2008).
Blogs and Bloggers

As the self-publishing platforms were easier to use, horizontal communication chan-
nels proliferated, and all kinds of blogs rapidly incorporated the voice of citizens into
journalism. Bloggers claimed the professional territory of journalists: selecting events
and topics for the audience and commenting on relevant issues through content aggre-
gation. This led to further tensions between the possibilities afforded by innovations in
news production and the normalizing force of established newsroom routines
(Mitchelstein, Boczkowski, and Wagner, 2017). Professionals quickly drew the frontier
between journalists who valued equity, accuracy, balance, and other ethical criteria,
and content providers with their opinion blogs, which lacked a professional status
(Singer, 2003).
One of the ways in which journalists differed from bloggers was their independence,
based on neutrality, impartiality, or objectivity. Bloggers, on the other hand, published
their personal views and raised ethical problems. “It is not a fair, impartial or objective
journalism, nor does it intend to be. As they do not adhere to journalistic norms, blog-
gers do not have to be objective or politically correct,” protested one newspaper editor
(Carlson, 2007, p. 268). The success of bloggers posed the question of which character-
istics defined a digital journalist (Hayes, Singer, and Ceppos, 2007).

An ethical problem that journalists frequently criticized was that the material pub-
lished on blogs was not verified and, therefore, was not reliable. An editor summed up
this concern: “If something appears in The Washington Post or The New York Times, I
know it has been reviewed by someone whose profession requires them to have it
checked. With a blog, you have no idea. Bloggers don’t know how to verify the facts.
Calling a blogger a journalist is like calling a photographer anybody who takes a snap-
shot” (Carlson, 2007, p. 274).
Criticisms related to impartiality and verification pointed to the emergence of a
norm that was especially suitable for digital media: transparency. It was important for
the disclosure of a blogger’s background, their personal interests and financial ties.
Although the norms of objectivity and balance made it difficult for some journalists to
adhere to blogging, blogs became an acceptable innovation by 2012 (Mitchelstein,
Boczkowski, and Wagner, 2017).
User-Generated Content
Journalists had to face the consequences of user-generated content (UGC) and its
influence on their professional routines. The spread of UGC implied that journalists
could lose control over what they published, even as authors of the news and it soon
threatened editorial values and news standards (Paulussen and Ugille, 2008). Ethical
concerns about UGC focused on three aspects: accuracy, credibility, and civility. It
increased the difficulty of verifying the information and checking whether something
was true or were mere rumors or lies spread by people over whom journalists had no
control. News professionals saw that their credibility was in the spotlight. Some experts
criticized that users, unlike journalists, did not feel responsible for what they pub-
lished and did not report accurately (Noguera Vivo, 2012).
Legal concerns about the use of UGC in the media, such as copyright ownership,
were mixed with ethical ones. However, making sure that the material external to the
newsroom was “legally safe to publish” consumed considerable time and energy in
most newsrooms. According to one British editor, comments are “subject to lawsuits
for defamation, slander, libel, or the prohibition of spreading the name of the victim of
a violation: reading these things and supervising them involves tons of work” (Singer,
2003). In this way, journalists struggled to ethically accommodate the opportunities
for dialog presented by UGC, while safeguarding their credibility and sense of respon-
sibility. News professionals showed concerns about the value of user contributions, as
well as the consequences of uncivil comments on personal and institutional credibility
(Singer and Ashman, 2009, p. 18).
However, criticism of the use of UGC in the newsrooms was not universal; many
journalists expressed support for user contributions (video, pictures, news tips, etc.),
although warned about the actual costs versus the ideal benefits. As Singer (2003)
points out, most media outlets established an ethical framework about the problems
raised by this innovation and many newsrooms drew a line not to be trespassed.
Social Media
Platforms such as Twitter are essentially microblogs, but unlike users’ comments and
other UGC that are produced after the journalist has published the story, social media
material is a potential journalistic source (Noguera Vivo, 2012). Journalists initially
disdained the potential of social media in their job because instant information com-
bined mass distribution with an easy publishing process and the absence of editorial
supervision. “A toy for boring celebrities and high school girls” is how a columnist
described Twitter in 2009 (Hermida, 2012, p. 168).
Social media challenged traditional journalistic values such as impartiality and
accuracy. According to one study, a high percentage of tweets by journalists them-
selves contained at least some expression of opinion and used them to share infor-
mation about their work and their personal lives (Suárez-Villegas and Cruz-Álvarez,
2016b). Therefore, prestigious news outlets such as The New York Times, the BBC,
and The Washington Post, issued guidelines about the use of social media by their
employees. New ethical concerns arose as misinformation and fake news became
a problem. Newsrooms used with caution the available content in Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram, and most journalists adopted social media more
quickly and with fewer complaints than the previous innovations (Suárez-Villegas
and Cruz-Álvarez, 2016b).
Citizens and social media users were excluded from meaningful participation in the
media ethics discourse. However, as Ward and Wasserman (2010) argued, new tech-
nologies and platforms were democratizing media globally and were rendering jour-
nalistic practices more flexible and fluid, facilitating an “open media ethics.”
Journalistic Production for the Internet

Digital journalism is instantaneous. Journalists publish news content as it happens, in
a 7/24 cycle, with short time to check it. Journalism tends to be increasingly opinion-
ated because the news content is presented from the “ideological trench,” and is becom-
ing more entertaining, including a mix of spectacle, sensationalism, and clickbait
elements. In addition, news content is gathered and distributed in social media, where
sources, journalists, media consumers, and citizens participate almost at the same level.
Journalism innovations facilitated the production of content in multiple formats,
contributed to forge a more attractive and accessible journalism for a greater number
of people and, at the same time, broadened the focus of the ethical issues raised in the
newsrooms. Table 1.1 summarizes some ethical issues debated by journalists between
2010 and 2015.
Table 1.1 Ethical issues for news professionals who work in digital newsrooms.
Production stages Ethical issues
Access-observation ●● Verification of what is published on social media.

●● Check the information with two or more sources.
●● Journalists should not publish personal opinions in social
media.
●● Fight against misinformation and lies.
Selection-filtering ●● Verify the accuracy of UGC.
●● Label external content as such.
●● Pressure to promote topics that increase online traffic.
Transparency in accessing news sources.
●●
Processing-editing ●● Rejection of excessive multiskilling.

●● Convergence as a costsaving operation.
●● Low quality in production of multimedia content.
●● Separation between advertising and editorial.
Distribution ●● Value the journalist’s byline.
●● Obsession to beat the competition.
●● Immediacy of live coverage.
●● Use of clickbait.
Interpretation ●● Value of input from the users.
●● Moderation of comments and insults.
●● Correction of errors.
●● Transparency.
Source: Author
Thus, the ethics of traditional journalism, with values based on the accuracy, rigor,
precision, and verification, was gradually extended to digital journalism, where
collaboration with users, transparency, and immediacy predominate (Suárez-Villegas
and Cruz-Álvarez, 2016a).
Immersive Journalism
Immersive journalism tells stories through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality
(AR), or 360-degree video and allows the user to become part of the story through a
great variety of experiences. These formats raise important ethical issues (Pérez-Seijo
and López-García, 2019), such as:
●● To what extent producers can modify the recorded content, altering elements of
reality or making up scenes, so that the story works better.
●● Users’ exposure to content of a sensitive nature, including the use of violence,
emotional abuse, obscene language, or explicit sex scenes.
●● The manipulation of emotions that influence the users and arouse feelings of
adherence or rejection to ideas or institutions.
●● Business interests of companies that produce VR content or finance immersive
experiences.
VR environments could become incubators for manipulation and propaganda, and
for this reason, being unaware of the journalist orchestrating highly persuasive con-
tent could undermine the credibility of VR narratives (Kool, 2016). The use of VR
technology raises complex ethical questions that require careful consideration by
the producers of these formats to preserve journalistic standards (Pérez-Seijo and
López-García, 2019).
Journalism and Big Data

Big Data refers to the ability to process large amounts of information, analyze it, and
draw relevant conclusions. Big Data raises their own ethical dilemmas about user
privacy, information security, and data manipulation, among other issues, when
journalists decide how to incorporate the use of massive data into their stories.
The process of making public a large volume of data helps rethink their ethical
quandaries, as many journalists have embraced such openness as a professional norm,
facilitating public scrutiny of complete data sets and open programming code (Lewis,
2015). This trend can improve some journalistic processes, as Lewis (2015) states, by
integrating principles such as transparency and participation in newsrooms.
The use of massive data raises ethical dilemmas associated with the collection,
analysis, and dissemination of such information. Just because a content is publicly
accessible does not mean that the journalist had permission to make it public for
everyone (Lewis and Westlund, 2015). Problems often arise with public data provided
by governments and institutions or gathered through techniques such as crowdsourcing
or data scraping. Such problems can go unnoticed, either by the size of the data involved
or by its public dissemination, so journalists must weigh the benefits of publishing
open data against the risk of personal injury, especially when private information can
be easily shared (Lewis and Westlund, 2015).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
"Yes," Kimmensen said, nodding slowly. "You're right—he's
dangerous." But Kimmensen was less ready to let his emotions carry
him away. The days of political killings were over—finished forever.
"But I think we can trust the society to pull his teeth."
Kimmensen hunched forward in thought. "We'll talk about it tomorrow,
at work. Our personal feelings are unimportant, compared to the
steps we have to take as League officers."
That closed the matter for tonight, as he'd hoped it would. He still
hoped that somehow tonight's purpose could be salvaged.
In that, he was disappointed. It was an awkward, forced meal, with

the three of them silent and pretending nothing had happened,
denying the existence of another human being. They were three
people attempting to live in a sharply restricted private universe, their
conversation limited to comments on the food. At the end of the
evening, all their nerves were screaming. Susanne's face was
pinched and drawn together, her temples white. When Kimmensen
blotted his lips, he found fresh blood on the napkin.
Jem stood up awkwardly. "Well ... thank you very much for inviting
me, Joe." He looked toward Susanne and hesitated. "It was a
delicious meal, Sue. Thank you."
"You're welcome."
"Well ... I'd better be getting home...."
Kimmensen nodded, terribly disappointed. He'd planned to let
Susanne fly Jem home.
"Take the plane, Jem," he said finally. "You can pick me up in the
morning."
"All right. Thank you.... Good night, Sue."
"Good night."
"Joe."
"Good night, Jem." He wanted to somehow restore Bendix's spirits.
"We'll have a long talk about that other business in the morning," he
reminded him.
"Yes, sir." It did seem to raise his chin a little.
After Jem had left, Kimmensen turned slowly toward Susanne. She
sat quietly, her eyes on her empty coffee cup.
Waiting, Kimmensen thought.
She knew, of course, that she'd hurt him badly again. She expected
his anger. Well, how could he help but be angry? Hadn't any of the
things he'd told her ever made any impression on her?
"Susanne."
She raised her head and he saw the stubborn, angry set to her
mouth. "Father, please don't lecture me again." Every word was low,
tight, and controlled.
Kimmensen clenched his hands. He'd never been able to understand
this kind of defiance. Where did she get that terribly misplaced
hardness in her fiber? What made her so unwilling to listen when
someone older and wiser tried to teach her?
If I didn't love her, he thought, this wouldn't matter to me. But in spite
of everything, I do love her. So I go on, every day, trying to make her
see.
"I can't understand you," he said. "What makes you act this way?
Where did it come from? You're nothing like your mother,"—though,
just perhaps, even if the thought twisted his heart, she was—"and
you're nothing like me."
"I am," she said in a low voice, looking down again. "I'm exactly like
you."
When she spoke nonsense like that, it annoyed him more than
anything else could have. And where anger could be kept in check,
annoyance could not.
"Listen to me," he said.
"Don't lecture me again."
"Susanne! You will keep quiet and listen. Do you realize what you're
doing, flirting with a man like Messerschmidt? Do you realize—has
anything I've told you ever made an impression on you?—do you
realize that except for an accident in time, that man could be one of
the butchers who killed your mother?"
"Father, I've heard you say these things before. We've all heard you
say them."
Now he'd begun, it was no longer any use not to go on. "Do you
realize they oppressed and murdered and shipped to labor camps all
the people I loved, all the people who were worthwhile in the world,
until we rose up and wiped them out?" His hands folded down whitely
on the arms of his chair. "Where are your grandparents buried? Do
you know? Do I? Where is my brother? Where are my sisters?"
"I don't know. I never knew them."
"Listen—I was born in a world too terrible for you to believe. I was
born to cower. I was born to die in a filthy cell under a police station.
Do you know what a police station is, eh? Have I described one often
enough? Your mother was born to work from dawn to night, hauling
stones to repair the roads the army tanks had ruined. And if she
made a mistake—if she raised her head, if she talked about the
wrong things, if she thought the wrong thoughts—then she was born
to go to a labor camp and strip tree bark for the army's medicines
while she stood up to her waist in freezing water.
"I was born in a world where half a billion human beings lived for a
generation in worship—in worship—of a man. I was born in a world
where that one twisted man could tell a lie and send gigantic armies
charging into death, screaming that lie. I was born to huddle, to be a
cipher in a crowd, to be spied on, to be regulated, to be hammered to
meet the standard so the standard lie would fit me. I was born to be
nothing."
Slowly, Kimmensen's fingers uncurled. "But now I have freedom.
Stepan Dubrovic managed to find freedom for all of us. I remember
how the word spread—how it whispered all over the world, almost in
one night, it seemed. Take a wire—twist it, so. Take a vacuum tube—
the army has radios, there are stores the civil servants use, there are
old radios, hidden—make the weapon ... and you are free. And we
rose up, each man like an angel with a sword of fire.
"But if we thought Paradise would come overnight, we were wrong.
The armies did not dissolve of themselves. The Systems did not
break down.
"You take a child from the age of five; you teach it to love the State, to
revere the Leader; you inform it that it is the wave of the future, much
cleverer than the decadent past but not quite intelligent enough to
rule itself. You teach it that there must be specialists in government—
Experts in Economy, Directors of Internal Resources, Ministers of
Labor Utilization. What can you do with a child like that, by the time it
is sixteen? By the time it is marching down the road with a pack on its
back, with the Leader's song on its lips? With the song written so its
phrases correspond to the ideal breathing cycle for the average
superman marching into the Future at one hundred centimeters to the
pace?"
"Stop it, Father."
"You burn him down. How else can you change him? You burn him
down where he marches, you burn his Leaders, you burn the System,
you root out—everything!"
Kimmensen sighed. "And then you begin to be free." He looked
urgently at Susanne. "Now do you understand what Messerschmidt
is? If you can't trust my advice, can you at least understand that
much? Has what I've always told you finally made some impression?"
Susanne pushed her chair back. "No. I understood it the first time and
I saw how important it was. I still understood it the tenth time. But now
I've heard it a thousand times. I don't care what the world was like—I
don't care what you went through. I never saw it. You. You sit in your
office and write the same letters day after day, and you play with your
weapon, and you preach your social theory as though it was a
religion and you were its high priest—special, dedicated, above us all,
above the flesh. You tell me how to live my life. You try to arrange it to
fit your ideas. You even try to cram Jem Bendix down my throat.
"But I won't have you treating me that way. When Anse talks to me,
it's about him and me, not about people I never met. I have things I
want. I want Anse. I'm telling you and you can tell Bendix. And if you
don't stop trying to order me around, I'll move out. That's all."
Clutching his chair, not quite able to believe what he'd heard, knowing
that in a moment pain and anger would crush him down, Kimmensen
listened to her quick footsteps going away into her room.
CHAPTER IV
He was waiting out on the patio, in the bright cold of the morning,
when Jem Bendix brought the plane down and picked him up. Bendix
was pale this morning, and puffy-eyed, as though he'd been a long
time getting to sleep and still had not shaken himself completely
awake.
"Good morning, Joe," he said heavily as Kimmensen climbed in
beside him.
"Good morning, Jem." Kimmensen, too, had stayed awake a long
time. This morning, he had washed and dressed and drunk his coffee
with Susanne's bedroom door closed and silent, and then he had
come out on the patio to wait for Jem, not listening for sounds in the
house. "I'm—I'm very sorry for the way things turned out last night."
He left it at that. There was no point in telling Jem about Susanne's
hysterical outburst.
Jem shook his head as he lifted the plane into the air. "No, Joe. It
wasn't your fault. You couldn't help that."
"She's my daughter. I'm responsible for her."
Jem shrugged. "She's headstrong. Messerschmidt paid her some
attention, and he became a symbol of rebellion to her. She sees him
as someone who isn't bound by your way of life. He's a glamorous
figure. But she'll get over it. I spent a long time last night thinking
about it. You were right, Joe. At the moment, he's something new and
exciting. But he'll wear off. The society'll see through him, and so will
Susanne. All we have to do is wait."
Kimmensen brooded over the valleys far below, pale under the early
morning mist. "I'm not sure, Jem," he answered slowly. He had spent
hours last night in his chair, hunched over, not so much thinking as
steeping his mind in all the things that had happened so suddenly.
Finally, he had gotten up and gone into his bedroom, where he lay on
his bed until a plan of action slowly formed in his mind and he could,
at last, go to sleep.
"It's not the matter of Messerschmidt and Susanne," he explained
quickly. "I hope you understand that I'm speaking now as someone
responsible to all the families in this area, rather than as the head of
any particular one. What concerns me now is that Messerschmidt is
bound to have some sort of following among the immature. He's
come at a bad time. He's in a good position to exploit this business in
the Northwest."
And I'm going to die. Kimmensen had to pause before he went on.
"Yes, in time his bubble will burst. But it's a question of how long that
might take. Meanwhile, he is a focus of unrest. If nothing happens to
check him now, some people might decide he was right."
Bendix chewed his lower lip. "I see what you mean, Joe. It'll get
worse before it gets better. He'll attract more followers. And the ones
he has now will believe in him more than ever."
"Yes," Kimmensen said slowly, "that could easily happen."
They flew in silence for a few moments, the plane jouncing in the
bumpy air, and then as Bendix slowed the vanes and they began to
settle down into the valley where the office building was, Jem asked,
"Do you have anything in mind?"
Kimmensen nodded. "Yes. It's got to be shown that he doesn't have
the population behind him. His followers will be shocked to discover
how few of them there are. And the people wavering toward him will
realize how little he represents. I'm going to call for an immediate
election."
"Do you think that's the answer? Will he run against you?"
"If he refuses to run in an election, that's proof enough he knows he
couldn't possibly win. If he runs, he'll lose. It's the best possible move.
And, Jem ... there's another reason." Kimmensen had thought it all
out. And it seemed to him that he could resolve all his convergent
problems with this one move. He would stop Messerschmidt, he
would pass his work on to Jem, and—perhaps this was a trifle more
on his mind than he'd been willing to admit—once Messerschmidt
had been deflated, Susanne would be bound to see her tragic error,
and the three of them could settle down, and he could finish his life
quietly.
"Jem, I'm getting old."
Bendix's face turned paler. He licked his lips. "Joe—"
"No, Jem, we've got to face it. Don't try to be polite about it. No matter
how much you protest, the fact is I'm almost worn out, and I know it.
I'm going to resign."
Bendix's hands jerked on the control wheel.
Kimmensen pretended not to see it. For all his maturity, Jem was still
a young man. It was only natural that the thought of stepping up so
soon would be a great thrill to him. "I'll nominate you as my
successor, and I'll campaign for you. By winning the election, you'll
have stopped Messerschmidt, and then everything can go on the way
we've always planned." Yes, he thought as the plane bumped down
on the weathered plaza. That'll solve everything.
As Kimmensen stepped into his office, he saw Salmaggi sitting

beside the desk, waiting for him. The man's broad back was toward
him, and Kimmensen could not quite restrain the flicker of distaste
that always came at the thought of talking to him. Of all mornings, this
was a particularly bad one on which to listen to the man pour out his
hysterias.
"Good morning, Tullio," he said as he crossed to his desk.
Salmaggi turned quickly in his chair. "Good morning, Josef." He
jumped to his feet and pumped Kimmensen's hand. "How are you?"
His bright eyes darted quickly over Kimmensen's face.
"Well, thank you. And you?"
Salmaggi dropped back into his chair. "Worried, Josef. I've been
trying to see you about something very important."
"Yes, I know. I'm sorry I've been so busy."
"Yes. So I thought if you weren't too busy this morning, you might be
able to spare ten minutes."
Kimmensen glanced at him sharply. But Salmaggi's moon of a face
was completely clear of sarcasm or any other insinuation. There were
only the worried wrinkles over the bridge of his nose and at the
corners of his eyes. Kimmensen could not help thinking that Salmaggi
looked like a baby confronted by the insuperable problem of deciding
whether or not it wanted to go to the bathroom. "I've got a number of
important things to attend to this morning, Tullio."
"Ten minutes, Josef."
Kimmensen sighed. "All right." He settled himself patiently in his
chair.
"I was up in the northwest part of the area again on this last trip."
"Um-hmm." Kimmensen, sacrificing the ten minutes, busied himself
with thinking about Jem's reaction to his decision. Bendix had
seemed totally overwhelmed, not saying another word as they walked
from the plane into the office building.
"There's been another family burned out."
"So I understand, Tullio." Kimmensen smiled faintly to himself,
understanding how Jem must feel today. It had been something of the
same with himself when, just before the end of the fighting years, the
realization had slowly come to him that it would be he who would
have to take the responsibility of stabilizing this area.
"That makes seven in all, Josef. Seven in the past eighteen months."
"It takes time, Tullio. The country toward the northwest is quite
rugged. No regime was ever able to send its police up there with any
great success. They're individualistic people. It's only natural they'd
have an unusual number of feuds." Kimmensen glanced at his clock.
It was a great responsibility, he was thinking to himself. I remember
how confused everything was. How surprised we were to discover,
after the old regime was smashed, that many of us had been fighting
for utterly different things.
That had been the most important thing he'd had to learn; that almost
everyone was willing to fight and die to end the old regime, but that
once the revolution was won, there were a score of new regimes that
had waited, buried in the hearts of suppressed men, to flower out and
fill the vacuum. That was when men who had been his friends were
suddenly his enemies, and when men whose lives he had saved now
tried to burn him down. In many ways, that had been the very worst
period of the fighting years.
"Josef, have you gone up there recently?"
Kimmensen shook his head. "I've been very occupied here." His
responsibility was to all the families in the area, not to just those in
one small section. He could never do his work while dashing from
one corner of the area to another.
"Josef, you're not listening!" Kimmensen looked up and was shocked
to see that there were actually glints of frustrated moisture in the
corners of Salmaggi's eyes.
"Of course I'm listening, Tullio," he said gently.
Salmaggi shook his head angrily, like a man trying to reach his
objective in the midst of a thick fog. "Josef, if you don't do something,
Messerschmidt's going to take an army up into the Northwesters'
area. And I'm not sure he isn't right. I don't like him—but I'm not sure
he isn't right."
Kimmensen smiled. "Tullio, if that's what's on your mind, you can rest
easy. I am going to do something. This afternoon, I'm going to make a
general broadcast. I'm going to call an election. I'm resigning, and
Jem Bendix will run against Messerschmidt. That will be the end of
him."
Salmaggi looked at him. "Of who?"
"Of Messerschmidt, of course," Kimmensen answered in annoyance.
"Now if you'll excuse me, Tullio, I have to draft my statement."
That night, when he came home, he found Susanne waiting for him in
the living room. She looked at him peculiarly as he closed the panel
behind him.
"Hello, Father."
"Hello, Susanne." He had been hoping that the passage of a day
would dull her emotional state, and at least let the two of them speak
to each other like civilized people. But, looking at her, he saw how
tense her face was and how red the nervous blotches were in the
pale skin at the base of her neck.
What happened between us? he thought sadly. Where did it start? I
raised you alone from the time you were six months old. I stayed up
with you at night when your teeth came. I changed your diapers and
put powder on your little bottom, and when you were sick I woke up
every hour all night for weeks to give you your medicine. I held you
and gave you your bottles, and you were warm and soft, and when I
tickled you under the chin you laughed up at me. Why can't you smile
with me now? Why do you do what you do to me?
"I heard your broadcast, of course," she said tightly.
"I thought you would."
"Just remember something, Father."
"What, Susanne?"
"There are a lot of us old enough to vote, this time."
CHAPTER V
Kimmensen shifted in his chair, blinking in the sunshine of the plaza.
Messerschmidt sat a few feet away, looking up over the heads of the
live audience at the mountains. The crowd was waiting patiently and
quietly. It was the quiet that unsettled him a little bit. He hadn't said
anything to Jem, but he'd half expected some kind of demonstration
against Messerschmidt.
Still, this was only a fraction of the League membership. There were
cameras flying at each corner of the platform, and the bulk of the
electorate were watching from their homes. There was no telling what
their reaction was, but Kimmensen, on thinking it over, decided that
the older, more settled proportion of the League—the people in the
comfort of their homes, enjoying the products of their own free labor
—would be as outraged at this man as he was.
He turned his head back over his shoulder and looked at Jem.
"We'll be starting in a moment. How do you feel?"
Jem's smile was a dry-lipped grimace. "A little nervous. How about
you, Joe?"
Kimmensen smiled back at him. "This is an old story to me, Jem.
Besides, I'm not running." He clasped his hands in his lap and faced
front again, forcing his fingers to keep still.
The surprisingly heavy crowd here in the plaza was all young people.
In a moment, the light flashed on above the microphone, and
Kimmensen stood up and crossed the platform. There was a good
amount of applause from the crowd, and Kimmensen smiled down at
them. Then he lifted his eyes to the camera that had flown into
position in front of and above him.
"Fellow citizens," he began, "as you know, I'm not running in this
election." There was silence from the crowd. He'd half expected some
sort of demonstration of disappointment—at least a perfunctory one.
There was none. Well, he'd about conceded this crowd of youngsters
to Messerschmidt. It was the people at home who mattered.
"I'm here to introduce the candidate I think should be our next League
President—Secretary Jem Bendix."
This time the crowd reacted. As Jem got up and bowed, and the other
cameras focussed on him, there was a stir in the plaza, and one
young voice broke in: "Why introduce him? Everybody knows him."
"Sure," somebody else replied. "He's a nice guy."
Messerschmidt sat quietly in his chair, his eyes still on the mountains.
He made a spare figure in his dark clothes, with his pale face under
the shock of black hair.
Kimmensen started to go on as Jem sat down. But then, timed
precisely for the second when he was firmly back in his chair, the
voice that had shouted the first time added: "But who wants him for
President?"
A chorus of laughter exploded out of the crowd. Kimmensen felt his
stomach turn icy. That had been pre-arranged. Messerschmidt had
the crowd packed. He'd have to make the greatest possible effort to
offset this. He began speaking again, ignoring the outburst.
"We're here today to decide whom we want for our next president.
But in a greater sense, we are here to decide whether we shall keep
our freedom or whether we shall fall back into a tyranny as odious as
any, as evil as any that crushed us to the ground for so long."
As he spoke, the crowd quieted. He made an impressive appearance
on a platform, he knew. This was an old story to him, and now he
made use of all the experience gathered through the years.
"We are here to decide our future. This is not just an ordinary
election. We are here to decide whether we are going to remain as
we are, of whether we are going to sink back into the bloody past."
As always, he felt the warmth of expressing himself—of re-affirming
the principles by which he lived. "We are here to choose between a
life of peace and harmony, a life in which no man is oppressed in any
way by any other, a life of fellowship, a life of peaceful trade, a life of
shared talents and ideals—or a life of rigid organization, of slavery to
a high-sounding phrase and a remorseless system of government
that fits its subjects to itself rather than pattern itself to meet their
greatest good."
He spoke to them of freedom—of what life had been like before they
were born, of how bitter the struggle had been, and of how Freemen
ought to live.
They followed every word attentively, and when he finished he sat
down to applause.
He sat back in his chair. Jem, behind him, whispered:
"Joe, that was wonderful! I've never heard it better said. Joe, I ... I've
got to admit that before I heard you today, I was scared—plain
scared. I didn't think I was ready. It—it seemed like such a big job, all
alone.... But now I know you're with me, forever...."
Messerschmidt got up. It seemed to Kimmensen as though the entire

crowd inhaled simultaneously.
"Fellow citizens." Messerschmidt delivered the opening flatly,
standing easily erect, and then stood waiting. The attention of the
crowd fastened on him, and the cameras dipped closer.
"First," Messerschmidt said, "I'd like to pay my respects to President
Kimmensen. I can truthfully say I've never heard him deliver that
speech more fluently." A ripple of laughter ran around the crowd.
"Then, I'd like to simply ask a few questions." Messerschmidt had
gone on without waiting for the laughter to die out. It stopped as
though cut by a knife. "I would have liked to hear Candidate Bendix
make his own speech, but I'm afraid he did." Messerschmidt turned
slightly toward Bendix's chair. In Kimmensen's judgment, he was not
using the best tone of voice for a rabble-rouser.
"Yes, Jem Bendix is a nice guy. No one has a bad word for him. Why
should they? What's he ever done on any impulse of his own—what's
he ever said except 'me, too'?"
Kimmensen's jaws clamped together in incredulous rage. He'd
expected Messerschmidt to hit low. But this was worse than low. This
was a deliberate, muddy-handed perversion of the campaign
speech's purpose.
"I wonder," Messerschmidt went on, "whether Jem Kimmensen—
excuse me; Jem Bendix—would be here on this platform today if
Josef Kimmensen hadn't realized it was time to put a shield between
himself and the citizens he calls his fellows. Let's look at the record."
Kimmensen's hands crushed his thighs, and he stared grimly at
Messerschmidt's back.
"Let's look at the record. You and I are citizens of the Freemen's
League. Which is a voluntary organization. Now—who founded the
League? Josef Kimmensen. Who's been the only League President
we've ever had? Who is the League, by the grace of considerable
spellbinding powers and an electorate which—by the very act of
belonging to the League—is kept so split up that it's rare when a man
gets a chance to talk things out with his neighbor?
"I know—we've all got communicators and we've all got planes. But
you don't get down to earth over a communicator, and you don't
realize the other fellow's got the same gripes you do while you're both
flapping around up in the air. When you don't meet your neighbor face
to face, and get friendly with him, and see that he's got your
problems, you never realize that maybe things aren't the way Josef
Kimmensen says they are. You never get together and decide that all
of Josef Kimmensen's fine words don't amount to anything.
"But the League's a voluntary organization. We're all in it, and, God
help me, I'm running for President of it. Why do we stick with it? Why
did we all join up?
"Well, most of us are in it because our fathers were in it. And it was a
good thing, then. It still can be. Lord knows, in those days they
needed something to hold things steady, and I guess the habit of
belonging grew into us. But why don't we pull out of this voluntary
organization now, if we're unhappy about it for some reason? I'll tell
you why—because if we do, our kids don't go to school and when
they're sick they can't get into the hospital. And do you think Joe
Kimmensen didn't think of that?"
The crowd broke into the most sullen roar Kimmensen had heard in
twenty-eight years. He blanched, and then rage crashed through him.
Messerschmidt was deliberately whipping them up. These youngsters
out here didn't have children to worry about. But Messerschmidt was
using the contagion of their hysteria to infect the watchers at home.
He saw that suddenly and plainly, and he cursed himself for ever
having put this opportunity in Messerschmidt's hands. But who would
have believed that Freemen would be fools enough—stupid enough
—to listen to this man?
Of course, perhaps those at home weren't listening.
"And what about the Northwesters' raids? Josef Kimmensen says
there aren't any raids. He says we're settling our unimportant little
feuds." This time, Messerschmidt waited for the baying laughter to
fade. "Well, maybe he believes it. Maybe. But suppose you were a
man who held this area in the palm of your hand? Suppose you had
the people split up into little families, where they couldn't organize to
get at you. And now, suppose somebody said, 'We need an army.'
What would you do about that? What would you think about having
an organized body of fighting men ready to step on you if you got too
big for people to stand? Would you say, if you were that man—would
you say, 'O.K., we'll have an army,' or would you say, 'It's all a hoax.
There aren't any raids. Stay home. Stay split up?' Would you say that,
while we were all getting killed?"
The savage roar exploded from the crowd, and in the middle of it
Messerschmidt walked quietly back to his chair and sat down.
Jem's fist was hammering down on the back of Kimmensen's chair.
"We should never have let him get on this platform! A man like that
can't be treated like a civilized human being! He has to be destroyed,
like an animal!"
Heartsick and enraged, Kimmensen stared across the platform at the
blade-nosed man.
"Not like an animal," he whispered to himself. "Not like an animal.
Like a disease."
Still shaken, still sick, Kimmensen sat in his office and stared down at
his hands. Twenty-eight years of selfless dedication had brought him
to this day.
He looked up at the knock on his open door, and felt himself turn
rigid.
"May I come in?" Messerschmidt asked quietly, unmoving, waiting for
Kimmensen's permission.
Kimmensen tightened his hands. "What do you want?"
"I'd like to apologize for my performance this afternoon." The voice
was still quiet, and still steady. The mouth, with its deep line etched at
one corner, was grave and a little bit sad.
"Come in," Kimmensen said, wondering what new tactic
Messerschmidt would use.
"Thank you." He crossed the office. "May I sit down?"
Kimmensen nodded toward the chair, and Messerschmidt took it. "Mr.
President, the way I slanted my speech this afternoon was unjust in
many respects. I did it that way knowingly, and I know it must have
upset you a great deal." His mouth hooked into its quirk, but his eyes
remained grave.
"Then why did you do it?" Kimmensen snapped. He watched
Messerschmidt's face carefully, waiting for the trap he knew the man
must be spinning.
"I did it because I want to be President. I only hope I did it well
enough to win. I didn't have time to lay the groundwork work for a
careful campaign. I would have used the same facts against you in
any case, but I would have preferred not to cloak them in hysterical
terms. But there wasn't time. There isn't time—I've got to destroy this
society you've created as soon as I can. After tonight's election, I
will."
"You egomaniac!" Kimmensen whispered incredulously. "You're so
convinced of your superiority that you'll even come here—to me—and
boast about your twisted plans. You've got the gall to come here and
tell me what you're going to do—given the chance."
"I came here to apologize, Mr. Kimmensen. And then I answered your
question."
Kimmensen heard his voice rising and didn't care. "We'll see who
wins the election! We'll see whether a man can ride roughshod over
other men because he believes he has a mission to perform!"
"Mr. President," Messerschmidt said in his steady voice, "I have no
idea of whether I am supplied with a mission to lead. I doubt it. I don't
particularly feel it. But when I speak my opinions, people agree with
me. It isn't a question of my wanting to or not wanting to. People
follow me."
"No Freeman in his right mind will follow you!"
"But they will. What it comes down to is that I speak for more of them
than you. There's no Utopia with room for men like you and me, and
yet we're here. We're constantly being born. So there's a choice—kill
us, burn us down, or smash your Utopia. And you can't kill more than
one generation of us."
Messerschmidt's eyes were brooding. His mouth twisted deeper into
sadness. "I don't like doing this to you, Mr. President, because I
understand you. I think you're wrong, but I understand you. So I came
here to apologize.
"I'm a leader. People follow me. If they follow me, I have to lead them.
It's a closed circle. What else can I do? Kill myself and leave them
leaderless? Someday, when I'm in your position and another man's in
mine, events may very well move in that direction. But until the man
who'll displace me is born and matures, I have to be what I am, just
as you do. I have to do something about the Northwesters. I have to
get these people back together again so they're a whole, instead of
an aggregate of isolated pockets. I have to give them places to live
together. Not all of us, Mr. President, were born to live in eagle rooks
on mountaintops. So I've got to hurt you, because that's what the
people need."
Kimmensen shook in reaction to the man's consummate arrogance.
He remembered Bausch, when they finally burst into his office, and
the way the great fat hulk of the man had protested: "Why are you
doing this? I was working for your good—for the good of this nation—
why are you doing this?"
"That's enough of you and your kind's hypocrisy, Messerschmidt!" he
choked out. "I've got nothing further I want to hear from you. You're
everything I despise and everything I fought to destroy. I've killed men
like you. After the election tonight, you'll see just how few followers
you have. I trust you'll understand it as a clear warning to get out of
this area before we kill one more."
Messerschmidt stood up quietly. "I doubt if you'll find the election
coming out in quite that way," he said, his voice still as calm as it had
been throughout. "It might have been different if you hadn't so long
persisted in fighting for the last generation's revolution."
Kimmensen sat stiffly in Jem Bendix's office.

"Where's he now?" Bendix demanded, seething.
"I don't know. He'll have left the building."
Bendix looked at Kimmensen worriedly. "Joe—can he win the
election?"
Kimmensen looked at Jem for a long time. All his rage was trickling
away like sand pouring through the bottom of a rotted sack. "I think
so." There was only a sick, chilling fear left in him.
Bendix slapped his desk with his hand. "But he can't! He just can't!
He's bulldozed the electorate, he hasn't promised one single thing
except an army, he doesn't have a constructive platform at all—no, by
God, he can't take that away from me, too!—Joe, what're we going to
do?"
He turned his pale and frightened face toward Kimmensen. "Joe—
tonight, when the returns come in—let's be here in this building. Let's
be right there in the room with the tabulating recorder. We've got to
make sure it's an honest count."
CHAPTER VI
There was only one bare overhead bulb in the tabulator room. Bendix
had brought in two plain chairs from the offices upstairs, and now
Kimmensen sat side by side with him, looking at the gray bulk of the
machine. The room was far down under the building. The walls and
floor were cement, and white rime bloomed dankly in the impressions
left by form panels that had been set there long ago.
The tabulating recorder was keyed into every League communicator,
and every key was cross-indexed into the census files. It would
accept one vote from each mature member of every League family. It
flashed running totals on the general broadcast wavelength.
"It seems odd," Bendix said in a husky voice. "An election without
Salmaggi running."
Kimmensen nodded. The flat walls distorted voices until they
sounded like the whispers of grave-robbers in a tomb.
"Did you ask him why he wasn't?" he asked because silence was
worse.
"He said he didn't know whose ticket to run on."
Kimmensen absorbed it as one more fact and let it go.
"The first votes ought to be coming in." Bendix was looking at his
watch. "It's time."
Kimmensen nodded.
"It's ironic," Bendix said. "We have a society that trusts itself enough
to leave this machine unguarded, and now the machine's recording
an election that's a meaningless farce. Give the electorate one more
day and it'd have time to think about Messerschmidt's hate-
mongering. As it is, half the people'll be voting for him with their
emotions instead of their intelligence."
"It'll be a close election," Kimmensen said. He was past pretending.
"It won't be an election!" Bendix burst out, slamming his hand on his
knee. "One vote for Bendix. Two votes for Mob Stupidity." He looked
down at the floor. "It couldn't be worse if Messerschmidt were down
here himself, tampering with the tabulator circuits."
Kimmensen asked in a dry voice: "Is it that easy?"
"Throwing the machine off? Yes, once you have access to it. Each
candidate has an assigned storage circuit where his votes
accumulate. A counter electrode switches back and forth from circuit
to circuit as the votes come in. With a piece of insulation to keep it
from making contact, and a jumper wire to throw the charge over into
the opposing memory cells, a vote for one candidate can be
registered for the other. A screwdriver'll give you access to the
assembly involved. I ... studied up on it—to make sure
Messerschmidt didn't try it."
"I see," Kimmensen said.
They sat in silence for a time. Then the machine began to click.
"Votes, coming in," Bendix said. He reached in his blouse pocket. "I
brought a communications receiver to listen on."
They sat without speaking again for almost a half hour, listening.
Then Kimmensen looked at Bendix. "Those'll be his immediate
followers, voting early," he said. "It'll even out, probably, when most of
the families finish supper." His voice sounded unreal to himself.

News Media Innovation Reconsidered: Ethics and Values in A Creative Reconstruction of Journalism María Luengo and Susana Herrera-Damas

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News Media Innovation Reconsidered: Ethics and Values in A Creative Reconstruction of Journalism María Luengo and Susana Herrera-Damas

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News Media Innovation Reconsidered:

Ethics and Values in a Creative

Ethics and Values in a Creative Reconstruction of Journalism

Edited by María Luengo

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover image: © Busakorn Pongparnit/iStock/Getty Images

Journalism, Ethics, and Innovation in Times of Digital Turbulence 1

1 An Inquiry into the Ethics of Innovation in Digital Journalism 3

2 Democratically Engaged Journalists: Ethical Invention amid

3 Journalism Innovation in a Time of Survival 40

News Ethics and Emerging Journalistic Narratives 53

4 Ethics in 360-Degree Immersive Journalism 55

5 Quo Vadis, Newsgames? Ethical Boundaries Between

8 Semi-automated Journalism: Reinforcing Ethics to Make the Most of Artificial

9 Ethical Challenges in Incorporating Artificial Intelligence into Newsrooms 138

Journalistic Innovation at the Service of the Public 155

10 Journalism, Algorithms, and the People’s Right to Know 157

11 Ethical Dilemmas in the Personalization of News from Voice Interfaces 174

12 Transparency, Innovation, and Journalism 187

13 Innovative Tools for Citizen Empowerment in the Fight Against

News media are suffering a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” (Schumpeter, 1975

ing journalistic practices and products such as 360-degree immersive journalism,

The Ups and Downs of Techno-economic Explanations

Seeing Creative Destruction as Creative Reconstruction

The selected innovations are characterized by an online-only or online-first approach,

Mapping News Innovation Culturally

Print / legacy Independence

themselves from the technologies and related practices, dismissing them as

past negative characterizations that have positioned them as a threat to journalism.

New Journalistic Performances on Stage: Ethics Vis-à-Vis

In Chapter 2, Ward offers the challenging notion of “democratically engaged journal-

tives but also help to ensure journalism’s long-term survival.

machines. Barceló-Ugarte et al.’s Chapter 9 explores the specific incorporation of arti-

Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future.

Carlson, M. (2016). Telling the crisis story of journalism: narratives of normative

Journalism, Ethics, and Innovation in Times of Digital

An Inquiry into the Ethics of Innovation in Digital

An Ethical Perspective on Journalism Innovation

become obsolete (Küng, 2017).

their relationship with audiences is weakened by a more interactive, horizontal,

(a) Technological determinism: When focusing on the role of technology, we can

(c) Relativism: There are no universal or absolute ethical principles, so that

Seeking the truth; loyalty with citizens; a verification discipline; independence

Defining Journalism Innovation

This definition, provided by a group of researchers from the Miguel Hernández

Innovations and Journalism Ethics: 2000–2020

In 2000, I began to explore the consequences of the digitalization of television news-

The Emergence of Journalism in the Internet

Convergence and Multimedia Content

Blogs and Bloggers

istics defined a digital journalist (Hayes, Singer, and Ceppos, 2007).

Journalistic Production for the Internet

Production stages Ethical issues

Access-observation ●● Verification of what is published on social media.

Processing-editing ●● Rejection of excessive multiskilling.

Journalism and Big Data

In that, he was disappointed. It was an awkward, forced meal, with

As Kimmensen stepped into his office, he saw Salmaggi sitting

Messerschmidt got up. It seemed to Kimmensen as though the entire

Kimmensen sat stiffly in Jem Bendix's office.

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2 Democratically Engaged Journalists: Ethical Invention amid

5 Quo Vadis, Newsgames? Ethical Boundaries Between

8 Semi-automated Journalism: Reinforcing Ethics to Make the Most of Artificial

13 Innovative Tools for Citizen Empowerment in the Fight Against