Strategically Communicating

As I write this blog post, I’m going to do my best not to break any laws. I find fascinating and at the same time worrying, the way the internet has changed the job/role of a journalist. Throughout this term we have been discussing in several classes what it means to be a multimedia journalist, to be a one-man-band, a journalist who does it all.  I guess we now also have to be lawyers and business-women! I am starting to feel that it is a lot. At the same time I like the idea of taking full accountability for the content I post on the web. I feel that it forces me to seriously consider what I want to say, the work that I want to quote or comment on because once it is on the internet it is out for the world to see.

There is one practice that makes me cringe however. I feel really uncomfortable knowing that some take bits and pieces of others’ work and reshape it to say something completely different than the original piece. For example, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi tell the story of an article published in the Des Moines Register which was republished by the campaign staffers of Tim Pawlenty without permission and omitting a lot of unfavorable passages. It makes me uneasy to think of the fact that whatever I publish and create, whether it ends on the internet or not, can be used illegally and sometimes legally by someone to make arguments with which I might disagree.

As journalists, how much control can we have on the content we create once it is published?