One thing that became apparent in the great comment discussions in parts I and II (Advertising Age Uses a Yellow crayon w/ Toby Bloomberg and Yellow crayon Redux: Journalism versus Blogging) is that ethical journalism is falling to the way side. The media are reacting to lost advertising dollars and readership with increasingly gray forays into social media (Forbes Dan Lyons, Ad Age’s Jonah Bloom).

Readers and journalists realize there is no such thing as fair and balanced. Now ethics are enforced by the readers of news outlets and blogs, as opposed to editors.

In “The Road from Media Ethics to Information Anarchy,” by PC Magazine’s John Dvorak we find an explanation of journalistic ethics:

Telling the truth is always a good idea, but too often the truth is covered up by a smoke screen of facts that do not lead to the truth. Ethics codes don’t cover this. Generally speaking, ethics codes are designed to eliminate out-and-out corruption within a news organization. The bigger the organization, the more elaborate the ethics codes. What does that tell you?

This fascinating article really threw me off because it basically debunked any pretense that news organizations have fair and balanced reporting. Basically, we give power to the mastheads of old..Yet in reality the increasingly questionable media viewpoint — in large part exposed by bloggers — has created an anarchists environment of media creation where blogs can equally compete with traditional news outlets.

Another choice Dvorak quote:

…the only difference between a blogger and a reporter for the Times is that one makes a lot more money and prints on dead trees. Sure, Times reporters may have more skill, but from what I can tell, they might also not have more skill.

It’s a pretty hard hitting reality statement, isn’t it? Some organizations still hold more credibility than others due to significantly better professional training and experiences. But it seems that savoire faire cannot prevent biased content from hitting the pages. As a result, new media powers that can provide great reliable insights time-in, time-out will arise to have as much — if not more — power than the old “credible” journalism outlets.

Consider this, which is more powerful? eWeek or TechCrunch? It’s a very debatable comparison, and likely depends on the technology.

Six Possible Impact Points

The merger of journalism/blogging media forms seems to be accelerating, which means PR and social media pros will need to stay on top of this continuing evolution. Here are some likely outcomes of the continued growth of new media powers.

1) Trust will continue to erode. Enforcement of ethics and “good reporting” by media outlets new and old will fall to vigilante citizen journalists. They will also police themselves.

2) In some cases, the vigilantes won’t be right. But the wisdom of the crowd will rule.

3) Older outlets move towards hybrid new media formats, whether that’s with USA Today-esque social media tagging and commenting, or with op-eds that read more like rants than journals.

4) In turn, blogs and other social media forms will move towards hybridized media formats to seize more readers and command larger audiences.

5) Some older media forms will collapse as they find themselves unable to adapt and/or compete in the current environment.

6) The two forms — old and new media outlets — will become increasingly co-dependent reporting from and commenting on their respective coverage. For example, I had yet another start-up client get a big-time media opportunity from some blog-ink we garnered. That reporter would never have answered a direct phone call from us, but they read a blog post.

Perhaps we should start looking at new media as the Fifth Estate. The Fourth Estate (a nickname for the media) filled the role of policing the government. It seems to ensure democracy and the ability to discern some semblance of truth we need a Fifth Estate — citizen media — to keep the Fourth Estate in line.