when is a public blog post meant to remain private?

(bringing new readers up to speed)

When it began to become clear that a horrific tragedy was unfolding at Virginia Tech University earlier this week, I did what a lot of bloggers did and looked to the blogs. I quickly found a whole cluster of Virginia Tech students on LiveJournal. As I fed these personal accounts to my colleagues in TV and Radio news, I also blogged. For me, it was the most natural of things to do. I wasn’t the only person working for a news agency who turned to the blogs to find stories. One of the LiveJournals that I blogged, and which eventually ended up being read on-air, caught the attention of journalists from around the World, many of whom used the comments facility on the post to approach him, often clumsily, for his story…

(regulars start here…)

I seem to have kicked off quite an industry debate with my post questioning the way that journalists engage with those who use the internet to create and publish the stuff formerly known as user generated content. I’m not just talking about the clumsy approaches made by journalists seeking to confirm the information or gain further access to those with a story to tell, but also about whether those approaches are entirely necessary when, in certain situations, it might very well make sense to simply link and let audiences decide for themselves.

Since that post, I’ve had 5000 places in the technorati rankings worth of blog mentions, links from a few news stories, and interview requests from half a dozen broadcast and print journalists. There have also been email, including one from a journalist who had, as I did, previously privately approached the author of the post I highlighted, someone who wanted me to remove their email address from the site (I never published their email address so I assume he thought he’d made it back to the original LiveJournal author) and a few journalism and media studies lecturers.

And some big blogs joined in too – here’s what the Huffington Post, Dan Gillmor, Mark Jones at Reuters and others had to say.

Here’s what Jarvis said:

“I see that in Hamman’s post, with scores of reporters each trying to get their piece of the student’s voice when, as Robin sagely realizes, the student’s voice and account is already online for all to see, on a LiveJournal blog. The right thing to do is to point to that, to quote it, to link to it.

This yields a new architecture of news, a distributed architecture. It’s what is bound to happen. Those students put their news up on their own sites because they have them and because the people they care about know their addresses and will read them. I’m surprised that Albaughouti’s video didn’t go up on YouTube (I sat next to a YouTube exec last night on a panel at NAB and he said, “it will”). I have no doubt that people will soon have their own live YouTubes/blog pages where they broadcast what they are doing at the moment: Twitter Video. We will all be Justin.TV. And sometimes, what we broadcast or blog will be news, big news, live news.”

But there is another issue here that we haven’t really touched on much – that, sometimes, a blog post that’s made in public is actually only intended for a private audience.

The argument that private stuff should always be password protected just doesn’t wash well with me because, being a person with a public yet private blog or two myself, I understand that sometimes password protection just isn’t practicable (or, with some services, even possible). Vox is, from what it says on the tin although I have no experience with it personally, a step in the direction of allowing control like this for each individual piece of content. But not everyone does, or will, use Vox.

How can a journalist, or anyone wanting to link to or draw attention to a post know when something that’s published publicly online is private?

Here’s the debate…