What will be the blogging community’s Jayson Blair moment?

I enjoyed the conversation on We’re All Journalists Now by Gant. The evolving definition of journalist is one of the major disruptions taking place in news.

The lowered barriers of entry have made bloggers major players in political and technology news. The Daily Kos has an average of nearly 950 thousand hits per week. I have learned a great deal from bloggers and citizen journalists. The story of State Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland groping an employee would not have come out had it not been for the Horses Ass blog. The two daily papers sat on the story for months.
But the bloggers lack of a formal ethical framework is cause for concern. There is no set ethical framwork for journalists in mainstream media, but virtually every media outlet has a set of policies loosely patterned after the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics . I haven’t seen the equivalent from the citizen journalist bloggers. To the contrary they mock the notion of balance and fairness before launching another broadside.
There are a fair number of freewheeling truth tellers in the blogging community, but they have their own imperatives to drive traffic to their site, which means they often favor the quick nasty cheap attention grabbing post. Most professional news organizations maintain a wall between editorial and advertising to prevent conflict of interest. Often on a blog it’s one person who is creating the content and monetizing the content. This is a situation rife for abuse.
I saw this most clearly at the SxSW Interactive Conference in Austin last March where a booth carried the banner “we’ll pay you to blog”. At the end of the day all a journalist has is trust. The blogging community is due for their own Jayson Blair moment that will test the trust of their audience.