Original scientific paper
Protection of Privacy, Intellectual Property and Electronic Business as Indicators of Ethicalness of Online Media in Croatia
Mato Barutović
Abstract
Internet as a new media environment places before journalists and media new ethical challenges (privacy, electronic business, immediacy, photograph manipulation and plagiarism, intellectual property, publishing of supplementary material and user-based journalism in online media) for which commonly accepted ethical standards still do not exist. Namely, it is still not clear what should, and what should not, be ethically acceptable. Therefore, international newspaper publishers and online journalist organizations strive to establish guidelines in order to regulate this problem. The leaders of that initiative include America Society of Magazine Editors, Online Journalism Review, Online News Association and Poynter Institute. This paper’s focus is the research of Croatian online media’s privacy protection of their users, showing whether they violate other media’s intellectual property, their conduct of business, namely is their business approach equal to that of classical media, and also the possibilities of errors due to the immediateness of news publication. For the research, textual content (news) analysis method has been used. It has been established that Croatian online media do not respect user’s privacy, even thought it is of increasing concern to the Internet users. As many as 89% uses cookies covertly, and the statement of privacy protection can be found in just 23% of media analyzed. Croatian online media publish commercial content together with the journalistic one. Research has established that 85% of online media using banners do not mark them as advertisements. In a similar manner, 61% of online media in Croatia use home page links as a connection to commercial content. As many as 55% of Croatian online media content is not original, and intellectual property is doubtful in 44% of media content. On the other hand, online media producing own content do not use other media’s content. From the publishing time-frame and error possibility aspects, it has been established that Croatian online media content is outdated. Of the total analyzed content, 60% is older than one day, and in 32% of the cases publication date could not be established, or was older than seven days. This reduces error possibility, but also shows that Croatian online media fail to exploit the most important characteristic offered by this new media environment – directness.
Keywords
protecton of privacy; intellectual property
Hrčak ID:
18044
URI
Publication date:
27.6.2007.
Visits: 4.976 *