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Digital technology means anyone can produce unregulated journalism or PR from a laptop or a mobile phone. Do journalistic ethics, professional standards and regulation have a role in the multimedia future?

Only on the internet could a call for civility be greeted with a torrent of invective — and that’s exactly what happened this month. Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales and Tim O’Reilly, who coined the expression “Web 2.0”, dared to suggest that abusive commenting on blogs perhaps wasn’t the best way to conduct public debate, and the blogosphere, in turn, was markedly Not Pleased.

Or rather its most vocal section wasn’t — the very people, of course, at whom Wales and O’Reilly had directed their missive. But to suggest that all bloggers behave in the same way, or that “the blogosphere” is a culturally coherent space home to only one type of discussion, is a mistake.

Bloggers’ comment policies are almost as varied as their political views — even among bloggers who have found themselves elevated to the punditocracy. Tim Worstall and Oliver Kamm both started out blogging, and both regularly contribute to the Times’s comment pages, yet the former encourages debate both on his blog and across blogs while the latter has no comments section at all.

Kamm responded to Wales and O’Reilly’s proposed code of conduct by seizing the opportunity to denounce the entire medium, writing in the Guardian that political blogs are “error-strewn, insular and parasitic” and that they “tend not to enhance but to poison healthy debate”.

It’s an argument almost as old as blogging itself. Hypertext innovator Mark Bernstein warned against letting standards slip in May 2005, commenting: “Sloppiness and second-rate thinking damages the blogosphere.”

Yet perhaps they’re wrong. Individual mistakes shouldn’t damage the entire medium any more than, say, Jayson Blair’s notorious journalistic fraud on the New York Times should affect the newspaper business as a whole. But bloggers themselves are susceptible to having their mistakes revealed, and as pointed out by Frank Fisher — the most prolific commenter on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog — it can happen quickly. “Blogging isn’t just print journalism on-screen: it’s journalism plus,” he says. “It can provide sources, illustrations, and further reading and verification — and it is fast.”

This has meant the professionals having to shape up as well, of course. “Journalists like me have had to raise our game, knowing that a factual lapse will be pointed out within minutes,” admits Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. Repeated “factual lapses” — or, perish the thought, deliberate misrepresentation — can quickly kill a reputation. Amateur bloggers are at greater risk of this than professional journalists, not only because they lack much of a reputation to start with, but because of the one-upmanship and point-scoring that pervades the blogosphere, the tendency for many bloggers to act as a personal Private Eye.

Just one example is the ongoing, relatively high-profile spat between Tim Ireland of bloggerheads.com and those he accuses of censorship, anonymous comment bullying and denial of right-to-reply — in particular Tory blogger Iain Dale and the popular Paul Staines, who writes under the pseudonym Guido Fawkes. Ireland and several other left-leaning bloggers have recently created an info-site warning of Dale and Staines’ alleged wrongdoing.

A similar tactic may be useful for public relations. Professional blog consultant Jon Buscall recommends that businesses run a blog alongside their usual website. “A well-judged weblog with quality content would be an excellent way of tackling online crap written about you,” he says. “Rather than trying to deal with the boo-boys who use the net to savage people, companies and products left right and centre, a weblog would allow you to tell your side of the story.”

But there will always be those who try to employ more underhand methods. The website information-revolution.org, a campaign against Google’s dominance of the search engine market, purported to be run by a small, independent, activist-type group. But a “WhoIs” search showed it to actually be administered by Profero Ltd, the company handling the marketing for the rival Ask.com. This fact, naturally enough, was soon spread across the internet — at the time of writing, Google returns 177,000 sites referring to the connection between the two. It’s a tangled world wide web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

Because of the easy availability of information on the internet — and because there’s always someone watching — mistakes or malice don’t stay hidden for very long. In a sense, the readiness of net users to point out the cock-ups or wrongdoing of others amounts to a kind of self-regulation. Faced with this, there’s an almost Darwinian position for ethics and standards: those with them will thrive, while the rest are, eventually, left behind the herd, their credibility destroyed.

(This is the second assignment for the Reporters and the Reported module on the Cardiff diploma. See the first here. Other than the quote from Frank Fisher, I plundered the web for these.)

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