A digital identity is your presence on the Web -- the sites and accounts you register for and create that help determine who you are and what you do online. To get a better sense of your digital identity,
Google your name. See how many hits appear. Many of the related Web sites may be links to the news organization you work for, but others might link to pages you've never seen before, written by people you don't know. Those people -- often bloggers -- aren't "stealing" your online identity, but they are helping to shape it.
For journalists, who are accustomed to sharing the stories of others, creating and shaping a digital identity can feel risky or misguided.
Some reporters say the less personal information that's online, the better. But others, like
JD Lasica, social media strategist and co-founder of
Ourmedia.org, say developing a digital identity creates an opportunity to reach out to the public in new, interactive ways.
"News organizations have for too long practiced journalism as a dark art, and so the public has come to regard journalists and their intentions with a degree of suspicion," Lasica said. "I suppose I tend toward more transparency than most people -- you can easily find my home address online, for example, and the fact that I have an 8-year-old son -- but we're living in the Internet era now. When I take photos in public, my instinct is to return home and upload them to Flickr. Sharing media and information online is the new routine. Younger people just expect that a lot of personal information about their lives will wind up online."
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A digital identity, Lasica says, is more than the profiles you fill out on social networking sites -- it's everything you do online. So, it can be easy to cultivate a digital identity but much harder to control it.
To shape what is being said about them online, many journalists are choosing to actively engage in the development of their online presence.
On his blog, Lasica lists more than a dozen social networks that he belongs to as a way of encouraging readers to converse with him on some of the sites -- even if the "conversation" is just back-and-forth comments posted online. Lasica belongs to such networks as
Flickr,
SpinXpress,
LinkedIn,
Digg,
Facebook,
Ourmedia,
MySpace and
Second Life and
Facebook.
Involved, but Not Without LimitsJames Gibbons, editor/opinion pages at
The Houston Chronicle, says he just doesn't have the time, or the desire, to develop his digital identity. A few years ago, Gibbons wrote
an article about his distaste for blogging. Several bloggers criticized him online for his views, but Gibbons says he doesn't mind that his digital identity is attached to these critiques.
"I'm happy to give and take," Gibbons said. "I'm just more focused on the print product. Between putting out a newspaper every day and doing what I can to enhance our Web site, that's pretty much my day. I haven't seen the utility or the benefit from blogging or doing all this digital stuff."
Gibbons recently joined Facebook after receiving an invitation from a friend, but says he doesn't want to join any more social networking sites. Facebook has been less staunch about the privacy settings of the site in recent years, and
announced plans last month to allow non-users to search members' personal profile pages. Facebook users who wish to remain unsearchable can specify this in the privacy settings of their accounts.
To keep track of where their name is appearing online, some journalists assign
Google alerts to their names, so any time their name appears on a Web site, they will get e-mail notification with links to the site where their name appeared.
"It's always a bad sign when I haven't written anything recently and I get a Google alert," said Jennifer 8. Lee, a metro reporter at
The New York Times. "You know that means you are being mentioned by someone else -- which can be good or bad."
Though she has written hundreds of articles for the
Times, the first entry that appears when you do a Google search of Lee's name isn't one of her stories -- it's a link to her
Wikipedia page, which she didn't create. While Lee's professional digital identity is "Jennifer 8. Lee," to her friends, who occasionally post photos of her online, she is often just "Jenny Lee," a name that disappears into the morass of the Web. And on Facebook, she is just "Jennifer Lee" -- one of hundreds, if not thousands.
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The wild, worldwide Web opens the door to a multiplicity of identities -- authentic ones and those that are concocted. With a few clicks, for example, people can create their own
avatars, or online personas, on the 3-D, virtual world site,
Second Life. They can create their own identity and physique, changing their hair from brown to blonde, their skin color from white to caramel, their body type from pear to stick. As journalists and seekers of transparency and truth, creating such personas seems antithetical to what we do. It would make sense, then, that when developing our digital identities, we should uphold the values of truth and identify ourselves in ways that accurately reflect who we are.
Lee follows a simple motto when it comes to developing her digital identity on her blog: Don't write something that you wouldn't feel comfortable putting under your own byline. She says any information she makes available online is not just a reflection of herself, but of the
Times. Lee is also cautious when it comes to posting photographs of herself on the Web and makes sure there are no photos of her on Facebook other than her profile picture. Photos and related captions can lead to untrue associations that Lee says she would rather not help create.
Unlike TV journalists, who have long been recognizable to their audiences, some print journalists are still not used to branching out beyond their bylines. Putting photos of herself online -- even professional mugshots -- still makes Julie Mason, White House correspondent for
The Houston Chronicle, wary. "It brings a lot of attention, good and bad. As a lifelong reporter, I get used to people not knowing who I am and what I look like," Mason said. "You do get a lot of comments about what you look like. You can't control what's out there about you. It's all very unnerving."
The transition toward blogging was a difficult one for Mason, who began blogging full-time for the
Chronicle in January 2007, in addition to writing a weekly column and an occasional story for the
Chronicle's print edition. A journalist for 18 years, Mason says she was accustomed to being recognized by her byline, but now, she's also recognized for her blog,
"Beltway Confidential," and the photo that accompanies it. Developing a digital identity through a blog, Mason says, can be challenging, particularly for female journalists.
"Outspoken women can sometimes attract an unstable element of attention. My experience and what I've observed is that outspoken women are being threatened on blogs because of the anonymity of the Internet," said Mason, referring to the wealth of people who can post comments without revealing their real names. "As a journalist who always felt safe with a certain level of anonymity, becoming an Internet commodity is scary. News organizations will have to figure out what their policies are for their journalists becoming more visible and recognizable."
Looking Ahead to the FutureThough unnerving for some, NBC cameraman Jim Long posts photos and videos of himself online a few times a week on his blog,
Verge New Media. Developing his digital identity, Long says, isn't just a hobby -- it's a necessary step toward securing his future in journalism.
"Because of this fragmentation of media, I need to build my own personal media brand. I don't know what the lifespan of the union network news cameraman is," Long said.
In the blogging world, a "brand" -- which is often displayed as a tagline or slogan -- is a succinct, professional description of who you are or the message you would like your blog to convey. Long's tagline is "The intersection of old and new media," though he said it is only a small component of his "brand." Now, he says, when people visit his blog, they can identify him by his tagline or his usernames on other sites, such as Twitter and Flickr, which he links to on his blog.
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Some journalists also buy a domain name to have greater control over their digital identity. For instance, I bought mallarytenore.com, partly to prevent anyone else from creating a Web site with this name and posting falsified information about me on the site.
Along with his blog, which he has had for about six months, Long also has a
Twitter page, which he generally updates several times an hour, writing posts about his day, responding to the posts of others in his Twitter network and posting links to
Utterz audio bites.
Long says he doesn't hesitate to engage in conversation online, especially if someone has misinterpreted what he has said. It's all part of shaping his online identity and not letting it slip into the control of others.
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"The story doesn't end with the posting of a blog. I think it's important to get back in there and foster the conversation. Be involved in the content and let people know that what they're saying matters to you," Long said. "You may not agree with it, but their discourse has merit and you have to acknowledge that."
In Long's view, the more journalists can engage in the discourse and develop their digital identities, the better off they -- and their news organizations -- will be. "I think overall that in this world of fragmented media, it's imperative for, and incumbent upon, big media organizations to figure out ways to engage audiences on a deeper, more meaningful level using social media," Long said. "We need to put a human face on monolithic news organizations."
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