Objectivity or transparency?

I sat near the door at the workshop intended to begin composing a set of guidelines for the ONA on the ethics of staffers writing blogs. That's because I feared it would be lame and obvious. Thanks largely to some really good moderating by Anthony Moor, now the online boss at the Dallas Morning News, it proved fascinating, indeed eye-opening.
It was a wide-ranging discussion on a broad range of ethical issues related to staff-written blogs. I couldn't capture it all here, but let me just go over some of the questions that were raised:

• Should reporters be allowed to write blogs on their own time?
  
• Should they be restricted to topics outside their coverage area?


• What about other personal publishing platforms, Twitter, Flikr, etc?


• Should news sites disclose a writer's political affiliations, interests, activities, personal interests, sexual orientations? Can we make writers do that?


• Or is keeping all that stuff private part of the price we have to pay to preserve the appearance of objectivity?

I had a long conversation about this afterward with my friend John Burr of the Florida Times-Union. Our "keepers-of-the-faith" take on it: While we must adapt to the new digital world, we must preserve the core values of our profession. We must avoid public expressions of our political viewpoints. And besides, revealing everyone's personal information would just make readers go nuts. A better expenditure of effort would be to explain to our readers why this is the case, not being arrogant, as Mr. Keen recommended last night, but assertive of our culture of objective verification.
The comments were all over the place, and there's a ways to go before the ONA will come up with a policy everyone can agree to. Poynter has set up a wiki to talk about blog ethics. Now the ONA has one too, at www.journalists.org/members/wiki/doku.ph , where members can offer their thoughts. (Join now! It's only $50.)