Between news and advertising, it is now hard to tell what ranks top in the online edition of our newspapers. When you arrive at eastandard.net and nationmedia.com, for example, you might be forgiven for feeling quite lost for a while.

All over the screen, there are competing blinking objects, flashing pictures, and staccato text. Each is practically screaming, "Click me! Click me! Click me!" And the static text section for news, which gets smaller by the day, plays second fiddle to all of this. The sum result is that advertising appears to edge out news online.

The Nation, for example, this week had a vertical table on the right hand side of the screen advertising an assortment of cooking fat, an array of detergents, bar soaps, and a Swiss baking powder. Right underneath was another box for real estate, a save-a-life call, an address to Kenyans in the United States and a link to reach 2,500 school classmates.

Most of these multi-layered ads blinked at one-second intervals, too fast for sensible reading. And this was only one strip of advertising. There was more on the right column, the top, middle, and the bottom stretch.

On its part, the Standard carried on the top strip three competing ads for an assortment of Forex bureaus, Kenya Airways and solar power products. The right column featured at least five mini-boxes, each teeming with blinking ads for commercial products, from Standard Chartered banking needs to Chai Masala.

For whatever reason, only the Kenya Times had no blinking commercial ads.

Yes, the Net is a platform with huge advertising potential, because it has a virtually unlimited audience. But in this new form of journalism where anyone with a computer, a modem and a telephone can publish – even from a boat floating in Lake Victoria – there is equally huge potential for chaos. And the Kenyan journalism code of ethics, the gospel equivalent for local media practitioners, is silent on online issues.

Yet, it is crucial that in this new form of journalism where audiences are refined, boundaries removed and relationships between reporters and readers reinvented, uniformity in "doing the right thing" should be charted out.

In these uncharted waters, our media practitioners appear clearly lost. The preoccupation here, it appears, is to build and run compelling Web sites. Even before that takes shape, the MBA guys with the nose for money smell the commercial potential from kilometres away.

And before anyone knows it, the news aspect of the publication is forgotten. The result is all that stuff that confuses us in the online edition of our newspapers: graphic manipulation, banner ads stretching the entire top width of the homepage, and a haphazard mix of editorial and advertising content all the way down.

Profits, it appears, is king. But out there, the world of online journalists is beginning to take notice. And debate is rife. While everyone agrees that traditional journalism values remain relevant online, practitioners disagree sharply about how these values should play out in this new situation. The biggest challenge is the nature of this new medium, where immediacy, interactivity, unchecked competition and the persistent pressure to produce revenue race toward a crushing end.

Few will argue with the idea that the guy who discovered the Internet should be pronounced Saint. In the quest for knowledge and information, the Internet is perhaps the best thing that happened to man. In journalism, however, this great resource may one day come to sound the death knell for ethics – if journalists don’t keep their money craze in check.

How is this likely to come about? Already, journalists are prone to align themselves with special interest groups and titans of commerce. Advertisers have a long tradition of putting their nose in editorial content. And now ads, opinion, marketing and news have become intertwined. Commercial links, promotion packages, entertainment, opinion and news blur together. The bottom line is that the Internet is threatening to dismantle the wall that separates news (factual truth) from everything else, including propaganda. The end result is that audiences will lose faith in journalistic objectivity.

The good news is that news people around the world already exhibit awareness for this ethical minefield and are trying out stuff. That is why such news sites as BBC.com, newyorktimes.com, and the South African-based capetimes.co.za, for example, have a clear demarcation between news and advertising. Here, however, our online journalists still have to learn the rubrics of netiquette – etiquette on the Net. Then, one hopes, they will get to talk about journalism ethics online.

Kodi Barth teaches journalism at United States International University-Nairobi.
If you have seen questionable content in the press, write to kodi@kodibarth.com
Website: www.kodibarth.com/