9. Maintaining Professional Standards on Digital Platforms: A Case Study of Nepal

There has been an ongoing debate among scholars across the world about the relevance of traditional standards of professional journalism—whether or not journalism on digital platforms needs a different set of ethical codes due to the platform’s unconventional characteristics, including, but not limited to, interactivity, hypertextuality, immediacy, multimedia use and global readership. Journalists and news media in developing countries like Nepal have been accused of employing arbitrary approaches, meaning they follow the traditional standards if that serve their purposes; otherwise, they break the tradition by unpublishing, altering or modifying the published content, and making post-publication corrections with or without public acknowledgment. This study, therefore, empirically assesses the performances of online news portals in Nepal, how, and to what extent, Nepali journalists working on various online news portals employ journalistic standards on digital platforms. This study may be beneficial to journalists across different countries to understand, compare and, if applicable, avoid the arbitrary practices of Nepali online media and journalists with regard to upholding professional standards of journalism on digital platforms.