What not to say
Wow. I just gave a talk to 30 editors of trade journals. Even though the title of my talk was “Bloggers Are Not Journalists (But Blogging Will Change Journalism),” the session taught me that one should not say say, imply or gesture that the community of bloggers could provide a depth of expertise that might come close to that which professional journals offer. I also learned that pointing at the window and saying “Look over there!” will not distract them long enough, especially the second time.
There were, in truth, a couple of people who were vocal in their contempt for bloggers: It’s a fad, it’s bad information, it’s wanking by unemployed losers who have enough time for blogging but apparently not enough to change out of their pajamas. The rest of the group seemed to be open to looking into this blogging thang. It was more fun than I’m letting on.
At the session I paid some but not sufficient homage to the virtues of professional journalism. But, I’m so dismayed by how broken journalism is that I tend to under-emphasize the hard-won value it still brings us. We’re going to have to invent a way of take full advantage of the courage and professionalism of journalists, a way that rewards them for telling us the truth they’ve earned, without requiring them to erase their own point of view.
We have to invent it? Nah. Journals and journalists will invent it. They already are.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Bloggers are not journalists in the same way that the guy I had a conversation with at lunch isn’t. But that doesn’t mean you should avoid lunch conversations in favor of professional, fact-checked journalism. nobody gets riled up about lunchtime conversations, asking us pointedly “how do you know what Bill said is true! Who is his editor?!” Blogging is a conversation. Conversations are important to have. They’re an older and more necessary part of being human than professional journalism. Why are journalists confused and/or threatened by this? Is it because blogging uses a a medium and is ‘published’ that they think it’s has to conform to journalistic standards?
Well put. I said something very close to what you say, Scott. Yes, I believe bloggers look like journalists because we’re writing in public about many of the same issues as they are. Further, the top of the A-List has a mass readership. Thus, the left side of the power law gets a lot of media attention and the loooooong tail, where the real social changes are happening, gets ignored.
Scott: Some people (right or wrong) lend more weight to written words than spoken. Written words have more force, more power. Journalists, recognizing this, think there’s an implied responsibility that bloggers do not take seriously.
So, yes, essentially, it is because blogging is “published” that it is held to a different standard than Alice and Bob in the cafeteria. It’s true that if everyone understood it to be an inconsequential conversation, there’d be no question here, but blogging is new (and varied), so not everyone understands it the same way.
Ultimately, I think this is not a question about blogging itself any more than you can ask that question about television. One channel has many varieties of programming from pure entertainment to entertaining “journalism” (often about entertainment) to actual news programs. Likewise, blogs run from brain candy to brain food. The question is, if your blog aspires to be food, should it not conform to standards like all the restaurants? You can’t just say, “I’m cooking for me but making enough for the whole world, and if y’all get food poisoning, I don’t want to hear about it.” I can’t blame the restaurants for pointing out that they stand behind their product in a way bloggers don’t.
While you say blogging is just blathering, others say it’s the future of journalism. The journalists are right to ask whether those who would fill their role will follow in their footsteps or just stagger and blather.
Kyle, I think we bloggers will run the gamut from responsible journalists-without-portfolio to blithering idiots to lying hatemongers. The individual bloggers are not in a position to declare which they are since few of us think we’re blithering idiots or hatemongers. So, I guess I want to say two things (besides thanks for the comment):
First, blogs do tend to come contextualized. Frequently we get to them because someone else recommended them, and because blogs are persistent, they provide their own context. That helps, but does not solve, the discrimination problem.
Second, I thoroughly recommend that we all try to provide as much metadata as possible. If we’re writing about something we don’t know much about, we should say so. If we’re reporting a rumor, say so. If we’ve got a degree in the topic, say so. We should do whatever we can to help our readers understand how reliable a post is. We cannot be the ultimate arbiters of our own reliability, but we can at least provide some guidance.
Blogging is so broad that it is impossible to compare to journalism. Those that comment on current events have some responsibility to provide links to substantiate factual claims or at least sources. Those who blog about their big debate over whether to wear the red fringe vest or the blue spandex shirt needn’t bother.
I have found some of the most insightful analysis of what’s happening in the blogosphere and it is pretty easy to tell who is responsible and who is just spewing.
If anything, bloggers have put the mainstream press on notice — go hard at a story or get out of the way. We’ve had enough of the Katie Couric/Matt Lauer lapdog journalism that is entertainment masquerading as news.
I wish there were a journalism-for-bloggers center somewhere on the web, that would provide guidance. Online tutorials where you could sign up and take a “class” with others, ethical quandaries and norms, critiquing each other’s work, maybe some sort of IS09000-lite certification levels, maybe piecework editing (put up a post, pay someone to edit it for you)…
Maybe J-Lab’s planning on doing this with some of the Knight foundation money ( http://www.j-lab.org/newvoices_pr.html ), I don’t know (and, from their site, I fear for the content:glitz ratio). I just know that I want it.
“…pointing at the window and saying “Look over there!” will not distract them long enough, especially the second time.”
a–hehehehehehehe!
I understand what Kerry tried to do with his talk about “unity and healing,” that is, to buoy up the sinking Party, and to remain “acceptable” to high-society, but it only serves to obfuscate any real differences, and, in trying to stay somewhere near the “center,” to slide rightward in the meanwhile to catch up with it. What good does it do to belong to an “opposition” Party, when that Party declares “unity” with its own raison d’etre; as if fighting over the real issues was just some kind of technical procedure, or academic debate!
What Bush is doing, drumming up threats, and demonizing the opposition, in order to inflame passions, and appeal to the crudest form of patriotism–righteous and uncritical nationalism, is classic textbook Machiavelli, as is his Patriot Act remarkably reminiscent of Mussolini’s version of the same during his tenure–with the institution of tribunals outside of the framework of the Constitutional legal system; just like the emergency measures of the Hitler regime. NEVER ABANDON OUR CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISIONS! The Constitution is itself a hedge against just such expedience!. All the while, his derogatory talk of “those New England Liberals” is as divisive and insulting as can be–yet, while he was himself a Yalie! Every one of the “Founding Fathers” was, himself, a New England Liberal!
What does it mean, in terms of our national history, that we have so decisively cast aside France, and the many things that nation has historically stood for, in terms of liberality, fraternity, and equality–the nation that helped us forge our very independence, and bonded, instead, with the very nation that we once had to cast off to get there? Does this mean that the counter-revolution has come back to us full swing?
The Democratic Party is thoroughly impotent, as it has no power from which to draw. One begins to feel almost like a clandestine outcast by admitting support for such an entity at all. Today, two Mormon missionaries came in, dressed to the hilt like corporate C.E.O.s. Impeccable. I almost ran to hide, figuring that they were faith-based Bushites–veritable full-time, undercover, Republicans–posing as members of the society of Jesus. Hmmm, Jesus in a full western business suit? Go figure.
I have come to find that the more comfortable I’ve become as a student again, embedded once more in the vibrant and intellectual social milieu which I’d been bemoaning as missing to me, the more I’ve begun to enjoy socialist literature anew, and the less inclined I’ve been to further follow up with the individualistic and cynical thinkers –both the philosophers and the poets. It is not that I am some kind of agitator or rabble rouser, far from it, but being no longer an isolated exile I am thinking differently now–socially, and I am correspondingly relaxed by the intelligent details involved in such careful political criticism of these contrary states themselves–a psychological boon. I am sure that my individualist phase will return, no doubt, on the heels of some new and unforeseen disappointment (always the pessimist in me), but, for now anyway, I am appreciating the obverse side of it with new found surprise.
Als blogger voor de leeuwen
David enters the Lions’ Den. (post is in Dutch).
It seems to me that it’s the journalists who are confused about their proper role, not us bloggers. I see “pundits” taking turns shouting at each other on the tube. These organizations are trying to sell us canned conversations when they should be doing their jobs as fact finders and information disseminators. Please leave the conversations to us amateurs. We do not need scripted, pretend conversations. We need news. Who is better suited to engage a “national discussion,” or even a global one? Journalists? I think not. Let them root out the facts and provide them for us. We will have the conversations ourselves, thank you very much.
Being a journalist and a blogger I can tell you that those are very different situations. But they interfere. It has been happening since the whole thing of the Web has started and it has accelerated since blogs are there. And the question is: blogging and journalism interfere, but what’s the outcome of it?
Well. Let me tell you what I think the center of journalism is: journalism is about asking questions. That’s our true skill. If we ask the right questions, we are pretty good journalists. We are good if we are also able to report the answers that people gives us.
Bloggers can ask questions. And they answer, too. Often very vocally. They are like everybody. They must be experts. They have to contribute to the conversation. They cannot just ask questions: they must answer, at some point. And they do, don’t they?
The good relation is: journalists ask questions, then report; bloggers, like everybody else, comment, discuss, create new facts, answer… They are the reality about which journalists should report. Bloggers have to work in a way that makes it relevant for journalists to ask bloggers their questions.
But, of course, that is not mandatory. Bloggers can just forget about “being asked questions” by journalists. And keep going on with their conversation.
Luca De Biase, bloggin from Italy
I wonder if advent of bloggers will affect the tension between choosing to deliver “complete truth” vs. “truth that’s most easily inhaled by the reader”.
e.g. much of “professionalism” consists of removing the reporter from the picture, which lets audience focus on the picture without the distraction of the reporter, but the picture is thereby made less complete since the reporter really _is_ an influential part of it.
or to put it more verbosely and obscurely –
The impersonal framework for reporting, that keeps the journo out of the picture, is something we’re used to, whereas if they were to go the self-indulgent blogger route and speak whole (Derrida-style?) truth, then we’d be reading “I did this I saw that I think this I ate that” and there can come a point where you want to pick the blogger up and move him bodily out of the way so you can focus on the view. But this _does_ mean that you’re no longer taking in the whole truth, because you’ve removed data about the observer from the spectrum of info provided. And this can lead to false certainty, since now the reporter can’t say “I have N% confidence that how I’m telling it is correct”.
what would be the optimal balance between ‘data’ on the reporter vs ‘data’ on the reported?
sorry if this is wholly and utterly obscure…
In you’ve got mail, Meg Ryan says: “what’s so wrong in taking things personally, anyway?” (or something like that…). And we all were with her in that phrase.
Professional and personal are blurring and it is not new.
But in journalism that’s part of the show. If you are personal in your reporting it is because that is the style of your reporting: sort of a publisher strategy. That shouldn’t add data. It should only add personality to the language of the piece. It doesn’t add data because all that fits reporting should be reported anyway (and should be reported with the journalist’s eyes anyway). I guess…
What is very worth to add is the kind of underlying contract that is signed between the journalist and the public. We have in Italy a lot of politically involved journalism. I don’t like it. But I accept it when it is explicit. When the underlying contract is not known, then there is something of value that is missing.
Blogging is different because it is not reporting. It is talking to eachother. As you all say. Don’t you think?
Scott D. Feldstein: “nobody gets riled up about lunchtime conversations, asking us pointedly “how do you know what Bill said is true!”
Obviously Scott has never worked in a workplace where the lunch room is teeming with people recounting urban legends as factual accounts of friends of theirs. hahaha.
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