So is Blogging Journalism?
November 12th, 2008 by Linda Isted
The question (darling of media courses world wide) came up because it occurred to me that the reason I’m not an instinctive blogger is because it still says journalist on my passport.
What journalists are supposed to do (foundation PR course 1.01 coming up) is news. They ask questions, take notes, ask more questions, establish the facts, gather representative opinions and present it back in their audience’s favoured style.
Most reporters firmly believe that journalists are born not made. Which is why they are generally badly-paid, are prepared to sit through council meetings and corporate PR events and will always swing the car round to follow the third siren. After five years away from a newsdesk I was still excited that the tip off I called into my local paper turned into a front page story.
Journalism is the fourth estate (look it up), a cornerstone of democracy, blah blah. But at the heart of all the self-importance is the absolute belief that news matters and opinion is a totally different beast.
Opinion has always been cheap; columnists increased in inverse proportion to the profitability of newspapers. Nothing wrong with cheap (preferably with one of its usual companions: cheerful, chic, and best of all, dirty), but let’s not pretend that it has the value of a real story.
What blogging does brilliantly, of course, is gossip and the uncorroborated. In the early days of t’internet, a news editor at the FT told me that from his perspective virtually everything online was unchecked and uncheckable - and a serious journalist should be very scared of it.
I think the point is that while some journalists may blog, very, very few blogs are journalism. Whether or not they are PR is another story…
Tags: 4th estate, blogging and journalism, Fourth estate, ft
November 12th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Ok, so in a traditional sense very little blogging is journalism.
Bloggers are more like online columnists. Look up “columnist” on the ever-debatable fact source, Wikipedia, and it actually comes pretty close to resembling that of a blogger. And it even has the title “journalist” in there.
If bloggers are not journalists then journalists are not bloggers. But still both parties can be said to work within the other’s sphere… Journalists are blogging away
Maybe we ought just acknowledge blogging as another branch of journalism? Or blogging as the fifth estate? If not true in Land of The Free, this is certainly one plausible interpretation of the blogosphere in repressed China: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinajournal/2008/06/14/chinese-bloggers-really-are-edgy/
November 12th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
This question was being asked four or five years ago. Nowadays, not so much.
November 13th, 2008 at 8:50 am
I too was trained, qualified and certified under the systems in place which make it possible for me to call myself a journalist. But if a “non-qualified” person takes a photo and provides a tip off that’s then used either by the traditional media or uploaded onto that person’s own media (e.g., a blog) are they any less a journalist? In whatever way an “official” journalist looks at it, their work is always circumscribed by the policies and prejudices of their publisher. The blogger has a far greater degree of independence, which doesn’t necessarily mean their work will be either sloppy or inaccurate. And there are a fair few traditional journalists who could be rightly accused of that. The boundaries are blurred and all the better for it.