So is Blogging Journalism?
Wednesday, 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…
