Blogging is journalism and so are you [Schooling]
The proposition is Blogging is not journalism.
Before I answer the question we should define both blogging and journalism.
Blog - A contraction of the term weblog, a blog is a web site with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, links to other websites, graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order with the latest entry being the highest.
Journalism - Journalism is a business that produces content for an audience to consume, it then sells advertising bundled with that content. Journalists are expected to use facts to describe events, ideas, or issues that are relevant to the audience.
Asking whether blogging is journalism is like asking if a newspaper, magazine or newscast is journalism. Journalism isn’t defined by its format. Great journalism could be carved into stone tablets.
A better way to frame it is like this; blogging can be journalism just as newspapers, magazines and newscasts can be journalism.
Let’s bring up some of my fave blogs from the Technorati Top 100;
- The Huffington Post - The well known internet newspaper
- TechCrunch - A popular blog about new internet products and businesses
- icanhazcheezburger - Home of the lolcats
- Gawker - The new New York Times
- The Unofficial Apple Web Blog ie. TUAW
These are some of the most popular blogs on the internet. All except icanhazcheezburger could be classified as journalistic in nature.
As a format, blogging is proving to be quite popular. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report;
- 95% of newspaper web sites have blogs
- 133 million blog records indexed by Technorati since 2002
- 900,000 blog posts in 24 hours
Blogging is not only journalism, it is one of the most important developments in the history of publishing ever.
To quote Jay Rosen who is part of the Faculty of Journalism at NYU (Click his name to check out his bio)
“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, and blogging means practically anyone can own one.”
With the means of production in the hands of the audience the power has shifted and Big Media has yet to realize and embrace this concept.
Big mainstream media companies ignored the internet as long as they could. When they finally realized that this whole internet thing wasn’t just a fad they were way behind the curve.
Bloggers embraced the new medium and as a result found a way of producing content that works with the medium. Two major things that bloggers and the blogsophere do well that the mainstream media do not are linking and commenting.
LINKS
Jay Rosen of Press Think calls it the ethic of the link. Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine calls it the link economy. Other people call it the link layer. Watch this video and find out what I’m talking about.
Jay Rosen of NYU on the ethic of the link
Bloggers embraced this idea while the mainstream media still pretty much turns its nose up at it. Who do you think serves their online audience better?
The most popular news site on the internet is the Drudge Report. All the Drudge Report is, is links to stories.
COMMENTS
If you go to any blog at the bottom of each entry is the ability to comment.
If you go to the Calgary Herald, you cannot comment on stories, only on opinion pieces or specialized blogs. However in my limited research the community is sparse and comments are few and far between.
Dan GIllmor, the founder of founder of Grassroots Media Inc. famously coined the phrase (and I’m loosely quoting here); news as a conversation instead of a lecture.
David Siffry, the co-founder of Technorati sums up how the blogosphere works.
“People trust The New York Times and Washington Post and link to them,” Sifry says, “but there are a huge number of people who are going outside the bounds of traditional media to these new media forms to get their information and, more importantly, to participate in the discussions around news and topics.”
He says we shouldn’t be too surprised by the results, which reflect a shift in user behavior that has been taking place for some time. The idea of the Web as a place where we randomly surf for news or conduct task-oriented hunt-and-peck Web searches has given way to a new metaphor: the Web as virtual corner bar, where community and conversations reign.
“The Web is not chiefly about a library or a news stand,” Sifry says. “You have to start thinking about the Web as this humongous event stream. The Web is a set of ongoing conversations that weave together into this new kind of omnipresent social fabric.”
From J.D. Lasica @ Social Media
However the proposition begs the unnecessary and useless question: are bloggers real journalists. Jay Rosen addresses this ultimately pointless exercise.
“To put it that way is unnecessarily antagonistic. But it’s worse than that. It’s reductive, and smart people have been calling it that for years. Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon and a technology-aware writer, said it back in 2002:
“Typically, the debate about blogs today is framed as a duel to the death between old and new journalism. Many bloggers see themselves as a Web-borne vanguard, striking blows for truth-telling authenticity against the media-monopoly empire. Many newsroom journalists see bloggers as wannabe amateurs badly in need of some skills and some editors.
This debate is stupidly reductive — an inevitable byproduct of (I’ll don my blogger-sympathizer hat here) the traditional media’s insistent habit of framing all change in terms of a “who wins and who loses?” calculus. The rise of blogs does not equal the death of professional journalism. The media world is not a zero-sum game. Increasingly, in fact, the Internet is turning it into a symbiotic ecosystem — in which the different parts feed off one another and the whole thing grows.”
Mark Hamilton is a blogger and journalism instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver, BC. His blog is called Notes From a Teacher. Mark started it as a way to connect with students and as extension of his classroom. However he quickly realized that his students weren’t reading it and starting writing for a more general audience.
Mark has been blogging since 2003 and he gets about 150 unique visits a day and has about 300 subscribers.
Mark is an excellent aggregator and filter and he quite frequently posts what he calls squibs. A collection of links to sites or posts that he has been reading.
Here’s a short Q & A
DK - Are bloggers “real” journalists
MH - “Some of them. The vast majority of them no, most of them don’t want to be journalists. There are some bloggers who do journalism occasionally, some who do it more regularly.”
Since Mark mainly reads media blogs he brought up examples of bloggers who could be considered journalists; Jay Rosen, Scott Karp, Allan Mutter.
DK - What do blogs do well that newspapers don’t?
MH - “Not a question of well but different. Blogs connect with readers in a different way. Media connects with readers mostly because of authority, blogs connect with readers mostly because of their voice.”
Mark doesn’t believe there is a single answer out there. He doesn’t look at the internet as a new medium. Instead looking at it as a collection of mediums. He believes in a new mediascape where there is a combination of things we are very familiar with ie. newspapers, newscasts, etc. and innovative new web technology ie. Twitter, Youscreen etc. What we have now is a whole new idea of what mass media is.
DK - Do you believe that the freedom of the press belongs equally to the amateur and the professional?
MH – “Definitely. We all have the right to free speech. What goes with that is the ethics that professional journalists adhere to should also apply to the amateur journalist.”
DK - Why do blogs link so much and newspapers link so little or not all?
MH - Newspapers still have this fear of driving people away. They still have this concept as the publication as the voice of authority. The link is the basis of the world wide web. There was a recent report out there that stating that the Drudge Report is the most popular news site on the internet. All he does is link and he makes millions of dollars”
DK - Why do blogs have comments while most Canadian newspapers don’t?
MH - “That comes back to the link economy. Dan Gilmour’s phrase “news is a conversation.” On most stories there isn’t a definitive end point. Most newspapers that understand the web are doing comments now and in some ways that just an extension of letters to the editor. That’s still something that newspapers are trying to figure out.”
DK - How do you deal with comments on your site?
MH - I will go in and remove the obvious spam and the ones that are tasteless.
DK - What’s the learning curve for blogging?
MH - The learning curve is one of the shallower curves out there. Through a service like Wordpress or Blogger you can literally be blogging in minutes. The hardest thing is finding your voice, finding your topic and sticking with it. For journalists, in particular young journalists blogging is great, it forces you to write all the time, to defend, to sharpen, to network. It also gives you a body of work. It’s also a dangerous thing if you maintain a blog full of party pictures or rants and raves”
He added;
“It’s the most exciting time to be a young journalist despite the uncertainty. Mainstream media might be in decline but journalism isn’t. The tools we have to tell our stories are amazing.”
LINKS
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/07/28/the-imperatives-of-the-link-economy/
http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/