I am a journalist who blogs. But are all bloggers journalists? I don’t think so, but there is a good post on it from the non-journo blogger’s perspective here.
UPDATE: Given the popularity of this post, I should have added that I think it depends on how you define “bloggers”. I think the word is inadequate to encompass all that is now carried on under the rubric of blogging. I have written on this before.
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… and further to that should journalists have a mortgage over the public discussion? or has the conduct of most – sensationalist, cynically maniuplative, populist – modern journalism undermined that claim?
@jonathan, of course journos shouldn’t have the sole mortgage over public discussion, and they never have.
However it’s not just the behaviour of journalists that have weakened their claim. (I’d also argue that it’s not most journalists who are sensationalist, cynical etc… just a few high profile ones and more than a few owners, but that’s not the point. )
The biggest factor in widening the discourse has been lower barriers to entry.
Now, instead of needing access to a printing press or a broadcast tower, if you’ve got the ability, time and motivation you’re almost on equal par with professional commentators. That means people more people with direct, ongoing experience with the subject they’re talking about are more easily heard. While some journalists and commentators do have detailed knowledge of their subject, huge numbers don’t. So when somebody who knows their beans and has a talent for communication speaks out, it puts journalists and commentators who only have a part-time association with the facts and nuances to shame.
all very true Fergus. I think one of the saddest things in my time in journalism (a VERY long time indeed) has been the erosion of newsroom expertise. It’s simply not valued any longer, perhaps because it usually comes attached to someone senior on a significant pay packet. Most newsrooms are filled with well-intentioned but harried young folk battling each day to apply instant expertise across a diverse handful of yarns. It’s hard to see how that offers social value.
I’m not sure which has been worse for the reputation of journalism, the sensationalists or the sweatshops. Active vs. passive shallowness?
Curiously, this sort of chat often sounds like what you long for is to actually run those newspapers. Not so much a bitch about standards as a sense of rejection. Jonathan was in there a long time and seems to have been overpaid? And now he’s in a sweatshop? Or something/
really, isn’t this just another insider bitch? people don’t really do anything other than buy the journalism they like and the sad fact is that too many incumbents have been wanking, as old Max Suich said in The Age.
last thing i’d want to run is a newspaper. and this, dewey is no sweatshop
My idea of sweatshop in this instance would be a room full of kids indelicately rephrasing press releases (which were written by rooms full of kids indelicately describing things they didn’t understand in the first place).
UPDATE: Given the popularity of this post, I should have added that I think it depends on how you define “bloggers”. I think the word is inadequate to encompass all that is now carried on under the rubric of blogging. I have written on this before. http://www.creative.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=229836
Jeff thinks it’s sweaty re-writng press releases. Whereas I reckon it’s sweaty writing one-sided malicious crap about lots of people you don’t know.
Thank you for the link Margaret! We are indeed living in a very exciting time filled with plenty of change and grey areas.
You bring up a good point too in what is a “blogger”. In one of my blogs, a focus is weight management, and there are plenty of lose weight quick affiliate and internet marketers, as well as spammers who use blog platforms to sell their wares. Am I the same as them? No way.
I do believe too that bloggers can learn plenty from journalists especially the bloggers who want to get their content featured or syndicated by mainstream publications.
Yes, my take is that blogging, Cit-J etc etc will become increasingly important – but that journalistic skills should not be underestimated, and are still needed.
Disaggregation. Professional guild. Closed shop v addictive democracy. Affluence. Power. Revolving door. 1st, 2nd, 4th estates. Sea rise!
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In a more digestible form: I’m interested in who exercises power in society – something about being an 8th child. One giant serving of leftovers. I see journalism as a power construct (just as I see lawyers as the product of sausage machines with precious few having any real ideals at the far end.)
There are criteria and forms and style to prove you are or aren’t ‘the thing’, but it’s pretty superficial stuff depending on mysterious but really hierarchical power relations. Style trumps substance in most situations. Right clothes. Right contacts. Right job title. Everything has an exception, everything reversible, and standards maleable if you are the right person with the right timing and of course money. As they say at law school there is no right or wrong answer only how you argue. (Not for nothing do law firms have expensive impressionist indefinable art works on their walls as they turn the meaning of things to their client’s purpose.)
Only good science is not really like that. Water really does boil and scold at high temperatures. Your can’t argue out of or be voyeuristic about gravity as you fall from the WTC. That’s science. The subjective moving feast of big media and big law/government is slamming up against the limits of the eco-system. Hard science. Blogging may be just one expression of the umpire’s reality check, or as someone said – the Wank of big media.
I mean I don’t get that itch to write a blog if I see ‘good’ coverage and ‘good’ work in traditional media. Rather I think – that’s done. That’s a decent first draft of history.
I see blogging in terms of power redistribution in the sense that Justice Michael Kirby notes the traditional media wallow in power and influence including personal affluence. How else to comprehend a blimp like Akerman. Remember Bulworth where the Warren Beatty character interrupts the political interview on camera and says in effect – get real, I’m rich, you’re rich, you aren’t going to ask the right questions.’
But I also note a brief section of Nelson Mandela’s book ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ (I haven’t read the one after he got out of prison) where he refers to an activist’s work to read the press not simply to get a view of what is happening (debatable) but in particular to get an idea of what everyone else thinks is ‘happening”. In short what the group think is – at least in general.
One big factor not really analysed that I’ve seen is what happens when there is no group think in a widely distributed aggregation of small audiences? Plethora of minor and micro parties like the Shooters? (Yuk). Worse case scenario – civil war? If the ABC is the town square, what happens when there are 10 x 10 town squares? Or more like 10K x 10K? That’s a heavy responsibility for bloggers to grapple with.
In short I see blogging as the desire for freedom of information.
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On another tangent altogether – I heard recently that sad story about the UK journo who wanted to refuse an assignment in Africa as unsafe but was too worried about losing her job. She was killed. What this tragedy says to me is that literally, reporters are more scared of losing their job than of dying. In that case I thought what hope is there really of journalists not being manipulated by their owners or self censoring? As a generalisation anyway. This comforts me somehow as I go from one grovel job to the next and tell successive employers to shove it, but it mostly saddens me for the integrity of the 4th estate.
I think this is a topic that journalists stress about, most bloggers couldn’t give a toss. Why do journalists assume that bloggers all aspire to be journalists?
@Trevor But who wouldn’t want to be a journalist! Good point though. Journalism, whatever the f that is, may not be the only means to the end.