Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Blogs and Journalism: Are Bloggers Reporters?
Blogs Eating Into The Domain Of Traditional Media
Thanks to Steve Rubel who commented on a report by Peter Johnson in USA Today that viewers and readers are turning increasingly — and more regularly — to the Internet and cable for their news, according to the State Of The News Media Report.
The report also finds that the traditional "journalism of verification" — in which reporters check facts — is ceding ground to a new "journalism of assertion," in which information is offered on radio and cable talk shows and via Internet bloggers, with little or no attempt to verify the facts.
"Blogs and 'so's your mother'-style talk shows are distorting news in America beyond what anyone could have imagined 10 years ago," he says. "The public is finding it more difficult than ever to distinguish between legitimate news and unverified drivel.
The problem is that most news consumers don't realize that mainstream media reporters work within strict policies and guidelines that these other outlets don't require."
Are Bloggers Qualified To Report On News?
Recently a California Superior Court judge ordered three bloggers to reveal confidential sources in a lawsuit brought by Apple Computer, ruling they weren’t protected by the First Amendment, not because they weren’t journalists—that issue the judge did not directly address—but because they published trade secrets.
Readers responding to an online InformationWeek poll showed no consensus on whether bloggers should be given the same legal protections as journalists when protecting confidential sources. One of them commented that “Bloggers have no more rights than anyone else ranting in a public place. To elevate them to the status of 'journalist' makes no more sense than calling anyone who writes a paragraph of gibberish a published author”
As a former journalist who always wrote outside the mainstream (you can read some of my articles here) and was often disgusted by the trash that leading dailies print as reportage I am happy to see the public interest in non-traditional media.
But I have mixed views on blogs and citizen journalism and am not yet ready to form an opinion on bloggers being given the same rights as journalists.
However these comments on BlogCritics (emphasis added) may help to put things in perspective.
Being a blogger doesn't make you a journalist. But neither does having to answer to an editor or publisher. Journalists can be bloggers, and bloggers can be journalists. But the real journalists, regardless of whether or not they hold the accepted credentials, will emerge because of the quality of their work.
There is a disturbing body of evidence that the quality of journalism offers no indication of the size of the audience for the work. Blogs offer at least the potential to change that situation by offering ideas and opinions that do not have to answer to sponsors -- or, for that matter, public opinion. But it remains to be seen if people will take advantage of the diversity of opinion offered by blogs, or if they will simply gravitate to the comfort of the familiar.
