A blogversation
Evan Dawson of WHAM 13 has invited me, Rotten, and Ontario Republican to have a “blogversation” about the blogs and journalism.
First question from Evan:
I’ll start with a question: Do you consider yourselves journalists?
I have an answer to that question, but I prefer to get your views first. But here’s some context for why I ask: Pew Research shows that blog reading (and news blog reading in particular) has gone up markedly every year since 2004. In a future post on this subject I’ll list the blogs I read daily, but suffice to say, some of the most significant reporting is now coming from blogs. You can point to Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who recently won a Polk for reporting on his blog (Ontario, are you as impressed with Josh’s award as his progressive fans are?).
My answer:
Some of what I do at RochesterTurning is journalism but most of it isn’t. I don’t follow the same rules that a journalist does. I make little effort to be impartial and I don’t follow the same kinds of rules about sources and so on that a serous journalist should. And I don’t do that much original research. I would like to do more but I don’t have time.
Interestingly, though, I think I have better sources than most actual political journalists do locally. I think that’s because I run pretty much every interesting tip I get if I have a strong reason to believe that is correct (if I’m not completely sure, I will add a caveat to the post). Journalists can’t do this — unless they have blogs (!) — since a lot of this stuff is too brief to make into into article.
In the end, though, I’m not one of those bloggers who believe that bloggers can exist without professional reporters. Most of what I write about is things I have read in the D&C or on the Politico (or on CQ or The Hill or the WHAM blog or whatever). A lot of what I am doing is digesting and repackaging others’ reporting. I think that readers find that very helpful. I know that I find Josh Marshall’s (and others’) repackaging of national reporting extremely helpful myself.
Related posts:
I like your answer. I don’t consider you to be a journalist, although some of the things you do come very close to journalism. But your last paragraph is the key point to me … the analysis I find in blogs, the big picture where they consolidate several stories, has mostly gone missing from mainstream media. If it wasn’t for blogs, I wouldn’t know the connection between the Iraq War and our country’s economic woes. If it wasn’t for blogs, I would know the connection between the I-35W bridge collapse and conservative policies. And on and on and on. To me, that is the primary benefit I get out of reading blogs.
That’s what I see as the primary benefit too. The great work TPM did with the US Attorney purge was a case in point.
I wonder if Evan Dawson’s “blogversation” should include some avid readers of blogs as well. Seems to me these readers represent a large and growing audience that is looking for something that they’re not finding among the major news media outlets.
A lot of the standard media (all of them?) have an institutional view that sometimes hampers good reporting, in my opinion. Bloggers aren’t afraid to say what the facts are, are not afraid of offending the politicians, etc., so you get more honesty, in my opinion.
Blogs are also faster in terms of data transmission because they don’t have an editor who must pre-approve the story. Blogs are just free that way.
What Exile said about putting in the caveat if a story is not rock solid is an example of that type of freedom that readers crave. I don’t think blog readers mind that type of caveat as long as it’s spelled out in the post.
Some of the things that we do at RT aren’t things a newspaper could do. I think that probably newspapers should move in the direction of blogs but only go a quarter of the way or so. They could use more informality and transparency but they probably need to have stricter standards of what they run than we do.
It would be great if the mainstream media could learn from blogs the same way that we learn from them.
I see that at with younger reporters but not so much with the older more established ones.
That’s an interesting idea. I’ll talk to Evan about that.
Right on, GA! Seems to me that there was a time in our country when journalists weren’t afraid of saying what the facts and they they didn’t care who they offended. Remember the Watergate stories by Woodward and Bernstein? Remember the Pentagon Papers? Remember when the good old D&C used to regularly endorse most Democrats and the Rethuglicans eventually boycotted the whole process? Seems like we have moved far away from that. Now, we see the NY Times and others providing cover for lying about a war, we see the NY Times for holding onto stories out of fear that they will affect an election, and the D&C editorial board goes out of their way to achieve “faux balance”.
I think the D&C has allowed itself to bullied by local Republicans at the editorial level.
The D&C has also allowed itself through it’s “Story Chat” entries to become the worst gutter level example of hatred I have ever witnessed in my life. For them to allow the posting of some of the comments has forced me to boycott the D&C forums and story chat areas. They need to do something…
…speaking of which on WHEC-TV 10 this morning, they announced that they have SHUT DOWN their forums as a result of the hatred that was displayed by participants, and that they could no longer allow it to continue.
Kudos to Channel 10 for having the courage to shut down and non-facilitate the racism, discrimination, hatred and down right criminal conduct that was being displayed in their forums.
Too bad (as usual) the D&C is always late for the bus.
I was thinking specifically of Woodward and Bernstein. I think some of the hesitance we see in traditional media is about the almighty dollar. They are businesses who have to feed the bottom line.
Blogs are free.
I think Paige nailed it above - blogs can carry truthful, accurate information. Bloggers aren’t sucking up to politicians, developing relationships that prevent critical analysis of reporting. One of the biggest examples that comes to my mind is the reporters “embedded” in Iraq. When there are preconditions on what can and can’t be reported, you can’t trust any of it.
Just a well-deserved ‘Kudos’ to RT for providing a much appreciated soapbox for those of us on the fringes of society.
I’m a 53-year old Status Mohawk of the Six Nations of the Grand River (Canada), a dual-citizen (CDN/U.S.) living in the Rochester area (315er) and committed Green Party member in both Canada and the States.
There aren’t many of my demographic around here and RT has listened where others have merely snickered. Nia:wen!
Kwe friend! Niawen for your kind words!
I’ve never even looked at the Channel 10 forums, but it’s key for MSM to build community on their websites, so I’ll bet that they re-tool and try again.
The D&C just changed forum providers. They had outsourced their forumns to Topix, a company that monitors forums for overt violations of terms of service, but doesn’t do much to build community. Now they’re running the forums themselves using a tool called Pluck.
The key dynamic is whether reporters will comment on the new forums, and I’ve seen one do so.
Exile, I actually think they’re learning pretty quickly for a very traditional corporation. The D&C is moving to incorporate more blogging and social networking into their web site. So I see them moving towards a couple of different tiers of news - reader blogs / chats, D&C sponsored blogs, and the “vetted”, editor-approved official news.
I still get the feeling that most of the older newsies ignore blogs as a matter of principle, though.
Gutter isn’t a strong enough word.
There’s obviously a fine line between free speech and hate speech, in my mind the D&C crosses that line when they allow comments about “ghetto trash” to stand.
[...] I posted a response to a question from Channel 13’s Evan Dawson about whether or not bloggers are journalists.ÂÂ [...]
I couldn’t agree more about the D&C Freeper Chat. I wish we could mount a counter offensive, but at the same time it is probably a waste of time.