Bloggers vs Journalists and Who Cares

January 27, 2008 · Comments

Not a JournalistInspired by this post by RichardatDell, I wanted to bring this out to you again: bloggers aren’t always journalists, and journalists aren’t always bloggers. Some of you don’t really care, and others of you care a little too much. But here’s the thing:

Journalists

Journalists, at least those who have received professional education and training, have responsibilities, have certain skills, and have certain inherent traits assumed about their conduct. The United States, as a nation, uses journalists to keep our government (and to a lesser extent, larger corporations) in check, by vigorously reporting their actions. It is assumed that journalists disclose their biases in specific reporting cases, and that they work towards reporting at least somewhat objectively.

***UPDATE: Just found this great article by Scott Karp about how journalists need to better understand the web. Thought it applied.***

Bloggers

Some bloggers tend to work with journalistic standards in mind. Others are trained journalists. Still more are professional journalists have come into blogging out of necessity.

And then there are the rest of us.

Plenty of bloggers, like me, just use this medium to write what we think and feel. You’ll note that my site is fairly light on “research” in the traditional sense. I read the bejeesus out of the blogosphere, but I don’t go out and research and ask three hundred people to answer surveys. I don’t attempt objectivity. I don’t attempt to be unbiased. I do disclose as often as I can or remember to do so. But I’m not a journalist.

I don’t want to be a journalist. I think they’re great people, some of them, and I respect them, some of them, but I sure don’t need to be a journalist to tell you what I think. I share. I inform. I query. But I sure don’t intend to represent anything as a journalist.

Who Cares?

There are times for journalists. I like that they’re out there keeping government and corporations in their sites. I’m hopeful that they continue to deliver value. I want them in our lives.

But I’m also excited for the velocity, the facility, and the ubiquity that bloggers bring to information sharing. I love that bloggers are abound, embedded in our communities, ready to share information at the drop of a hat. I’m grateful that there are networks of us sharing information, reposting information, and driving insight into the various corners of what we’re passionate about.

Without these millions of bloggers, we’d be missing some interesting things. Because we can take these tools to use for ourselves, we have a powerful opportunity to try new things, to learn about things that might be overlooked by others who are following different incentives than some bloggers have. Because of all this information, we have the ability to learn more, share faster, and discover new opportunities.

At times like that, I don’t care which hat you wear. Thanks for helping me find something interesting out there.

What do you think?

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  • What do I think? I think there is something to be said for accreditation.....

    go where you will with that comment....
  • Great post, Chris.

    Much of my work these days involves helping journalists and news orgs wrap their brains around the internet. Seems to me that the people most concerned with drawing black-and-white distinctions between bloggers and journalists are (surprise surprise) mainstream journalists who feel blindsided and threatened by the shifting media landscape.

    Hey, change is never easy, and even many of those folks are slowly coming around.
  • Chris, one of the biggest differences between journalists and most bloggers is journalists have editors and publishers and most bloggers don't.


    Who Cares? Any PR person and corporate communications person worth their salt should care.

    I'll hit this issue more deeply this week as a follow up to my Target PR Misses Mark blog http://tinyurl.com/2qh8l9, but anyone with the ability to reach and influence other people within their target audiences is someone a PR person should know about for their client or company.

    This is also why I have blogged about and been cited http://tinyurl.com/292rfe
    for saying that understanding social media requires political communication skills because social media is similar to grassroots organizations.

    Who Cares? If I'm going to be interviewed I'd want a snapshot about the person, journalist. blogger, radio show host, whoever. What have they done related to my issue, company, political leanings, etc. Who listens, or reads them - both numbers of people and type. Let me see a couple of pieces they have done, perhaps I want to reference them in my conversation.

    Yup everyone should care. Those people that do there job well should get treated with mutual respect and with every consideration. Everyone must prioritize their time, from CEOs to PR people, knowing about the person making an inquiry of your time I think is essential.


    PS: Elizabeth Grattan, you are right on the mark about accreditation, ask anyone struggling with that question at the Democratic and Republican political conventions. Who gets in and who doesn't. BTW Eric Pfeiffer was the first accredited blogger to access the White House press room. http://www.blogpi.net/who-was-the-first-white-h...
  • Chris, first of all, great post. Before I went into PR I spent several years as a journalist and am a little bit jaded when it comes to the assumption that journalists are truly crusaders for good. Well, not journalists, but the publications for which they write. This, however, does not negate your very good insight.

    I too believe that the people at large do benefit from the existence of journalists and bloggers. While it used to frustrate me that all it took was some HTML code for someone to call him- or herself a writer, I think once sifting through all of the noise there are definitely blogs that can be more informative or thought-provoking than a lot of the editorial board sanitized news articles that come to us through more traditional news venues.

    But this still begs the question, to me: "Does the existence of bloggers put journalists in jeopardy? Is there truly a need for both in the eyes of the general information consumer?" It's true that most journalists have access to information and events that many non-hybrid bloggers do. But aside from that, are readers truly discerning between the two or are the lines blurring? And if the lines are blurring, which is the voice that will come out clearer in the end?

    These questions are rhetorical, for the most part, but if anyone reading this cares to share opinions on the matter I'd love to read. My brain spins on the subject often.

    Again, Chris, thanks for the insight.
  • Chris,

    I usually explain to my friends and clients who have no idea of what a blog is (there are more of them than of "us," at least over age 35 or so) that it's like writing magazine articles, only you own, design, and run your own magazine, too. This kinda helps, and unlike most newspapers many mags do tend to be more biased.

    It's probably more accurate to say that it's a lot like writing your own editorials every day, because on the editorial page every knows you get to rant, favor something, hype your own point of view, etc.

    Good article as always. Thanks!

    Regards,

    Kelly
  • Chris-

    Important topic!

    You said: "It is assumed that journalists disclose their biases in specific reporting cases, and that they work towards reporting at least somewhat objectively."

    I think that this was once true, but I think that most people do not trust journalists anymore. Too many journalists and their bosses only care about ratings and selling papers/magazines. Some will cross the lines of objectivity to advance their biases...and while this is most likely a small number.... it ruins it for everyone.

    If journalists want to rescue their image then the rest of them need to draw a line in the sand and call out those who act in a bad way...but they NEVER do this. They gloss over the cases of yellow journalism.

    As for bloggers, many do far worse things than the bad journalists, but it is not a "profession" in the same scheme of things. In some ways, bloggers hold journalists in check the same you your claim that journalists hold the government and corporations in check.

    There are some bloggers who have achieved the readerships equal to news organizations and are morphing into amazing media outlets. This is fun to watch cuz it is a front row seat to a changing world (Arrianna Huffington's Huffington Post and Om Malik's GigaOm are just two examples of blogs that are now more than blogs).

    People who read blogs forget that the medium is only a few years old, compared to centuries of "journalism". Blogs are in 2nd grade on their way to a PhD, so there is still a long path ahead before this topic can be discussed in full.

    thom
  • Some journalists tend to be defensive because the quality of blogging is so variable and the tent is so big. Is LJ a blog that could be compared with Huffington Post as journalistic content?

    But my standard reposte to journalists who tell me that blogging isn't journalistic because the standards are so variable is to point them at the tens of thousands of small town newspapers now on the web.

    Talk about variability and lack of standards!

    These small papers used to be invisible to the journalistic elite. But now they make the idea of online newspaper as broad a category, in quality, as blog. Many include not much more than wire reports, opinion, and gossip.

    Placeblogging arose to try to *improve* the quality of local reporting.

    So it depends where you live on the food chain, I suppose.
  • I just wrote a couple of days ago about how old school journalists are the best poised to succeed in the blogosphere if they can get over their fear/hatred of it.
  • Interesting topic. What happens if a blogger, acting as a "journalist" investigates something about a company, discovers something through an anonymous source and then is compelled, should that blogger have traditional journalistic protections?

    I would argue that bloggers' biases are generally more transparent than those of news organizations. Sure, everyone knows that the New York Times and Fox News have their own set, but do they disclose them themselves, or do the bloggers hold them in check and make the disclosures for them through discovery?

    Some bloggers are journalists, some journalists are bloggers and some journalists have no business calling themselves either.
  • I think the difference should be that journalists report the facts from as many sides as they can seek out on a story and bloggers give their opinion of the story with as many facts and links to related opinions.

    Once upon a time a professional journalist was a respected and often ethical seeker of stories to present to a public that demanded honesty above all. Perhaps, as Jello Biafra says, we are just nostalgic for an era that never really happened.

    The role of 'journalist' has changed in this modern world of corporate owned mega-media. Now the 'journalist' is told what side to present the story from and people like Ted Turner admit that they write with the advertiser in mind rather than the public.

    Even the government has been busted with presenting 'propaganda' as 'journalism' and many 'news' stories are not written by journalists at all but by corporate copywriters and then given to news sources to read or print as if it was written by a journalist.

    But in terms of semantics, a journalist is one who reports on a story (presumably after researching it) and a blogger is someone who writes in a blog. A journalist can be a blogger but a blogger isn't necessarily a journalist.
  • Daz -- Technically, a journalist is someone who researches a story, but most journalists are using no more than the available open sources I use when researching a blog article. I have called news sources, attended press conferences, and done all the bits a journalist would do.

    I do not, as someone pointed out, have an editor. However, I would tend to say that my *readers* are my editors -- if I get something wrong, it's far more transparent in the comment stream than it would be in a 1/4 column inch correction or letters to the editor days later.
  • Thoughts from an actual sometime journalist:

    This is a false dichotomy.

    A blog is a medium, not a type of writing.
    Someone is a blogger because they write in a blog.
    It is unfortunate that we now consider a blogger as some different type of writer than one who works on paper or elsewhere.

    Writing in a blog can be as neutral and as fact-based as what we hope for in other forms of journalism or it can be as opinionated and non-fact-based as it wants -- or it can be somewhere in between

    Whatever it is, it depends on building trust with the reader. That trust comes in a number of different ways. If you want to be known as a reliable source than you make your writing as accurate and fact-based as you can. On the other hand, I have a blog where I make fun of things -- news events, business, marketing -- I build trust with my readers by being funny. I make it very clear that what they are getting is opinion only inadvertently laced with facts.

    The big difference between a journalist with credentials and someone who doesn't have those credentials is this:

    The former has a branded venue and was hired to work there because his or her employer thinks he or she has the needed expertise to write for them. The latter is a writer who works without someone else’s brand certification.

    Being a long-time journalist, it's not surprising that I have a bias in favor of brand certified writers. However, I do not think that certification means a writer is either better or worse than someone without it. It just means he or she is more experienced. Journalists make a lot of mistakes and people who are not or have not been paid to be journalists find and tell a lot of very good, fact-based stories.

    The wonderful thing about this interwebs with all its tubes and blogs is now everyone has a chance to find an audience for their writing. A lot of people are also finding out what journalists have a lot of experience with -- your credibility is your most important asset and it is always on the line.
  • Shava Nerad

    I don't necessarily buy the idea that a reader is an editor. A true editor's goal it is to get the facts right, or to see that a story may be balanced. In larger media organizations they also have fact checkers.

    Readers may have agendas and those are hidden and not transparent. the fact that someone has a different point of view or can site where there is an error in your blog post does not make it transparent.
  • Albert says: "A true editor’s goal it is to get the facts right, or to see that a story may be balanced."

    I teach media literacy to 7th to 12th graders. They're savvy kids, well before I get to them. These kids don't believe in facts in the same way their elders do. They know that statistics are manipulated, that facts are reported selectively, that the criteria for comparisons are often apples and oranges. They don't believe in one balanced or factual story. They believe in comparing multiple sources.

    My job tends to be to convince them that civic engagement still has meaning in this largely free-floating, relativistic, postmodern world of theirs.

    I don't think that the next generation of media consumers is going to find your definition of editor as a critical differentiation between establishment and civic media.

    As to fact checking, these are the same kids who assume that wikipedia has their facts straight because so many people with interests in a topic check and modify its content. It gives a whole new meaning to consensus reality.

    Editorial control and fact checking will not sell this generation on corporate media -- rather the opposite. For good or ill.

    My first real paycheck was from a newspaper -- I've written for a half dozen or so, and none of my editors had much issue with the quality of my work. None of them were "larger" media, and none of them had more than cursory fact checking.

    If I could, what I'd do was create a social blogging site with newsroom resources (fact checking, research, librarian) for bloggers-by-invitation and bloggers-by-rating. And we'd provide resources to educate young bloggers in journalistic standards and ethics.

    You're right, bloggers do miss newsroom resources, and even more *education*. But most of the young newsroom staff today are being hired with marcom, not journalism backgrounds (anecdotally, admittedly, from professionals at the last Media Giraffe conference).

    Journalists tend to dismiss bloggers as expressing opinion. But they respect columnists as experts. What's the difference between my blog and a NYT columnist? Pay.
  • one thing I like about blogs over 'news sources' is that I can usually comment without having to join a certain community or group. I'm done having to sign up and be on a mailing list just to leave a comment.
  • This is an interesting subject given the ethical question that Mark Cuban posits on his blog.
    http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/01/23/is-this-...

    He was interviewed by a journalist for GQ who happens to also blog for Valleywag. Long story short, Cuban's PO'd that the guy used interview material for GQ on the Valleywag blog.
    http://valleywag.com/347396/why-no-rich-techie-...

    The guy in question doesn't seem to think he did anything wrong. Who's right? Does it matter?
  • I think all of our comments have just supported Chris' initial comment of "who cares?" Just within this blog, there are at least five definitions of blogger and journalist, and both are equally subjective. Well, maybe journalist a little less subjective than blogger.

    I do feel, however, that regardless of your title -- whether it be blogger, journalist, analyst or monkey trainer -- if you voice your opinion in a public medium you hold YOURSELF to a certain level of credibility. Someone earlier said that journalists are more research focused whereas bloggers are more opinionated. True, but there's nothing stopping bloggers from doing their own research and ensuring that they are wrapping their blogs around facts. Dave Fleet made an excellent point in a blog the other day that explored the accountability of bloggers (http://fleetstreetpr.com/2008/01/fact-check-bef...) and he makes an excellent point.

    I think, over time, it's not going to be a "who will survive game" between journalists and bloggers. It will be a situation in which the most credible, research-focused and timely news communicators will remain at the top -- whether they are bloggers or journalists. The only question in that is, what is the vehicle if the imbalanced media outlets eventually are driven out of print?

    This is a bit more tangential than I would've liked, but I'm going to own it. Regardless, I think the lessons of Michael J. Parenti (http://www.michaelparenti.org/InventingReality....) apply in every case. And that is, in the end the readers decide who has the loudest voice, the corporations and advertisers be damned.
  • I'm still pushing for accreditation. As I mentioned on the twitter page:

    ...all opinions are pressed down and poured out for good measure…weighted regardless. as it should be. accreditation matters.


    Shava: I respectfully disagree. The difference between a columnist and a blogger spans beyond pay. There really is a process of proving credibility and audience...and of course, revenue being generated.

    And I wouldn't consider "readers" editors. Ever.

    Again, I just believe the main point regarding the issue is, and will remain accreditation.

    Con von Hoffman is spot on when stating this dilemma as a false dichotomy. It is. And the link to the very unethical blog done by the GQ journalist ought to show this well.

    That journalist was granted the interview based on his credentials as a journalist. Not a blogger. That he blogged in addition didn't change that. (while certainly unethical on the part of the journalist and naive on the part of the person being interviewed).

    Nothing has changed much in this discussion but for the means men (and women) are reaching an audience. Anyone who wants to stand on a soap box can. They always could. The only difference now is that everyone's got access to the megaphone, and some even have amps and mics. Some are drawing a crowd, and some are simply catering to the small minority that is the peanut gallery. But it's still just folks wanting a platform to sound byte something about something to anybody who will listen.

    The main difference, who would you buy a ticket to see standing on that soapbox? And would content be enough? Would the size of the crowd matter? Would their experience? Training?

    There are so many factors that come into play when deciding just what voice we actually care to hear...who cares if it's a journalist or blogger?

    The journalist does. The blogger ought to.

    Or they might as well step down from their soapbox and save the mic for those who actually feel they have something important to say....

    imo.

    :)
  • Chris:

    Last night I chose to unplug early, but before I did I read your blog and as I ritually do I wrote out my thoughts.

    I wanted to share them with you and your readers: http://www.faleafine.com/?p=26

    Aloha,
    NEENZ
  • some great additional perspectives, thanks for that.

    In some respects, Chris, you are right, it doesnt matter and both is good.

    I just wanted to speak up for bloggers who write what they think, feel and believe with no notion of being the "journalist"...and I think that is very powerful in its own right.
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