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Friday, January 28, 2005
Journalists are Webified
A lot of people apparently never got the word that the blog-vs.-journalism debate was over. I’m reading more commentaries by journalists now than I was before the end of the issue was proclaimed. The latest comes from Slate editor-at-large Jack Shafer, published in today’s National Post. Shafer has no issue with bloggers, only the notion that somehow they represent the end of traditional journalism.
Shafer notes that all new media are additive. Radio didn’t kill newspapers and television didn’t spell the end of radio. The only news delivery channel that hasn’t survived is the movie theater newsreel, he writes. Further, he adds, traditional journalists aren’t exactly clueless about the new medium:
With the exception of the “metro” section reporter covering a 12-car pile-up on the freeway, I think most practising journalists today are as Webby as any blogger you care to name. Journalists have had access to broadband connections for longer than most civilians, and nearly every story they tackle begins with a Web dump of essential information from Google or a proprietary database. They conduct interviews via e-mail, download official documents from .gov sites, check facts and monitor the competition—including blogs—the whole while. When every story starts on the Web, and every story can be stripped to its digital bits and pumped through wires and over the air, we’re all Web journalists.
At the New Communications Forum that ended yesterday, a group discussion wound up focused for a while on the journalism-blogger distinctions. ProfNet’s Dan Forbush suggested that reporters naturally seek comment from any individual or institution they write about while most bloggers just attack without providing an opportunity for the target to respond. I’ve also noted that journalists confirm information with at least two additional sources before going to press. Journalists may not actually be objective, but by training they strive for objectivity. Journalists have editors to check their facts and play devil’s advocate before an article goes to press. They follow up on stories. They have professional standards by which they are expected to abide, standards their readers naturally expect they’re living up to. (You never check a newspaper by-line to see if you’re reading a reporter you can trust, but each blog’s credibility is based on your experience with that particular blogger.) And, of course, the institutions for which they work are able to focus resources on a story that are unavailable to the unofficial affiliation of bloggers.
None of which is to suggest that bloggers won’t have a role to play in the delivery of news and information. But, like radio and television, blogs are an addition to the media mix and will not be a replacement. If only that realization were enough to put an end to the debate.
