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July 08, 2005BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Journalists vs. Bloggers
Ever since bloggers took their rightful spot in the limelight of the Information Age, media folk have vigorously debated whether bloggers are journalists.
Jay Rosen of PressThink proclaimed that debate "over" in a January essay he submitted for the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference at Harvard University, but I decided to add my voice to the debate today anyway. The venue: a Heritage Foundation roundtable that focused on the relationship between journalists and bloggers.
Mark Tapscott of Heritage's Center for Media and Public Policy hosted the event and already has begun blogging about it at Tapscott's Copy Desk. The other panelists were Ed Morrissey of the Captain's Quarters blog and Jim Hill, managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
Here is the proverbial nut graph of my speech: "Instead of being part of the Fourth Estate, [bloggers] are part of something new. I call it Estate 4.5 -- a nod both to the profession whose excesses galvanized many bloggers and to the medium they use. Bloggers are like inspectors general, the independent watchdogs of government. Just as IGs are not part of the agencies they oversee, bloggers are neither part of government nor journalism, but they keep a wary and watchful eye on both. And in so doing they provide a valuable check against the arrogance, inadequacies and abuses of all four estates."
The full text of the speech:
We're here today to answer the question, "Are bloggers and journalists friends or enemies?" And the best way to answer that is by listening to what the two camps say about each other.
Because I'm a journalist, I'll start with the blogger bashing that unfortunately is all too common among my colleagues. I keep a running list of journalistic rants against bloggers, and it is a nasty list.
Journalists have called bloggers:
-- "Jumped-up dunces with PCs"
-- "Barroom loudmouths"
-- "Salivating morons"
-- And "the headless mob"
In February, columnist and editorial cartoonist Ted Rall wrote this: "Bloggers are ordinary people, many of them uneducated and with nothing interesting to say. They're sitting in their rec rooms, regurgitating and spinning what real journalists have dug up through hard work. They don't have sources, they don't report, and no one holds them accountable when they make mistakes or flat out lie."
Bloggers have just as much animosity toward the press. They refer contemptuously to the "mainstream media" and the "media establishment." They claim as trophies the careers of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd of The New York Times, Dan Rather of CBS News, Eason Jordan of CNN and Jeff Gannon/James Guckert of something called Talon News. And if some of them had their way, Newspaper Guild National President Linda Foley would be looking for a new job now.
That evidence makes it abundantly clear that bloggers and journalists are enemies. They are intellectual adversaries engaged in battle on the front lines of a 21st-century information war.
Appreciating the depth of that conflict also helps answer another much-debated question: Are bloggers journalists? And the answer is a resounding "no." Bloggers are not journalists and clearly have no desire to be. They are grassroots activists who, if inclined at all to quit their day jobs and change careers, are more likely to end up in political or policy circles than journalistic ones.
But the truth is that most bloggers are just happy being bloggers. Instead of being part of the Fourth Estate, they are part of something new. I call it Estate 4.5 -- a nod both to the profession whose excesses galvanized many bloggers and to the medium they use.
Bloggers are like inspectors general, the independent watchdogs of government. Just as IGs are not part of the agencies they oversee, bloggers are neither part of government nor journalism, but they keep a wary and watchful eye on both. And in so doing they provide a valuable check against the arrogance, inadequacies and abuses of all four estates.
Bloggers like to say that journalism is something you do, not who you are, and they have done some great journalism. I admire their work and have even used it to better my own.
But just doing journalism doesn't make you a journalist any more than doing first aid makes you a doctor or emergency medical technician. Any more than representing yourself in court makes you a lawyer. Any more than loaning money to a friend makes you a banker. Journalism is a profession.
On the flip side, journalists are not bloggers, either. I have blogged about religion from Russia and adoption from Guatemala, and I just started Beltway Blogroll, a column in blog format that is focused on blogs. But I am a journalist, not a blogger.
Like it or not, we journalists are part of the "establishment," one of the four estates. No matter how hard we may try, we simply can't gain the perspective of bloggers who are not part of our club. Bloggers bring fresh insight, unyielding passion and a whole lot of sass to the public sphere, and they answer to no one but themselves.
Bloggers are not part of the journalistic-corporate complex that controls information from ivory towers; they are the militiamen of the information revolution. They are, as Jay Rosen of PressThink says, the Court of Appeal in the State of Supreme News Judgment.
Bloggers are not journalists because they "think outside the box," and we don't. I once had a supervisor who told me repeatedly to think outside the box. When I asked him to explain what he meant, he couldn't. I was so aggravated by the experience that when I left that job, I started a newspaper column called "Inside the Box."
Thanks to bloggers who have hurled cyber rocks upside my head over the past few years, I'm at least aware that life does exist outside the box now. But inside the box is where I remain -- and all of my journalistic brethren are right there with me.
I strongly advocate that we journalists adopt the technology of bloggers to enhance our editorial products. But I also appreciate that we are not and never will be bloggers. Try as we might to escape our past, we can't help but see the world through green-tinted eyeshades.
The bottom line: Journalists and bloggers are entirely different creatures occupying the same universe the Constitution calls "the press," and they are adversaries. But journalists, bloggers, the government and "we, the people," have benefited greatly from that adversarial relationship -- and hopefully we will continue to do so.
Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine said it best when he put it this way recently: "Journalism is institutional, impersonal, and dispassionate; blogs are human, personal, and passionate. ... At the end of the day, I don't want to see blogs turn into an institution, or try to, for then they wouldn't be blogs anymore."
Posted by dglover at July 8, 2005 03:40 PM
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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Journalists vs. Bloggers:
» Are Bloggers, Journalists Friends or Enemies? from Tapscott's Copy Desk
Following are the addresses by Jim Hill and Danny Glover this morning as members of The Heritage Foundation's panel: "Are Bloggers and Journalists Allies or Enemies?" [Read More]
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Many journalists hate bloggers... or at least see them as a threat to their own profession. But are bloggers journalists? Do they want to be? K. Daniel Glover of the Beltway Blogroll doesn't think so... [Read More]
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Comments
To the information consumer (namely, me) bloggers and journalists are competing information sources for differing things; among them, facts and insight.
The MSM surrounds me, in my car and my TV, my homepage, with immediate facts. I could not escape the details of the London bombings unless I had foresworn all media altogether (living better without electricity?). The MSM offers this immediately - fact.
Yet the blogosphere offers much more introspective and intelligent examination of the trends behind the facts - if you know where to look. For one searching for a plethora of ideas and perspectives, the bloggers far outperform the MSM - if you know where to look. Knowing where to look takes time, and experimentation.
Are bloggers and journalists friends? They are competitors, at least in this consumer's eyes. And this consumer and many others are better served by it. They will - as competitors do - assume each other's best practices, and be the better thereby. In time there will be a lesser divide between the two; hence the 'blogs' at the Guardian, in the wake of the bombings.
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