Jeff Walsh wrote today about

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February 23, 2003

Jeff Walsh wrote today about

Jeff Walsh wrote today about blogging and journalism. Read his essay and this is my response.

I'm with you on all counts as a freelance print journalist, but for one thing: blogs aren't journalism because there is no such as "blogs" -- no monolithic Blog, Inc., that produces blogs of uniform consistency. The "intro to blogs" pieces you mention virtually always make the mistake of lumping blogs into a single category, like war blogs or journalism blogs or Hello Kitty blogs. The criticism leveled at blogs is almost universally decrying a specific form of blog out of thousands of categories. So syllogistically, all blogs are not journalism, some people write journalism in blogs, therefore some blogs are journalism.

Many blogs are first-hand accounts of what someone is doing, has seen, or has done; many blogs are summaries of what other people have written, said, or created; lastly, a small number of blogs are second-hand reports based on interviews or interaction with people who did, saw, or created. This third category of secondhand blogs are the closest thing to print reportage that exists.

I wouldn't try to say that a given blog is or is not journalism, because journalism is broadly instanciating reality through the filter of the mind into the written or spoken word. That's a large category, and in that definition virtually all blogs are journalism, even blogs that are intensely personal or based on interiority.

Rather, the attention on blogs is that it splits attention: journalism is about monolithic ownership these days and monolithic worldviews. Blogs are all about individuals and the millions of separate opinions. In representing blogs to a non-blogging audience, reporters seem drawn to sweep them into a single heap.

Why? Either because you can't become an expert on blogging in the couple of hours a reporter has to write a story, or because a given reporters spends a lot of time in their single blog niche that they become obsessed with and write about blogs as if that niche is all there is.

No subject is monolithic unless you're writing about that scene in 2001.

Posted by Glennf at February 23, 2003 10:29 AM

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I've written a commentary on blogs and journalism. I'm a journalist who blogs. Here is the link.

Posted by: Bill H at February 25, 2003 5:13 AM

I took Jeff's main point to be that, instead of doing interesting things with weblogs, people are talking about what they are (specifically, whether they're journalism). I don't think that's really true of most webloggers -- it's more likely that the people who do, do, and the people who chatter, chatter, so when you listen it's easier to hear the chatterers than the doers -- but I agree to whatever extent it is true. It doesn't matter so much what you call a thing you do, as that you do it, and find interesting new ways of pursuing it.

Posted by: matt at February 23, 2003 4:57 PM

Glenn,

I agree with much of what you said, but I also hit this stumbling block: if journalism is a "large category" as you say (and I believe it is), how can you then turn around and say that journalism also is about monolithic worldviews? Consider the newspaper stories linked to by thousands of blogs, stories that cover a wide range of story topics, opinions and approaches. I spend time on Sundays finding a selection of (mostly newspaper) investigative pieces to link to and I hardly ever come up with less than 5 or 7 great examples of innovative journalism among American papers alone, and often those stories are projects that no blogger would be able to attempt, much less complete, due to resources, time and effort. But when I try to describe this to bloggers, some of them exhibit the same attitude that they decry among reporters: they lump all of it in the same negative category. True, many newspaper pieces about blogging are shoddy; in fact, many newspaper pieces in general are shoddy, sad to say. And yes, many bloggers do commit journalism, especially those with a particular viewpoint to present. But there are many, many things that journalists do that bloggers cannot and will not do. The ideas that the two are equivalent or that one can be replaced entirely by the other are ridiculous. Both sides react negatively to the other because it's the easiest response - but certainly not the smartest one. Debating this usually becomes a zero-sum game because the folks interested in defending the virtues of the one side rarely want to acknowledge the virtues of the other.

Posted by: Derek Willis at February 23, 2003 2:12 PM

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