Ideas, smart and stupid, about blogs and journalism
A Los Angeles Times article by Alana Semuels (Oct. 9) discusses the widening intersection of blogging and journalism:
The blurred lines make many uneasy. “There’s a lot of uninformed opinion on the Internet and not a lot of solid reporting,” said Fred Brown, vice chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee and a columnist at the Denver Post. A professional journalist “respects the truth and lives up to standards of ethics. Certainly that isn’t the case in the blogosphere.”
That kind of attitude is killing the newspaper business, Mr. Brown. Maybe it’s time for you to learn how to use an RSS reader. And read something online other than the Drudge Report.
Newspapers should make a clear distinction between staff-written and blogger-generated material as a service to their readers, said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
I agree with that in principle, but I would not use it as an excuse to “ghetto-ize” your community bloggers. Sticking them off in an ugly little ad-cluttered space of their own broadcasts, loud and clear, what you REALLY think about them.
But what if a blogger gets a fact wrong or makes a defamatory comment about someone?
Newspapers have to be careful, but federal law generally protects a website owner from postings by its users. As long as employees of a newspaper site have nothing to do with a blogger’s work, Ardia said, the newspaper is probably protected, because it is simply posting content produced by an outsider.
Translation: You do NOT have to moderate comments before posting them.
At the same time, the law allows newspapers to act as good Samaritans to protect their readers, and Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today, said his paper had been doing just that.
It removes from its website “anything brought to our attention that violates our terms of use, including personal attacks, hate speech, obscenities, plagiarism, as well as potentially libelous or defamatory material,” Wilson wrote in an e-mail.
Translation: You own the Web site. You’re allowed to delete stuff that is offensive or illegal.
But — be cool. Don’t delete stuff just because it’s edgy, or “may offend some viewers.” Threats about, say, hanging up nooses would be worthy of deletion, in my opinion. But someone saying the president is an idiot? Last time I checked, we were still allowed to say that in the United States.
The USA Today site has run excerpts from such blogs as College Football Resource and A Socialite’s Life, the latter a gossip site that discusses and mocks fashion, celebrities and the media.
Wilson said in an interview that the industry wasn’t adopting blogs in place of traditional reporting but in addition to it. In any event, he said, newspapers can’t afford to think about distributing information the way they used to.
“The walled garden is dead. We’re living in an era of distributed content,” he said. One important role of a newspaper nowadays is to sift through rafts of information online, he said, and help readers use it.
It’s nice to give credit where credit is due. For many years, business reporters at publications as lofty as The Wall Street Journal have “borrowed” liberally (some would say shamelessly) from the trade papers. If a journalist is tipped by a blogger, it’s only decent to refer to the source. Let’s not go down a dark road where journalists act like blogs are inferior while at the same time stealing from them.
One possibility is to welcome the best and the brightest into your own journalistic fold:
Some popular blogs have been “absorbed,” to use the New York Times’ term, into mainstream media sites. Freakonomics, a blog about economic thinking in everyday situations, runs on the New York Times site, and its authors share the ad revenue.
Stephen J. Dubner, a Freakonomics coauthor, said the partnership provided an opportunity to be featured on one of the most prominent newspaper sites in the world “with all the readership and support that comes along with it.”
Everybody wins! Not mentioned in the LA Times story was The New York Times “acquisition” in June 2007 of young Brian Stelter, the TVNewser blogger, almost immediately after his graduation from Towson University with a bachelor’s degree in mass communication.
So if you’ve heard anyone recently disparaging bloggers’ credibility or usefulness or integrity, why not ask them to name specifically which bloggers they are reading?
And if they’re reading such unreliable and unethical bloggers — I have to ask — why? Why aren’t they reading the good bloggers?
More of the same: I gave a 90-minute talk about similar ideas at a workshop for journalists last weekend.
Categories: blogging
Nothing like spouting off with an uninformed opinion, is there, Mr. Brown?
Thanks for the quotes. I think it’s really interesting how people from the traditional media are reacting so differently to blogging and the internet in general. I, and probably many of my generation, tend to take blogging for granted. I find it rather funny, then, when some people see it as a threat.
I’d like to think that most people don’t assume that all bloggers are journalists, and therefore remember to take what’s written with a grain of salt — which they should be doing anyway, even if something is written by a professional. I might be overestimating people, though.
I don’t really see a huge difference between newspapers including blog excerpts and newspapers including opinion columns like they have traditionally. I’m sure some of the newspapers are really proud of themselves for being on what they see as the cutting edge, but isn’t it really just more of the same?
The question of whether a blogger is a journalist or not should be considered in the same light as any other technology journalists have taken up: i’ll bet there once was a time when people using ball-point pens were frowned upon by those who preferred the more traditional fountain pens and pencils; i remember well the times when people would say that film was the only way to shoot news and these new video things weren’t broadcast quality; that the composing room which smelled of hot lead and sweaty souls was “the real newspaper comp room” while the quieter and cleaner photo-set cut-and-paste version wasn’t quite kosher, never mind the contemporary one completely devoid of compositors and smell … because it’s not there any more; and “bring back the typewriter because it doesn’t crash like these new computers” was a common phrase in the 1980s. get 10 years down the track and tell journalists of 2017 that once in the past people argued about whether blogging was journalism and they’ll laugh. of course it’s journalism.
” For many years, business reporters at publications as lofty as The Wall Street Journal have “borrowed” liberally (some would say shamelessly) from the trade papers. If a journalist is tipped by a blogger, it’s only decent to refer to the source.”
I was a major-metro reporter for 15 years (now working at a website) and got sourly accustomed to seeing my stories “adopted” by the NYT without credit; that experience is so commmon that among many major-metro reporters being ripped off by the NYT is a sign you’ve arrived. I hope and believe the increasing significance of blogs to journalism will change this. Blog(ger)s by definition talk to each other and thus can talk back to journalism in a way that is not currently possible within the journalism food chain. We don’t lose in power or authority when we acknowledge the origin of our ideas; blogs know this and it’s time that journalism learned.
It is and will always be the same: journalists unwilling to lift their bottom from the chair stealing from those who do – be it in a blog, or some other forum that will surely appear in due time. The strange thing is that the first make the most money and survive longer in their protected system, whilst the reporters running around are too busy to even notice. Reporter from Belgium.
You Guys, are lucky in the USA.
In the UK our libel law is much more stringent.
We can barely mention someone by name and every sentence begins with the world “Allegedly”.
Good point Maryn! Bloggers definitely share credit more than traditional journalists — at least as far as I’ve seen. Not only is easier to throw in a link here and there, but pingbacks and the hope of link backs encourage crosslinking.
I must say, I really enjoy how blogging is more cooperative than competitive. It’s good for the spirit and I’ve met lots of wonderful people. Maybe it’s all those years of competitiveness that have soured some journalists to the point where they can’t stand sharing the spotlight a bit.