Junk or journalism

Bloggers seem to be taking a lot of flak from journalists. The bone of contention being, blogging is not journalism: Bloggers are not trained reporters. They don’t do the original fact finding and reporting as journalists do. They have no professional journalistic standards – their reports are not sieved through an editor for what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s significant. They don’t do the truth-telling which journalists do. They are unknown entities whose reputations cannot be trusted.

More than flak, these are serious accusations… categorising blogs as nothing more than junk. Going by some of the blogs I’ve read, I have to agree with these accusations. At least, to some degree. I wonder at some of the blogs I’ve read… finding them totally meaningless. Some of them are so personal and naïve that they actually make me feel foolish. Some don’t even have a sense of spelling or grammar. No way would I consider them as journalism.

Ours being a democracy, we have the right to say what we want… or publish our thoughts unhindered on the world wide web. Blogging is self-expression and everyone has a right to it… whether he or she is a trained journalist or not. Then again, Rebecca Blood has a point: “I have no desire to conform my weblog to journalistic standards, or to remake journalism in my image. I want to find ways to leverage the strengths of both worlds to the mutual benefit of both.”

Leaving aside facts such as many journalists are bloggers and many bloggers are some of the best journalists in the world, I really wonder why we are fighting in the very first place. How does it matter if bloggers aren’t journalists? Can’t there be a world where journalists and bloggers co-exist? Perhaps there’s room for both journalists and bloggers in this ever-expanding world of media.

Happily, there are voices on the world wide web which support my thoughts. In fact, they’ve been there much before me.

One of them, Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon and a technology-aware writer, said it back in 2002: “The rise of blogs does not equal the death of professional journalism. The media world is not a zero-sum game. Increasingly, in fact, the Internet is turning it into a symbiotic ecosystem – in which the different parts feed off one another and the whole thing grows.”

Another is writer, blogger and Web philosopher Mitch Ratcliffe: “The point of innovation in media is to expand, not simply to displace, the voices that existed before.”

So, there is hope.

[Citation: PRESSthink, Jay Rosen]