PressThink: Brain Food for BloggerCon

Brain Food for BloggerCon

Here's my Introduction, take two, for the Saturday morning session at BloggerCon. Let's start by separating two things. Blogging is not journalism. But if each imagined itself as the other, some good might come of that.

On March 25th, I posted “No One Owns Journalism,” a background essay for the BloggerCon session I will be leading tomorrow. (Schedule here, participants here.) The work of the session began when I drafted my first answer to the question that Dave Winer had assigned me and the participants: What is Journalism?

Not sure, I said, but no one owns it. Journalism is always up for grabs, because it only exists in a free society, which is free to redefine itself and always does.

The session continued its work after March 25 in 120 or so comments at PressThink and BOP that covered a lot of ground and involved some 50 different writers lending data and perspective— many with well thought-out and multiple posts. Some are beautifully written. I urge you to scroll down and see.

Rather than try to summarize all that, I am going to tell you what I learned, and set up the closer on the team. That’s the people who show up in Cambridge. Let’s say there’s 100 bloggers and writers, with a few academics, some business people, some journalists. All can pitch.

In my first try at framing the subject, I had a number of things wrong. My questions were pedantic and abstract. (So I ditched them back of this post.) I wrote too much on the practice of journalism, in order to “open” it to webloggers, when I should have been writing on the practice of blogging, to see where it opens on journalism, here and there threatening to change it.

To me—but then I’m a professor of it—journalism is always up for grabs. That’s a principle and it needs to be maintained. But to many people I have been reading and arguing with in my head, this is true only abstractly. In reality, journalism is the opposite of “up for grabs.” It’s the Establishment. A closed profession. Or worse. Journalism, for many who blog, is one thing they are blogging against. Or instead of. (Or are they blogging “over” it? Could be.)

So what is journalism? Not sure, they say, but someone else owns it.

Something puzzled me as I tracked the discussion of blogging and jounalism elsewhere in the sphere. I kept hearing people say things like, “Well, I don’t think blogging is journalism.” (Or: gimmee a break, all blogging isn’t journalism.) Kevin Drum, formerly CalPundit, now at Political Animal, and one the bloggers said to be most like a journalist, told me in an email: “I don’t think much of the blogging as journalism meme.” Kaye Trammell says bloggers may perform “random acts of journalism,” a statement she can live with “because it does not insinuate that all bloggers are reporting all the time.”

But who ever said—and who believes it now—that “all” bloggers are reporting all the time? It’s a pretty farfetched claim, even for insinuaters. “Blogging is journalism or it’s nothing” doesn’t survive an hour of clicking ‘round the sphere. I looked and found no links to categorical statements like that. (I’m sure they will turn up, somewhere.)

I asked around, left comments at blogs. Zip. When there are many debunking the claim, and it’s hard to find any bunkers out there, something is up with that claim and you have to drill in. In fact, “blogging only counts if it’s journalism” is not being stated by anyone. But a great many bloggers think it’s implied in subtler ways, (perhaps the journalism track at BloggerCon is one) and they react to this. Why?

Part of it is the frontier-to-civilization cycle. Big Journalism is a Back East thing. (And journalists in the West are driven crazy by this.) It’s all rules and “shoulds.” But blogging is virtually rule-less, and open to so many shoulds that none can gain status as standard. Some of the suspicion I found also has to do with professionals coming toward an activity that, long before the pros even knew about it, was not only open to amateurs—people volunteering their time—but had been invented, developed and first popularized by them.

“This is ours, not theirs” explains, I think, why some bloggers say of journalism: that’s theirs, not ours. “Mavericks are notoriously resistant to being told what to do,” writes Rebecca Blood about the blog tribe. It took me a while—and some extended correspondence with Rebecca—before I understood this puzzle and what to do about it Saturday morning. So here’s what I am going to do about it. Quote Jimmy Breslin, from a portrait of the columnist in the New York Observer (April 16, 2004):

For his part, Mr. Breslin, who prefers to think of himself as a reporter and writer—”Don’t call me a journalist, I hate the word; it’s pretentious!”—doesn’t take too well to questions about the place of columnists in today’s culture.

Then there’s this, from Dean Landsman, in comments at the mother ship: “Journalism is a mighty sexy, attractive, and powerful word to use, when discussing blogs and blogging. Writing, I think, is more the issue of note.” (So Breslin thinks we’re pretentious in this session, while Landsman says we’re sexy. But it’s happening at Harvard, so what did you expect?)

And this, from Rebecca Blood: “So, when I say weblogs and journalism are fundamentally different, one thing I mean is that the vast majority of weblogs do not provide original reporting—for me, the heart of all journalism.”

Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is “the story.” Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access— as in getting your calls returned. Blogging counts because it a very good way of doing what the prophets of IndyMedia said we should do: become the media. (See Anarchogeek, here.) Bloggers are speakers and writers of their own invention, at large in the public square. They’re participating in the great game of influence called public opinion. And they’re developing, mostly through labors of love, what I’ve called an extremely democratic media tool.

Big Journalism frustrates and matters for the same reason: it’s an institution, with the machinery set in place for extracting, checking, editing, packaging and distributing news and information over earthly expanse. By maintaining this machinery through time, and disciplining themselves with a code, the big organizations involved create an asset—trust, reliability, credibility, visibility, brand, icon—that is very hard to match or overcome. (Which is not to say it will endure forever in its present form.)

Blogging is not journalism. When we separate these two things, we honor both. Then we’re prepared for the real work of the conference, which is to arrange more imaginatively, in sentences newly drawn, our two key terms— and to do this not once, but as many times as we can in 90 minutes of conferencing, plus the refelections after. Here’s a bit of what I mean:

Blogging is not journalism, but some journalists are natural bloggers and some bloggers may be natural journalists.

Blogging is not journalism, but bloggers now filter and edit journalists, and journalists read blogs. (Both facts are new.)

Blogging— hey, it’s not journalism. But when journalists blog they have to depart from normal practice if they want to tap the weblog’s strengths. These are an author’s voice, the art of linking, the immediacy and person-to-person tone, the comments section, the conversation with other blogs, tools like Technorati and RSS, none of which shone through in Web Journalism before the weblog’s rise.

Blogging is not journalism, but whereas journalism is on the Web, blogging is deeply of it, and so bloggers are ahead of journalists in learning what the Web is for, and how its ecology works. (To say nothing of its social psychology.)

Blogging ain’t journalism, but more of it should be, if we’re serious about “advancing” this form. (Doc Searles says so in a pre-BloggerCon post.)

Blogging is not journalism. But the blog sphere has a better memory for journalism than most hustling journalists, who are better at forgetting and moving on to the next thing. (What bloggers call their archive, newspaper journalists call the morgue.)

Blogging is not journalism, but it is journal-ing; and there’s a connection at the root there that has to do with recording events through time, then using that record to become fuller creatures of our time. (Thus Dave Winer’s probe: Journalism is “an independent view of a series of events,” a definition he built for bloggers, so use it if you can.)

Blogging is not journalism, but as Breslin said, journalists are writers and so are bloggers, which leaves reporting (the strength of journalism) and linking (the weblogger’s art) as two differences bound to make a difference.

Blogging… just don’t call it journalism. It’s what happens when the readers of journalism turn into writers, and the audience into a talking public. That’s a shock to the body of “mass” media, and even if it’s only a tiny shock, we can still say it’s electric.

Okay, so here’s Blood again in a newly published piece, using her imagination to set these two terms in proper relation. If you’re trying to find journalism, she says, don’t look at the people, look at their practices:

When a blogger interviews an author about their new book, that is journalism. When an opinion columnist manipulates facts in order to create a false impression, that is not. When a blogger searches the existing record of fact and discovers that a public figure’s claim is untrue, that is journalism. When a reporter repeats a politician’s assertions without verifying whether they are true, that is not.

Believe it or not, the question, “what is journalism?” is supposed to be practical. The purposes of BloggerCon—that pretentious, sexy and democratic thing—are to advance the weblog form and develop its nascent sphere. If that’s the practical task, then how is journalism best defined and understood? But in arguing about this, we cannot look only at the journalism we have, and have come to expect. Also in the room tomorrow should be the journalism we need, and a definition of that will prove just as valuable.

Blogging is not journalism. But if each imagined itself as the other, some good might come of it. Journalism that is more conversational, blogging that is more reliable. These we can certainly imagine. But what else can be demanded of the two forms, when they are thought about… together?

The philosopher Sheldon Wolin once said that we need vision in politics because when there is vision, things appear “in their corrected fullness.” At the high end of my hopes for this event, one is able to picture journalism in its corrected fullness. And that’s when we’ll find a vision of it from which webloggers can draw as they develop the form, improve their own sites, and strengthen the sphere they share with members of the press.

Aftermath: Notes, Reactions & Links…

Obviously, the bar is open and comments—post-conference—are welcome.

James Fallows in the New York Times on what’s different about weblogs: The Twilight of the Information Middlemen. (May 16, 2004)

From OJR: Columnist Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post on lessons to be learned from blogs for mainstream print journalists: “The most successful blogs all have something in common. Their authors are unashamedly enthusiastic about the topic at hand. (Often, of course, they’re outraged.) The lesson: There is no virtue in sounding bored online. Online, journalists should not conceal their fascination for the topics they cover. They should not hide behind the traditional bland construction of news stories. They should still be fair, of course, but they should also have voice and passion — and sometimes even outrage.”

CableNewser, a lively and newsy blog about the cable news biz (3,500 readers a day and many fans in the industry) turns out to be written by an 18 year-old college sophomore in Maryland. See Baltimore Sun article, “Writing beyond his years.” (June 2, 2004)

Reflecting on the BloggerComn session, Micah Sifry writes Bloggers are editors, not journalists: “bloggers who write about current events and culture (as opposed to people who are mainly focused on their inner world or their personal spheres) aren’t getting attention and adding value to the democratic discourse so much because they’re behaving like journalists, it’s because they’re behaving like editors.” (April 23, 2004)

Geoffrey Nuremberg has original things to say in Blogging in the Global Lunchroom, a commentary on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross (April 20, 2004).

The fact is that this is a genuinely new language of public discourse — and a paradoxical one. On the one hand, blogs are clearly a more democratic form of expression than anything the world of print has produced. But in some ways they’re also more exclusionary, and not just because they only reach about a tenth of the people who use the Web.

Amy Langfield offers an outstanding analysis, complete with predictions, pros and cons, legal questions and a conveniently prepared nut graph (April 19):

Newspapers will add blogs to their Web sites first with their existing columnists, through frequent community op-ed writers the paper has come to trust and through occasional “event” blogs related to things such as an election or major natural disaster. The two things that must happen before newspapers move beyond those steps are that the legal liability must be made clear through litigation and the economy must improve enough for them to hire more people to implement the blogs.

Highly Recommended: Vin Crosbie’s sharp narrative that puts the “What is Journalism?” discussion at Harvard into sequence with three earlier moments when the two tribes—bloggers, journalists—met. Is Blogging Journalism? (Rounds 1-4).

Do read Nico Macdonald in The Register (UK) on the Future of Weblogging (April 18): “This weekend the best and the brightest in the blogosphere will schlepp their WiFi-enabled laptops to the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass….” Also:

The “blogerati” rightly present Weblogging as opening up writing and communication to the masses. However, this populist and laudable attack on the mass communication sector disguises an elitist tendency at the centre of the blogosphere. This tendency is most obvious in the habit of using first names only (or even nicknames) when referring to fellow Webloggers. For a movement that aspires to (and has achieved some) intellectual leadership, this is inappropriate.

An interesting point about a habit that always bothered me, too.

Blogging from Prague, Douglas Arellanas reflects on tech hurdles for newspapers that want blogs (April 20).

Chris Geider, Blogging as Journalism: a Defense (April 19): “The Internet and blogs, in their way, are the best hope for the success of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ for which First Amendment advocates have so long fought. Why would some want to cut it short now?”

Jeff Jarvis posted his notes from the BloggerCon session: “What is Journalism?” (April 17)

The New York Times covers the “blogging as a business” session that Jarvis ran. (April 19)

Betsy Devine’s top ten quotes from the session: “What is Journalism?”

Here are Jack Hodgson’s journalism session notes from TECHpopuli (April 17).

Velveteen Rabbi (Rachel Barenblat) summarizes well the religion and blogging session at the Con (April 19).

See Rebecca Blood’s fine essay: “A Few Thoughts on Journalism and What Can Weblogs Do About It.” (April 15)

When bloggers link to conflicting or contextualizing material, smart reporters will further research and verify promising leads, and credit the bloggers who uncovered them. Participatory media and journalism are different, but online they exist in a shared media space. There are tremendous synergies possible between the two. 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.

An April 15 radio segment about Blogging on Australia’s Radio National with author Rebecca Blood, Jay Rosen and Lee Rainie, of Pew’s project on Internet and American Life. Listen here (requires Real Player.)

Tristan Louis had a long and interesting take, prior to BloggerCon: Thoughts Before BloggerCon II— Blogs and Journalism.

Ed Cone comments on this post: ” if my newspaper column on a lazy Sunday is about my dog, is that journalism? Is it journalism if columns about my dog inevitably draw more comment from readers than columns about Iraq, gay marriage, and the local economy?” (April 16)

Dave Winer responds: Jay, I didn’t ask if blogging is journalism. (April 16, see comments too)

J.D. Lasica comments on this post. “I think what really set me on edge was the notion that we should return to the days when only big-J journalists practice journalism and bloggers, well, whatever they did, it certainly wasn’t journalism.”

Sheila Lennon comments on this post: “Journalism is a discipline. — who, what, where, when, why. Get it right, dig, tell a story, publish it. What you type into a blog might be journalism, might even be ‘news’ or it might be blowing smoke.”

Doc Searls comments. “Three degrees of mediation.”

Some great background to these issues is provided in this report, We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information. Written by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, edited by J.D. Lasica. Recommended.

Newsweek on Ohmy News.com: “Is This the Future of Journalism? Oh Yeon Ho’s belief that ‘every citizen is a reporter’ has changed journalism in South Korea—and now he’s aiming for the world.”

South African Andie Miller, If Kapuscinski had a weblog. “Whether we call them journalists or not, what bloggers invariably possess – that much of journalism with its deadlines and word-counts has killed in its reporters – is an enthusiasm for telling the stories. If a young Kapuscinski was starting out today, and publishing his writing on a weblog, perhaps we wouldn’t call it journalism. Perhaps we would call it “literary reportage”, as Kapuscinski himself describes his writing. But whatever we called it, we would be richer for his desire to experience the world, and his passion for sharing those stories with us.”

See Jeff Sharlet’s pre-conference set up (and comments) for the Religion and Blogging session at the Con. Jeff is the editor of The Revealer, where faith and journalism collide.

Posted by Jay Rosen at April 16, 2004 10:24 AM Print

The People Formerly Known as the Audience: "You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." More...

Migration Point for the Press Tribe: "Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable." More...

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?" "It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?'" More...

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...

Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

Jay, This is a brilliant attempt to define the undefinable, and you've certainly earned my respect. However, I wonder if the subject itself doesn't produce an exercise in chasing one's tail, because there is no accepted and universal definition of journalism, nor can there be. If you accept the institutional definition, then it's possible to call blogging something different and come to the conclusions you've reached. However, if you accept that the institutional definition might be flawed, then you're back at square one. I think the moment I call myself a journalist, I'm not one, because that determination is reserved for the reader, whom I trust to be able to get it right. Have fun at BloggerCon.

Posted by: Terry Heaton at April 16, 2004 11:51 AM | Permalink

Journalism is like obscenity, I know it when I see it.

Institutions don't own journalism, they just monopolized it for a while.

Whether you call it a "post" or a "story," the 1,000 words at my blog on the use of the Internet by the Edwards campaign was journalism. Josh Marshall is doing high-level journalism at his blog. David Hoggard (not a professional journalist) has raised the bar on coverage of local stories here in Greensboro with his blog. Etc.

So journalism clearly happens on blogs.

Does that mean everything on my blog, or others blogs, is journalism? No. The want-ads and comics in a newspaper aren't journalism, either.

If I perform a certain amount of recognizable journalism at my blog, are other posts about my dog or my vacation journalism? I tend not to think so, except in the broadest sense.

But if my newspaper column on a lazy Sunday is about my dog, is that journalism? Is it journalism if columns about my dog inevitably draw more comment from readers than columns about Iraq, gay marriage, and the local economy?

I think the practice of journalism by bloggers is the interesting topic. Of secondary interest is the use of blogs by institutional media. Definitions will take care of themself.

Posted by: ed cone at April 16, 2004 12:36 PM | Permalink

Ouch ouch ouch.

Jay, this is exactly the sort of essay which I criticized a while back, and wondered if I'd get myself in trouble for saying that. I don't mean to be personally harsh, but I think it simply goes around a confusion point it created in the first place. As in:

"Is *writing* journalism ... did anyone ever say all writing is journalism? But writing puts words one after the other, and journalists put words one after the other too. Some professional writers are journalists. Some say journalists are writers. But isn't writing more than journalism? Or is journalism less than writing? ..." (on and on, for hundreds of words)

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at April 16, 2004 12:51 PM | Permalink

Jeez, Jay... how do you find the time to think such deep thoughts?
Interesting, thoughtful analysis, but why such a narrow implied definition of blogging? My definition is very broad -- it's simply one template for Web publishing. The substance of what gets published in that template is what defines whether it is journalism.
Journalists who blog can alter their writing practices without changing their journalistic values. Some amateur bloggers do actual reporting. Others do a credible job of editing and aggregating the news. It's all being done in a different medium, but so what?
(And, yes, the vast majority of blogging is journaling, not journalism in the traditional sense.)
I agree with most everything you say except the blanket statement that "blogging is not journalism." Why do we need to separate the two to honor both? I don't get that...
Finally, you're right about West Coast journalists and the East Coast attitudes that drive us crazy. So when will there be a Blogger.Con on the West Coast?

Posted by: Ken Sands at April 16, 2004 1:05 PM | Permalink

Blogging-as-journalism and blogging-as-conversation as two ends of a continuum:

http://www.bytemeonline.com/2004_03_01_bytemeonline_archive.html

Posted by: Frank Catalano at April 16, 2004 3:15 PM | Permalink

"Bloggers are speakers and writers of their own invention, at large in the public square. They're participating in the great game of influence called public opinion."

Maybe, maybe not. Blogging is new enough that its borders - national, linguistic, substantive, formal, etc. - are open, undecided and in flux. To assume the same contextual frames for blogging that are invoked by US journalism seems reductive. Blogging and journalism might do well to look at each other without mistaking what they see for their own reflection.

Posted by: Tom Matrullo at April 16, 2004 4:33 PM | Permalink

Jay, I'm surprised you bought into the blogging-is-never-journalism nonsense spouted by some bloggers who have a chip on their shoulder about big media journalism, instead of sticking to your guns about the difference between the craft and practice of journalism on the one hand and the institutions of big media on the other.

I wrote a response to your essay here.

Posted by: JD Lasica at April 16, 2004 7:51 PM | Permalink

I don't think any thoughtful person would say that blogging is never journalism, any more than they would say that blogging is always journalism. jay certainly assert either of those things in this essay.

why the absolutist reading? what I got out of the essay was an effort to get people to imagine the possibilities without being tied to their preconceived notions about how this or any other form of media is "supposed" to work.

Posted by: rebecca blood at April 16, 2004 8:42 PM | Permalink

To Rebecca's point, I think a fairer summation of Jay's position than some comments are allowing him is that, "Blogging is not automatically journalism." Blogging is a mechanism, using the Web as the medium for written expression. Sometimes it's journalism. Sometimes it's just conversation. And sometimes it's something in between (as I discussed in detail here in late March).

As someone who used to be a professional journalist for many years, even I have trouble defining journalism absolutely. Blogging is starting to seem to have the same problem -- there are more connotations than denotations. I think Jay deserves some kudos for attempting to put a wrapper around the jello.

Posted by: Frank Catalano at April 16, 2004 9:11 PM | Permalink

Blogging is not automatically journalism. Frank put it well.

Those who think this is some kind of "dis" to blogging--and especially JD--are asked to read it again. What do these sentences say to you? "Blogging is not journalism. When we separate these two things, we honor both." Does that sound like the wind-up to a dismissal?

At his weblog, JD says Rosen "accedes to the view that 'Journalism is not blogging." Bad note taking. The phrase I used--over and over-- was "blogging is not journalism," (you reversed it) and what I meant was: not automatically so. A simple statement like, blogging is not automatically journalism is not offered to you as PressThink's grand insight, or opening gambit in a war of definitions, to be continued at BloggerCon after 30 minutes of tail-chasing 'round the Ole Definition Barn. I think there was a little more to what I wrote than that, Seth.

My post was a brief against automatic thinking. That blogging isn't automatically journalism is a pre-condition for believing that citizen blogging can indeed become journalism, and give the traditional press a run for its money. It's also a necesarly move for our minds, for until we clearly separate the two, understand what each is, how can they be brought together in a new and more potent combination?

Journalists aren't automatically going to become bloggers, or good bloggers. Surely it's saying this that forces us to think about the blogging journalist and what makes her different.

You'll notice, then, that every one of my bullet points reminds you that blogging is not journalism, and then goes on to say where the two are touching, mixing:

Blogging is not journalism, but bloggers now filter and edit journalists, and journalists read blogs.

The "but" is my attempt to say: once we separate these two things we can see all the intruiging ways they come together.

Ed Cone: "I think the practice of journalism by bloggers is the interesting topic." I agree completely, and this is what I hope to spend the most time on Saturday. "Of secondary interest is the use of blogs by institutional media." True.

"Definitions will take care of themselves." Really? The Bush White House wants to define the press as a special interest, wants to say, in effect, there is no journalism. Is this one we should trust will take care of itself?

How about the day some gateleeper at a public hearing has to define who a journalist is, covering the event, and who's just a citizen, blogging? That one will take care of itself? Maybe there's another way to look at this.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at April 17, 2004 12:57 AM | Permalink

But if each imagined itself as the other, some good might come of it. Journalism that is more conversational, blogging that is more reliable. These we can certainly imagine. But what else can be demanded of the two forms, when they are thought about... together?

Maybe the big suck-in-the-wind gasp of some commentors might have occured where it did for me.

Blogging that is more reliable. Hmmm. To the crux, then, what is meant by reliable and why would we want to be more so? What is more reliable than genuine voice--verified sources? What is more reliable than publishing when the mood strikes--publishing daily or weekly even if there is no story worth telling?

That BigJ is more reliable--credible?--than blogging, and that blogging would do well to borrow some of that reliability from journalism is what made me gasp a little bit, Jay.

Makes me think, ewww. journalism cooties.

I like what Rebecca said about our mix-and-match processes. Perhaps the context of the written word does the defining.

Have fun at bloggercon!

Posted by: jeneane at April 17, 2004 1:35 AM | Permalink

So I wonder specific acts on a blog qualify as "journalism." (This gets to some of the thoughts in Rebecca Blood's newly published piece linked in Jay's post.) First-person reporting is the method that most people talk about. But reporting is just the most overt form of journalism.

When I was a copy editor, I did many of the same things that bloggers do. Question stories, look for holes, point out errors, seek background where it's missing, strive for balance and context. And when I was a copy editor, I certainly considered myself a journalist. If a blogger does these things in an objective fashion -- or even in a nonobjective fashion, as long as he or she is accurate -- are these acts of journalism? The biggest differences are that I did these things prepublication and I got paid for it.

When I've worked as a news editor, a big part of my job has been to select and edit the stories for the front page, and to make sure that the news of the day was covered throughout the rest of the paper. In essence, to exercise my judgment and organize news stories by their relative value. Bloggers do this too. The difference may be that they get to unashamedly exercise extremely personal judgment, and my goal was always to try to distance myself from my own preferences, to make decisions with the newspaper's overall readership in mind. So is that difference enough to separate journalism from *not* journalism?

When I was an assistant city editor for a while, I had to consider what stories we ought to be pursuing, and to consider how we should cover the issues that we were following. I'd then work with reporters to make sure their stories were accurate, fair, and so on. And if I called myself a journalist while I did all this, what do we call bloggers who weigh in on the same things? Again the difference may be that they get to be very personal in their judgments, and I was supposed to consider the whole of our readership.

I bring these questions up because I think they're interesting, and I'm not sure at all what I think about the answers. There may be things that I'm not considering here. But I think it's important not to limit the discussion to simply reporting when we talk about bloggers performing journalism.

Posted by: Ryan at April 17, 2004 5:26 AM | Permalink

Some bloggers are journalists some (or all) of the time. That would describe me. My weblog varies from personal comments (certainly not journalism) to specific reporting (like my piece yesterday on Sun spinning its services offering).

It's ok for bloggers to not be journalists at all (why should that be everyone's goal?), or to journalists sometimes (in the formal sense, or in some new, blog-specific sense), or to use their blog and the context of the blogosphere as if it were a new publication platform and do their journalistic writing from here.

Real journalism is all about freedom, fairness, and a search for the truth. Blogs can make that easier, more broadly accessible, faster to surface both new facts and feedback, and better at publically archiving information. Accept them as a new piece of the infrastructure.

Posted by: Amy Wohl at April 17, 2004 11:55 AM | Permalink

Blogging is, er, not journalism any more than printing or writing are journalism.
From what I've seen, blogging is mostly opinion backed up by a few hyperlinks.
When it is journalism, it is usually eye-witness reports -- albeit, minus the "substance" that would normally round a story out where professional journalists are involved, such as interviews, documents, photographs, etc.
As for accuracy and fairness? Forget about it!
Which beggars the question: if blogging is so wonderful why do its advocates sound more like people who have just given up smoking or recently discovered Jesus?
My guess is the "any moron can publish any crap they like" software freely available on the internet gives them a sense of enpowerment they believed they deserved for having an opinion.
But, from what I've seen, driving a pretty automatic doesn't make anyone an expert driver, just another information superhighway hazard.
PSST: Did you hear the one about...?

Posted by: Jack C at April 18, 2004 10:43 AM | Permalink

I keep coming back to this strange assertion: "the blogging-is-never-journalism nonsense spouted by some bloggers who have a chip on their shoulder about big media journalism"

I don't understand how that would follow. wouldn't people with a chip in their shoulders about big media journalism be more likely to be in the "weblogs are journalism" camp, trying to gain credit for being a member of a club they feel they've been excluded from?

Posted by: rebecca blood at April 18, 2004 1:01 PM | Permalink

What is 90% of the "journalism" industry today?

Editors regurgitating wire copy that has been edited and re-edited ten times.

"Journalism" is the mass dissemination of information based on an eyewitness account or a third-party source.

Blogging isn't far from that. Journalists obtain their information from third parties and add some context. Bloggers obtain their information from third parties and add some context.

Sometimes journalists create original or investigative pieces. Sometimes bloggers create original or investigative pieces.

Journalists disseminate information through huge and powerful networks (broadcast, newspapers, the Internet). Bloggers disseminate information through huge and powerful networks (the Internet).

Accuracy and fairness? I'll take quite a few blogs over Fox News any day!

Bloggers might not be as sophisticated or deep in their coverage of a story, but the basic concepts remain the same.

I believe certain professional writers suffer a bit of conceit in their craft, encouraged by the notion of the celebrity author. Professional journalism brings training and standards, but there are no barriers to the acts themselves (researching, writing, reporting).

Posted by: Anonymous at April 18, 2004 5:07 PM | Permalink

I have never, despite Cone's identification otherwise, considered myself a "journalist" because I can't help but to offer an opinion about what I am "journalizing" upon. To my mind a jounalist is bound to cover facts without overt editorializing... so I fail my own litmus test with glee.

Isn't it possible, with certain posts by certain bloggers at certain times, to meld the journalist and blogger moniker into something new?

Names for the meshing of blogger and jounalist? oh I don't know... perhaps you BloggerCon attendees can come up with something catchy.

Posted by: David Hoggard at April 19, 2004 12:54 AM | Permalink

Blogging is not just journalism. Blogs are diverse. How about medical blogs? Science blogs? Other "specialty" blogs? Photo blogs? One day blogs will publish medical, scientific studies and scientific case reports. Readers are peer-reviewers. Blogs are here, and blogs are the revolution. Check out our medical blog: EchoJournal. It is not journalism. Isn't it?

Posted by: Michael at April 19, 2004 1:51 AM | Permalink

Hoggard I didn't call you a journalist, I said journalism happens on your blog. You report. You break stories. That is journalism. Does that make you a journalist? Perhaps, at times. A citizen journalist, as Jarvis likes to say. Journalists also opine, by the way -- the definition of journalist is not "news reporter." But I think this is a lot of navel gazing. My thought in all this is that the medium is not the message. Blogging is wrting. Some writing is journalism.

Posted by: ed cone at April 19, 2004 8:04 AM | Permalink

Dear Jay,
What blogging is is self-syndication. The business of syndicating columns is all but dead and blogging fills in the gaping hole.

Posted by: Carolee Morrison at April 19, 2004 1:02 PM | Permalink

How old is journalism? Have we really defined the meaning of what journalism is and will be? Someone 3-400 years ago probably would not recognize a journalist.

Studs Terkel is a great example of a blogger who is also a journalist.

Posted by: john cass at April 19, 2004 10:01 PM | Permalink

Blogging is writing. Some writing is journalism. I am for that as a summation. Thanks to those who suggested it.

Self-syndication. I really like that, Carolee. Certainly describes my experience as an opinion writer who started a blog.

Dave Hoggard: "Names for the meshing of blogger and jounalist? oh I don't know... perhaps you BloggerCon attendees can come up with something catchy." scribblers self syndicated

I like Amy Wohl's summary too: "Accept them as a new piece of the infrastructure."

Jeneane: "That BigJ is more reliable--credible?--than blogging, and that blogging would do well to borrow some of that reliability from journalism is what made me gasp a little bit, Jay."

This was not a carefully presented idea, on my part. I would agree there are ways of being "reliable" that blogs should probably not take on. Reliable in going no more than ten feet from conventional wisdom in the chattering classes (an art perfected by Mort Kondracke on Fox and Howard Fineman of MSNBC and Newsweek, among many others) would not be good.

I meant much simpler things like checked facts, spelled names, accurate quoting, an "about us" page that tells me something-- reliable, informationally speaking. If you have ever been fact checked by real checkers in a magazine or newspaper section-- that's what I mean by reliable. I suppose some would argue this is a bad standard for blogs, too. I would not.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at April 19, 2004 11:11 PM | Permalink

Ryan says something important when, trying to capture the difference between thinking like a mainstream newspaper journalist and thinking about the same kind of events as a blogger, he writes: "The difference may be that they get to be very personal in their judgments, and I was supposed to consider the whole of our readership."

Journalism when there is some pretension to completeness (complete coverage of the Spokane community) requires a different kind of judgment. Rather than information vs. opinion, or objective vs. subjective--which raise so many intractable problems--Ryan suggests that personal vs. impersonal judgment describes the key difference in blogging v journalism.

Blogs require personal judgment to reign--and if they're good it does. Newspapers in cities like Spokane require impersonal judgment if they're to succeed in "covering" the whole community.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at April 19, 2004 11:27 PM | Permalink

There's a lot missing about reporting and its differences from journalism. The who what when where and how; with opinions about the why. News Reports. Facts.
What that means, and in particular, speculation about the future -- opinions. NOT reporting, except in a Nat. Enquirer sort of way (Kerry's opinon is yada yada). TV news, and much newspaper news, has degenerated from facts with some separate analysis to speculations about the future (what will happen, later -- what are the likely future facts to look like).

Whenever journalism is talking about the future, it's talking about opinions, and TV's seldom better, and increasingly more often worse, than the best blogs. Blogs with personal, first name opinions (I LIKE first names), also about the future.

And Spokane could possibly cover the whole community by including more personal voices -- but a news org would most often do a better job; and impersonal is better, then.

(Good thoughts here; thank you Jay Rosen)

Posted by: Tom Grey at April 20, 2004 8:01 AM | Permalink

The Venn diagram for journalism and blogging certainly intersect, but some of blogging extends outside the circle of journalism, and certainly the circle of journalism extends outside the circle of blogging.

In other words, some blogging is journalism, and some journalism is blogging, but not all blogging is journalism, and not all journalism is blogging.

Where journalism and blogging meet is where there is a discussion of NEWS - north, east, south and west in the context of facts - who, what, how, where and when.

But, when the "why" gets discussed, that's where journalism and blogging part ways. Then, they both morph into editoralizing. At least some newspapers attempt to label a page as an editorial (some just put it on the front page).

Blogging cannot be categorized easily because some of it meets these criteria, and some of it doesn't.

You have to judge for yourself.

Posted by: J. Craig Williams at April 20, 2004 1:57 PM | Permalink

Fascinating discussion interestingly coming out of the Western world, Blogging is actually defined in some places simply as "self publishing"

Journalism
is defined in the Penguin English Dictionary as "a profession managing editing or writing for newspapers or perodicals'. Is blogging not simply a new form of social commentary owmed by those that wish to speak their mind and create a new voice not owned by traditioanl media forms. As can be found in traditonal media there is interesting informative "writing / joournalism and a vast amount..... that is Do I need to know this??? What is fascinating is how many people have taken up 'blogging' to have their voice heard

Posted by: Lissa at May 6, 2004 12:54 AM | Permalink