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Blogging vs. Journalism

With bloggers (that are not me) invited to the Democratic Convention and Technorati working with CNN to cover political blogs, the field of journalism seems to be getting awful nervous about the whole blogging revolution (and they have been for some time). Not surprisingly, when traditional print media has covered blogging, they’ve been rather dismissive.

For example, danah boyd cites the latest New York Times article about bloggers, noting how they subtly demean the practice by referring to bloggers as “web diarists” in the headline:

As I’ve written before, blogging is rhetorically situated between journalism and diarying. Most often, people label blogging as one or the other in order to degrade it. The NY Times pulled this act today because they have a professional interest in portraying convention bloggers as “low-brow” and unworthy of reading, while the NY Times will present the real “high-brow” convention story. By framing bloggers as diarists, the NY Times is demanding that the reader see blogs as petty, childish and self-absorbed. They further perpetuate this view by pasting a picture of a youth on the front of the article to suggest that bloggers are all inexperienced and naive, further implying that their reports will not have the value of the more “adult” perspective of “real” journalists.

Another example was highlighted a few months ago by Laura at Apt. 11D:

Here’s one article from The Advocate [sic] (via Rebecca Blood) that says that bloggers need to act more like journalists and do some original research, rather than just respond to articles in the mainstream press. The author dislikes the reverse sequencing of posts, which disrupts story-telling. He also finds that “Webloggers consider it sufficient to link to an article with no context, or simply repeat the context someone else has given it.” Lastly, he finds that discussion over events and issues is so spread out chaotically throughout the blogosphere, that it is impossible to follow a coherent discussion.

Note, the link is actually not from The Advocate, but from The Register (yes, mistakes and typos are an aspect of blogs that I’ll cover later).

Archive organization

Some of The Register’s observations are spot on. I personally dislike reverse chronological order myself. It’s necessary on the front page, since it makes no sense to put older posts there, and the websites of print publications generally do the same thing (or they have a more sophisticated layout of stories that most blogging software do not yet support). But in my monthly archives, I present the posts in forward chronological order to make it less confusing (for example, check out March, which was one of my more active blogging months). Most blogs currently don’t do it that way, but there’s no reason that they couldn’t, so this clearly isn’t an inherent weakness of the blog format.

I see a lot more hits on my category archives than my monthly archives anyway, which is as it should be. If you are interested to see what I’ve had to say on various subjects, the best way to do this is to browse through the categories that interest you. The monthly archives (like all date-based archives) are mostly useful just to find something you’ve already seen where all you remember is the rough date when it was posted. While many blogs don’t have category archives, again, there’s no reason why they couldn’t. As blogs start using better software, they will gain better features. But just having conveniently accessible archives is already a huge advantage over other forms of media. How easy is it to get a back issue of a magazine or newspaper? Pretty much requires a trip to the library (or searching their website and paying for access). And you can pretty much forget about television or radio shows.

Instant feedback

As for discussions spread out chaotically, that’s a strange criticism, considering that there generally isn’t any discussion in traditional media. You’re usually presented with an argument or a single point of view or angle, and then that’s it. As I mentioned before:

The limitation of most other forms of media is that they typically present a limited point of view. People reading a book or an academic journal can’t readily access its criticisms without having to look them up themselves (often involving a good deal of legwork). The effect is even more pronounced with television or radio shows, which encourage much more passive behavior from their audiences. Although some content producers strive to overcome this limitation by providing balance and surveying several different viewpoints, most have their own agendas to promote.

Of course, when you have a blog with inline comments and trackback pings, the very same page of the post will often include other contrasting points of view, and maybe some interesting discussions.

While following trackback pings can be somewhat confusing, that’s still a lot better than for print media. For example, you’ll see a newspaper column in the Sunday editorial page. Well, you won’t see the response till a full week later, by which time the original column is already in the recycling bin. Or maybe you won’t see it at all, if you’re not a subscriber and just bought a single issue. So how is this conversation easier to follow? As for television or radio, a show’s producer exerts a tremendous amount of control over the dialogue with the selection of guests and the time allotted to each one. So you’re not really getting as many points of view as you think. Plus it’s a lot easier to check a web page’s sources than for any other media — just click on their links!

The systemic problems of journalism

So if you get a sense that journalists are grasping at straws, it’s probably because they are. They feel threatened by blogs.

And they ought to be.

Regular readers of Brad DeLong know that he has a long-running series of posts bemoaning the media (Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps?), particularly when it reports on the economy. He also has an excellent post discussing his theories about the structural flaws in journalism that might explain it:

You find yourself, day after day, depending on what set of issues you cover, running up against people who know much much more than you do about…science, technology, economics…and a host of other topics. Moreover, many of the people who know more than you do are trying to snow you: either that is what their corporate or ideological masters pay them for, or they are themselves driven toward some political goal…. So what do you do?
…
So one road reporters take…is one of Agnosticism: “I am a camera, and I simply report what people tell me, and I give greater authority to people who quickly return my phone calls and give me interesting quotes. I don’t care about what’s ‘really going on’ because that’s a matter of opinion, and who knows anyway.”
…
Deliberate ignorance of the substantive matters one is covering thus becomes a reportorial strategy: a way of (a) making your job easier, and (b) not getting any of your sources really mad at you.

In a nutshell, journalists are generally not experts in anything they cover, and nobody cares as long as they churn out plenty of copy on deadline. And Professor DeLong is, of course, an obvious example of an alternate model made possible by blogging: experts that self-publish. Certainly, not every expert will be a good writer, but since blogging is becoming so easy, a lot of experts can try, so there’s a pretty good chance that a few of them will be good writers. And it makes a lot more sense to read about economics from an economics expert who writes well than from a journalist.

After all, as I understand it, journalism school generally doesn’t teach you much more than how to write well, which is something you can pick up on your own, or through experience (or just through all the papers you have to write in college). And yet, our society seems to bestow a special, magical status upon journalists where we seem to believe they are uniquely qualified to give us the news. Blogging has helped take some of that sheen away, exposing them as the middlemen that they are.

Making too much of titles and labels

Matthew Yglesias seems to be resisting this in curious fashion in his claim that blogging has jumped the shark:

At the end of the day, blogging is just a mode of presenting text…. It’s not a method of doing things. The result, I think, is that the phenomenon of the “blogger” has no real future, though the phenomenon of the blog does. At the end of the day, Brad DeLong is an economist, Lawrence Solum is a legal theorist, I’m a commentator, Jeralyn is a criminal justice expert, Laura Rozen is a national security reporter, etc. These are trades — areas of competence, whatever — that we can all ply in a variety of media, print, web articles, blogs, academic papers (where appropriate), live or taped radio or television interviews, etc. None of us are “bloggers” except in the sense that we all write weblogs.

To be sure, he makes a valid point about the distinction between the “blogger” and the “blogs” phenomena. I do think that more and more people will be getting their news and commentary directly from the experts at their blogs, removing the journalist middleman. So bloggers who are regular Joes will probably get less of an audience as time goes by. However, he lumps “commentator” in with other areas of expertise. If blogs have shown us anything, it’s that anybody can do commentary, and do it as well as the pros. Yglesias himself is an obvious example of that. As far as I know, he’s not uniquely qualified to do what he does. He’s just a young philosophy grad who’s developed a reputation for being good at writing thoughtful political commentary. So it seems to me that he’s reading a bit too much into the fact that he’s parlayed this into a position at a “real” publication.

It’s also quite telling that he quickly wrote a follow-up post along similar lines, only this time he referred to himself as a journalist instead of a commentator: “I, Josh Marshall, Laura Rozen, Spencer Ackerman, and David Frum are all journalists who, among other things, have blogs.”

Of course, the journalist title still means something to a lot of people, but as I mentioned before they’re little more than middlemen. But it’s pretty odd that he’s trying to distance himself from the “blogger” label because of his new job. Your field of work really has little to do with whether you’re a blogger. For example, I’m a software engineer, and I’m still a blogger. So I see little need to distinguish between “blogger” and “person who happens to blog.”

And I don’t know if I’d really call Yglesias a journalist anyway. In my mind, a journalist is someone who actually goes out and finds the story and interviews people. So I think he got it right the first time when he called himself a commentator (columnist would have probably fit as well), but perhaps my comment made him sensitive about that or something.

Shoe-leather vs. ass-welt

As for the suggestion that bloggers should act more like journalists, Laura had a different take:

Look, blogging is never going to replace the mainstream press. We need proper journalists out there doing serious legwork and research to produce quality articles.

While it’s true we’ll always need people doing the legwork, this doesn’t preclude the possibility that “proper journalists” doing real research might all end up using the blog medium instead of the mainstream press, and that bloggers might end up doing more legwork (like some did at the Democratic Convention). Indeed, we may see some more specialization, where people who are good at finding stories but are bad writers can still find their niche, and vice versa. The blogosphere is already made up of different kinds of bloggers: thinkers (like me), linkers (like Glenn Reynolds), and teenage girls (like all the other bloggers). So it could conceivably evolve to include scoopers as well.

And via Dan Drezner, Jonathan Chait has an interesting take on that legwork at TNR Online:

Part of the problem is that journalism terminology glorifies “shoe-leather reporting,” whereby you pound the pavement so often you wear out the soles of your shoes. Yet there’s no widely used term of approbation for the other kind of reporting. For this very reason, my New Republic colleague Franklin Foer and I decided a few years ago to coin a phrase: ass-welt reporting. It means you’ve sat in your chair for so long reading books and documents that you’ve worn a welt the shape of your backside into your chair.

And as Drezner observes, “The best bloggers link to opposing views, excel at Chait’s ‘ass-welt reporting,’ and perform Google and Nexis searches ad nauseum.” Indeed, there are probably too many journalists doing shoe-leather reporting. You often see crowds of reporters at an event, since no publication wants to get scooped. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have just a few bloggers reporting on an event, other bloggers linking to the most important events, and then other bloggers analyzing all that information and writing about it?

Problems with blogging

To be sure, blogging is still an imperfect medium. The fact that it’s a self-publication format means there’s a lot of junk to wade through. Although many bloggers like to point out that it’s a medium where the cream eventually rises to the top because good posts get more links, there are so many blogs and a cliquish quality to the blogosphere that it’s pretty hard to break in. This method is pretty inefficient anyway, since it requires a lot of links to the same things, and given most of those links are with minimal comment, this is a huge duplication of information and effort.

Also, blogs tend to be fairly biased. Whereas journalists make an effort to present balanced stories, most bloggers don’t bother to. Of course, this is balanced by the fact that there are a ton of blogs, so most points of view across the spectrum are generally reflected (we don’t have the problem of the “one-paper town”). That, plus bloggers generally don’t hide their biases, where most journalists do (some would argue that the media would do a better job if journalists didn’t hide their biases or pretended that they aren’t biased). And it might also help if bloggers adopted a code of ethics.

Also, since bloggers don’t submit their stories to an editor, and since there’s an emphasis on posting quickly and often, blog posts tend to have a lot more typos and errors. Of course, bloggers could simply proofread their work better, like I do, or perhaps someone will come up with a very cheap and quick way for bloggers to get their posts proofread online. But any serious errors already tend to be caught by commenters and other bloggers. In contrast, a traditional media publication can usually ignore all their critics, and most of their audience would be none the wiser.

Really, the one real weakness of blogs is that you have to stay on top of several blogs to stay on top of current events. While RSS readers can make this easier, it’s still not as convenient as getting all the news from a single publication. Group blogs are a step in the right direction, but it still has a ways to go.

So while blogging has some issues to deal with, I don’t see any of them as showstoppers. Indeed, I see the process as similar to how I see the film, television, and music evolving, which I blogged about here and here. Creating and publishing content of all sorts is becoming easier and cheaper to do, eliminating the middleman. Although it will initially be harder to find quality, methods will develop, and it will be the audience who decides what succeeds, not the executives, so we will all be better off in the long run.

Especially if you read just my blog and nobody else’s!