bloggers vs. journalists… a reasoned view

Red Wings Corner: Blogs are fine by me:


My peers look at bloggers as non-journalists … and believe it or not, that’s a slam. They point out that very few bloggers have primary information, instead being so removed from the dressing room that they act as collection houses of information first posted by beat reporters. Commentary thus becomes the only unique part of the blog. My beat-writer peers fear that their blogs will have fewer hits (yes, we speak the language) because that information can be found on other sites.

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There’s lots of good stuff there and lots of garbage, kind of like movies or TV shows or newspapers.

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And blogs do offer commentary and that’s a good thing too. I’ve read dozens of newspaper columns this year about the Red Wings from columnists who haven’t been to many — if any — of the games. I’m not sure what the difference is.

A very nice, reasoned view of the whole “hockey blogger vs. journalist” thing.

Which is really overblown. I have some sympathy for the newspaper folks, it’s not a fun time in that industry, and I can understand why they might see bloggers as “the problem” and lash out, but in reality, that problem has been affecting the industry for 40+ years as readership slumps and newspapers fold or merge (or merge AND fold; for more on that, see some of my previous writing on this, like San Francisco Chronicle layoffs).

Bruce makes a point I’ve tried to make before: very little of what bloggers do is “journalism”. It’s commentary. It’s not “citizens journalism”, it’s an online op-ed page — it’s not creating the story or doing the research, it’s commenting on it.

Which isn’t bad. as Bruce also points out (and which many on the newspaper side tend to ignore), there’s a lot of that commentary going on in newspapers, too. There are beat guys in the sports page who basically live with the team during the season, and then there are the columnists and editors, who are no closer to actually being with the team than the bloggers are — hey, there are some here in San jose I’d love to see show up in the arena as often as they talk sharks, for instance…

Now, hopefully at some point some bloggers will be able to create an income stream from taking a team beat, and the teams will support that with access and information. Until then, that’s the domain of the printed publications, and some papers are trying to find a way to merge the old and the new and make this viable for THEM — see, for instance, the work Dave Pollack is doing with the mercury news as beat guy this year. He’s been charged not just with being the beat guy, but reinventing what that means in this new, online&print world, and doing some nice things).

Frankly? we need to make sure that the on-the-ground journalism survives this transition and gets funded properly, because that original work is something most bloggers can’t (and won’t) do — whether that’s the beat guy at the morning skate every morning or the reporter going to school board meetings and digging into city council expense reports.

But commentary? There are any number of bloggers doing better work on the Sharks than the so-called “professional” columnists here in the area. No wonder some folks “in the industry” feel threatened, that’s true in most markets, and if there’s a part of the newspaper industry at risk in the NEXT wave of migration to the net, it’s the people who comment on the news as opposed to the ones actually reporting it… (and of course the ones most likely bitching about bloggers are the columnists, because beat guys don’t editorialize like that — because that’s not journalism…. it’s commentary, and that’s not their role on the team…)

Many of those bitching about the bloggers DESERVE to be worried, you know? Maybe they should go back to covering a beat somewhere, and really get back to the roots of their journalism….

(hat tip, kukla)

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