Monday, September 3, 2007

back-to-iraq.com This is Chris Allbritton's blog. But don't call him a blogger.

Today Christopher Allbritton, the acclaimed foreign correspondent behind Back-to-Iraq, penned a retort to NYU j-prof Jay Rosen, who'd included Allbritton in a list of 14 bloggers doing original journalism.

Said Allbritton in I am Not a Blogger: "I am a journalist who chose to blog to make a career move. I am still a journalist, proudly embedded in the so-called mainstream media, which generates about 99.9999 percent of the original reporting today. When I was first getting ready to go to Iraq in early 2003, many reporters called me and asked me why I was doing it, why blog? 'I blog,' I said, 'for the same reason I don’t use a manual typewriter instead of a laptop. It's the best tool for the job.'"

I'm glad that Allbritton makes the distinction that a blog is just a communication tool, nothing more. You can use a blog to publish any kind of content you want -- which is why we need to bag the blogging stereotypes. Journalists can blog, and doing so doesn't mean they're no longer journalists. It's not an either-or proposition.

...But then, Allbritton leaps into what seems to me to be defensive and unnecessary vs. thinking. He concludes his post with:

"Blog away, but please leave me out of the lists showing bloggers doing journalism. A blog is just a medium after all. Is everyone on TV a news anchor just because they share a studio? Of course not. So at the risk of sounding elitist, just because I have a blog doesn't mean I’m in your club -- or you in mine."

Why this squeamish resistance to being called a blogger? Why must Allbritton paint the term as a derogatory label, rather than merely descriptive of how he publishes his work?

It seems to me that "blogger v. journalist" exclamations only encourage the continued conflation of the terms -- and needless misunderstandings and acrimony.

Journalists are people who perform acts of journalism. Bloggers are people who publish content via a certain tool: weblogs. The two terms represent no more inherent conflict than "journalist" and "writer" (as in, someone who communicates via the tool of written language).

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