Can Journalists be Webloggers is the more important question. Taken as a given that journalists will use their training and education for accuracy, their passion for their material and reasoned articulation of their viewpoints, the freedom to publish what they consider news, analysis and commentary without the constraints of column inches, editorial cancellations, or other concerns, is in a lot of cases too much freedom.
Should Journalists be Webloggers? The answer is yes. For the reasons mentioned above and also to demonstrate good writing, which in the majority of webblog discussions is pointed to as why they don't do it. So step up to the plate and show us how it is done.
Weblogs are about passion and communication. They are not about money or fame. Seems to me that Journalism is about passion and communication.
Self-editing and free production methods (like from Blogger.com, for instance) simply strip away some of the elaborations of modern journalism.
Broken laundry machines aren't going to make the front page of the New York Times or any newspaper. But if you can pass the word along to a few other folks, then, in a micro way, you're doing reporting.
The web log is without question an interesting tool in our culture, but it's just another pipeline.
How that fits in with the the larger questions that surround how we do journalism today (24-hour news channels, news ticker crawls, instant analysis, etc.) remains to be seen.
I would argue the reporting point. I think Weblogs are doing much more reporting than they generally receive credit for. But most of the mainstream press coverage seems to have ignored it. Instead, the press focuses on two groups of bloggers:1) the Andrew Sullivans and Eric Altermans of the world. Why? The writers have national recognition.2) the Jim Romeneskos of the world. Why? The sites have national recognition.
The press coverage is geographically top-down, as is most technology news. On the Internet, it's much easier to find the biggest names than the most local. So when even metro newspapers go to write the Weblog trend story, they focus on the big shots. Out of this coverage, we hear about what these big shots do best. Sullivan and Alterman do analysis and commentary. Romenesko does links.
But as with any top-down approach, the little guy gets attention last. And in world of Weblogs now, it's the little guy who is doing the reporting. This reporting has a different style than we (the media-consuming public) are accustomed to today. In the current media landscape, we are used to behemoth-filtered news. Corporations, chains and CNNFOXMSNBC (as Drudge would put it) in every American newsroom. But somewhere in the White Noise, the little guy-bloggers are practicing a throwback: super-local journalism.
Super-local is not for the masses. It's for Me the Blogger, the people I know and anyone else who happens to stumble past. With this nature, it's easily ridiculued and ignored by the press. Super-local journalism is a first- and second-person medium. When the press tries to play its usual role as the third person, it misses the point. Say a blogger goes to thelaundromat and mild hilarity ensues. Of course a paid observer isn't going to find that interesting. But the blogger's online social circle and the online passers-by are going to think the story is interesting and funny. It's a certain-win situation with this audience. If one knows about the blogger, one learns about the laundromat. If one knows about aundromats, one learns about the blogger.
Super-local is a return to person-to-person news reporting. It's Caveman Blog standing on the mountain top, pounding out the news for the next mountain over to hear. "I saw fire down in valley today," Caveman Blog says. Miles away, no one cares. But the next mountain over sure does. So does anyone stopping by these mountains.
In its present stage, the super-local reporting style is still as primitive as Caveman Blog. The tools prevent the style from seeing greater distribution. Many bloggers present their life reporting online, but they often find the work of geographically nearby people only through physical word of mouth. Further down the road, if this reporting style is going to live, tools must be created to better take advantage of the super-local nature. Any kind of local journalism can only thrive if it has real world relevance. Blogging's super-local take has this possibility, but tools and technologies need to make it far more pervasive and thus useful.
Say, at the laundromat one day, washing machine number six ate someone's quarters. That person blogged about it. If you go to the same laundromat, wouldn't you want to hear that story before trying the same machine? Yes. Is this news? Yes, again. A quarter-eating washing machine is silly, soft news, but it's information being gathered and shared. It's only part of someone's day, anyway. One can easily imagine harder news getting blogged too.
I don't know how many bloggers out there follow the super-local reporting style, but most of the ones I know do. They see it as sharing instances of their lives with others. They don't see this service as important. But because we each approach our world down-to-top every day, their sharing of instances is news to us. Although out of the spotlight and still in itsinfancy, their work is indeed valuable reporting. Otherwise, Charles Kuralt and Caveman Blog aren't journalists.
