If journalists at professional news organizations produce weblogs, should content that they produce go through a formal newsroom editing process, or flow directly from the weblogger’s keyboard onto the Web?
That is a question with no easy answer. As more news organizations embrace the idea of publishing weblogs, the free-wheeling nature of the weblogging world is clashing with the traditional practices of the news industry.
To the newsroom veterans, it seems like a no-brainer. Content produced by reporters or columnists that gets published under a news organization’s brand should be edited — for the sake of accuracy, making sure the content is unbiased, to watch for potential libel problems, etc. Content that is produced and published to the Internet without editing safeguards can be dangerous.
But before you buy that argument wholesale, listen to what some weblog proponents say about this issue. Here’s J.D. Lasica, a columnist for Online Journalism Review (and a veteran journalist who’s paid his dues in newspaper newsrooms), commenting during a recent lively discussion of this topic on Poynter.org’s Online-News discussion list:
“The chief appeal and attraction of weblogs are their free-form, unfiltered nature. You get to hear people in their natural dialect, writing from their gut (complete with warts, typos and feelings), saying things that wouldn’t normally make it through the newsroom editing machine. It would show journalists as human beings with opinions, emotions, and personal lives. I suspect the effort will not be worth it if the city editor or features editor has to sign off on every journalist’s weblog. Talk about self-censorship. If that becomes the standard, newspapers shouldn’t bother, because the more interesting blogs will be done by journalists on their personal sites in their off hours.”
Lasica has a point. Weblogs, if they’re good ones, are updated often and quickly. If an editing process is required for a news weblog, then it has to be a quick turn-around. And the best weblogs are often quirky and unpredictable — so editors should give staff bloggers more latitude than with normal articles. Lasica advocates the “light” editing approach, where weblog items are given a copy editing either before or right after publication.
Are edited webloggers stymied by the newsroom process? Not necessarily. Tom Regan, a technology columnist with the Christian Science Monitor who also writes two weblogs for the paper’s website, said in the Online-News list discussion that his blogs are edited by two people. “I’ve never found editing to be an impediment in any way to blogging,” he said. “In fact, aside from catching typos, I find that being edited helps me from gratuitously plunging off the deep end (especially when I write about topics like Microsoft or the RIIA). Yea, it’s not ‘instantaneous,’ but I don’t flatter myself with the notion that people are hovering over their computers, waiting to hear what Tom Regan has to say. They read me when they have the time, just the way I read the bloggers I like.”
The San Jose Mercury News‘ Dan Gillmor is edited after the fact on his popular eJournal weblog. His editor reads the blog frequently, “and lets me know if she sees a typo or something that raises a question,” Gillmor says. “If I have even the tiniest doubt about something I’m planning to post, I run it by her first.” Though eJournal is written in an “informal” style, “I don’t think journalistic principles are any less important there. The fact that I am a columnist (for the newspaper) gives me somewhat more leeway, I believe, than I might have if I were a reporter.”
I come down smack dab on the fence on this debate. I think there’s middle ground, where newsroom webloggers get both more freedom than they are used to and the benefit of professional (and fast) editing. The editing that Gillmor receives seems about right — where the writer gets the freedom and the ability to post directly to the weblog, but there is an editor reading directly behind him.
If you’d like to read more about this debate, check the archives of the Online-News list. From that page, click the “Visit online-news without joining” button to read old messages. The weblog-editing discussion took place during the first week of July.
