News-Record.com

I was having this conversation last weekend with some reporter friends of mine in MA. Blogging hasn't taken off as an actual part of newspapers there the way it has here yet, but they said the problem they've run into with blogs is that they advance the idea that everyone is a journalist, or everyone can be as long as they can operate a blog.

You wouldn't trust someone who just enjoys doing it to rewire your house or fix your plumbing. So why would you trust bloggers to act as responsible journalists? By and large they don't have training, experience or any sense of basic journalistic ethics -- so is it a GOOD thing that so many bloggers now think they're reporters?

I said I wasn't sure it was that severe. There are arguably even more dire consequences to amateur journalism than to amateur plumbing - but I think most people still know the difference between a blogger and a journalist.

It maybe true that those on the far right and far left think all journalists and all newspapers are full of lies and run by the opposition - but most rational people have some sense that journalism is a profession like anything else and can't just be picked up effectively by anyone who can type.

Joe, are you suggesting that one must be university trained in order to be a journalist?

Not at all. Some of the best reporters I know never went to school for journalism - and quite a few don't have college degrees of any kind.

But I do think there are skills, abilities and sensibilities you get from "traditional" journalism - working in a newsroom, being edited, concerning yourself with the profession's basic codes of ethics - that a lot of bloggers just don't have. Which is fine - if they consider themselves to be bloggers.

But there are bloggers out there - and I've run afoul of them - who consider themselves to be journalists who happen to be using a blog instead of a newspaper but haven't a clue about how to be a journalist and couldn't care less. Printing someone's name when you've told them their comments are off the record, altering quotes or pictures, re-creating events for photographs without labelling them as re-enactments, using "journalism" to settle personal scores or report on things to which you're entirely too close...these are some of the dangers of bloggers deciding they're journalists without thinking about what that means. I think it's more ignorance than malevolence - but being a bad journalist isn't just annoying, it's potentially dangerous.

Good explanation Joe and the kindness and the civility is much appreciated.

Eh - no extra effort to be civil.

This is a contentious issue - and one I'm on the fence on more often than not. But in the end I tend to think (perhaps because I think I qualify) that there's no real substitute for an experienced journalist who knows what he's doing, cares about it and is willing and even eager to be held to a standard understood and respected by other journalists.

Blogging may, as John says, be "like" journalism - and in certain rare cases may even be some strain of journalism. But at this stage, more often than not, it isn't good reporting. People are smarter than we give them credit for, though, and I think most people do know the difference.