A couple of weeks back I wrote a piece on something I called "blogger journalism." It was a response to people asking me to submit interview questions in advance, something I maintained companies would never do if I worked for the NY Times. Last week at DEMO, I was chatting with Dan Farber as we filed into a room. I said, "Journalism is really changing these days," and he responded immediately, "No it isn't. It hasn't changed a bit."
We both got funneled into the room and did not sit together so we never continued the chat. I have a hunch that we are both right. To Dan, the rules of journalism have not much changed. His delivery and distribution may now be online rather than on paper. His frequency may niow be several times daily, rather than weekly. But he still listens to people, asks questions and writes balanced copy. Dan is mild mannered and friendly and helpful to other journalists. But when he goes after a story he's like a dog with a bone. It's his story and he wants to get it first and right.
That would have been true of Dan 20 years ago as well. I think bloggers, aspiring to be journalists can be well served to emulate Dan's standards.
But still I would argue, journalism is changing. It is changing in a great many ways. Here are a few:
- We are amateurs. We don't get paid. No bloggers were airlifted by corporations to cover Iraq or Katrina as far as I know. Most blogger don't get into the room where the big stories are introduced by large organizations. But those stories are still pretty well covered by traditional media.
So we bloggers write about the stories we do get to see in our neighborhoods; at our meetups; in our classrooms. We interview the people we see. We serve as our own camera/sound crews.
The result is that a great many more events of the world are being covered today than has ever been the case in newspapers who determined news quantity as the page space between ads. Social media people are delivering news faster than ever before and more people have the chance to be heard than ever before.
Is it journalism? Of course it is. The quality is uneven, but the same is probably true of your local traditional news sources. Whether the content is served up by a traditional organization or a blogger does not define whether or not it is journalism. There are newspaper reporters who get paid to cover alien abductions complete with doctored photos. There are bloggers who are not journalists for similar reasons. But there are a surprising number of bloggers who are respected citizen journalists.
- The guise of objectivity has changed. When I was a paid journalist in the late 1960s, I interviewed George C. Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who would go on to take 43% of Massachusetts Democratic votes in a primary election.
After, he sent me a thank you note, telling me he felt my article had helped him and his cause--a cause which I absolutely detested. But I had done my job. I had accurately reported what he said. I asked the sort of open-ended questions I still ask in interviews, ones that lets the speaker go where he/she wants to go. But helping George Wallace do well in a liberal Yankess state was something that did not please me in any way.
Since I returned to journalism, I've developed a style that Scoble and I used in the book. I tell you why I'm speaking to someone, then I left someone have his say. Then I tell you what i think of it., making very clear that you are getting a personal opinion. I wish I had the freedom to have done that 40 years ago as a reporter with Wallace.
Other bloggers seem to have picked up this approach and it pleases me immensely. It gets rid of a charade of objectivity that was never really there. It lets the reader know who the speaker is, and the reader will also have some sense of where the reporter is coming from. It is different from the old rules of engagement.
- My fact checkers are you. You change my story. Last week I covered DEMO 08 presentations on Twitter. One company, NotchUp claimed, in their presentation, that word-of-mouth among enthusiastic alpha users had taken it's new service viral; that there were 50,000 grassroots users gathered in a few weeks. Within minutes, i received a significant handful of Twitter responses, from readers on three continents, saying these guys were spammers and their claim was highly misleading.
In days of old, my editor would have challenged the NotchUp claim, asking me to get a second source. If I could not, the paper would probably have run the claim, emphasizing that it was the company's assertion. Some readers would have known the assertion was misleading, but probably would not have told us, because it was much haerder than just hitting a Twitter "Upload button." In fact, a great journalist wiud have gone back to NotchUp to respond to the accusations, I did not because my readers got me to lose interest in them as a company.
I do not have the considerable benefit of an editor anymore, as those who ping me my frequent typos will attest--but I have a whole bevy of fact-checkers out there, as do other blogger journalists. They heloed Robert and I write a better book and they help me write more accurate reports now. Blog readers vet the facts, and the blog writer adjusts accordingly and quickly.
These are just three thoughts on the subject. There are many more. With all due respect to Dan, social media is changing most institutions and that includes journalism. Personally, it is a good thing. Most of America's "free press, " is in the hands of interests more concerned with corporate profits than journalism and for better or worse, social media is the only force emerging to offset that concentration of information control.
