PressThink: BloggerCon: Discussion Notes for, "What is Journalism? And What Can Weblogs Do About It?"

BloggerCon: Discussion Notes for, "What is Journalism? And What Can Weblogs Do About It?"

The background essay, "No One Owns Journalism," and an initial list of questions for the BloggerCon session I will be leading April 17 at Harvard Law School. Expect this post to change as comments come in and I re-think it. Plus, I need ten more questions for my final list of twenty. Got an idea?

I will be discussion leader for a session at BloggerCon that we are tentatively calling “What is Journalism? And What Can Weblogs Do About it?”

If you plan to attend, (see Dave Winer’s invitation) or follow along by webcast, or if you just have an interest in the subject, here are background notes, some distinctions that might usefully be drawn before discussion starts, and an initial list of questions for the group. There will be no lecture, no speeches, no panel. Dave’s philosophy at BloggerCon (and I agree with it) is that the people in the room are the panel. Keep that in mind as you read this. If you show up, you are a participant. It helps to be on the same page as others, and that’s the purpose of this post.

(Expect this to be revised up to the day of the conference, April 17.)

Background Essay, Draft Form:
No One Owns Journalism
(About 1,500 words, so read it when you have time.)

By “journalism” we ought to mean the practice of it, not the profession of it. Journalism can happen on any platform. It is independent of its many delivery devices. This also means that journalism is not the same thing—at all—as “the media.” The media, or Big Media as some call it, does not own journalism, and cannot dispose of it on a whim.

Nor does any professional group own journalism, any more than museums and galleries can “own” painting. Although the best journalists around today are professionals, this has not always been the case. During Benjamin Franklin’s time, printers were the people who served as journalists. They were stationed at the right point in the information flow, and they had the means to distribute news. Printers were often postmasters too, which helped.

If printers and postmasters, who didn’t set out to be journalists, can wind up as that, then in any era we should think it possible for people to wind up doing journalism because they find it a logical, practical, meaningful, democratic, and worthwhile activity.

The Open Practice and a Free Press

Journalism is a demanding practice; and only in principle—a pretty important principle—is “anyone” or “everyone” able to do it. It might surprise some at BloggerCon that journalists do not always like to be called professionals. Many don’t buy it, and they will argue with you if you say journalism is a profession. The first time I met with this attitude, I didn’t understand it. You won’t find social workers, pharmacists, dentists or public school teachers grabbing your lapels to say: We’re not a profession, buddy. Got that? But in journalism you get this argument often.

Why? Well, it’s part of a larger argument— for freedom in the press. “Journalism is a profession” only makes sense if you officially qualify people as journalists. That’s what a profession does: restrict the practice to the qualified ones. The bid for public trust follows from that initial division between the qualified and the not. “I’m a licensed teacher, trust me with your child.”

Journalists sometimes join in those kinds of restrictions (the press pass, for example) and they often do think, “we’re the pros at this…you’re not. ” But the deeper feeling among many is that journalism should always be open, unrestricted, in principle there for anyone, qualified or not, experienced or not, because to restrict the practice to approved voices is ultimately hostile to a free press. That’s why they say: we’re not a profession, don’t call us that.

The Professionals Set a Standard

So to argue that professionals don’t own journalism is no disrespect to professionals. It’s simply another way of calling for a free press, of preserving journalism as an open and democratic practice. The truth is that the people who do it for a living, because they are able to do it for a living, set a high standard for excellence, and—despite all kinds of problems—for basic accuracy in reporting.

Meanwhile, the capacity of the major news organizations to find out what’s happening, to package and deliver it to people, dwarfs any alternative capacity out there— including, of course, the weblogs. What I mean by “dwarfs” includes facts like the news and editorial budget at the New York Times: $180 million a year for a staff of 1,200. (See this.) That translates into power, as when The Times won a reprieve from Internet censorship in China because “its former editor appealed personally to former President Jiang Zemin.”

Even at two million weblogs and counting, the blog sphere isn’t in the same category or dimension as an institution like the Times, and that’s only one of hundreds of rich and powerful firms in the journalism biz (including nonprofit firms like NPR.) The weblog sphere isn’t an institution at all, and whatever strengths it has probably derive from that.

My own feeling is that amateur journalists, citizens, webloggers should take seriously the existing standard in the institutional press. They should understand what goes into meeting it, and even emulate professional journalism from time to time— when it fits with the author’s purposes. These are self-defined. And when they are not, a weblog is starting to become something else, more familiar to us. In the worst case, it’s PR or propaganda.

Of course, none of this means we should back off for a moment from criticism of a powerful institution, the press, or that all-surrounding complex, The Media. Both need it, and this is one of the first demands that weblogs, including this one, responded to. But when you free “journalism” from those two things—The Press, The Media—it’s easier to talk about the practice and what weblogs may add to it.

Passage to the Public Sphere

Even if only a tiny amount of “real journalism” (however you define it) goes on at weblogs, there is significance in a simpler fact: blogs represent passage to the public sphere. Citizens of any kind who decide to take up their pens and write their thoughts down at their own self-titled, self-published magazines—and there are a lot of those already—could, at any time, pick up the reporter’s notebook too. The first place they are likely to head is some event that concerns them— maybe the school board.

Are amateur correspondents unlikely to emerge en masse? Extremely so. And maybe their chance for a mass audience is nil. But picture them anyway. Were they to go out and report the world, the weblog is already there, an outlet to the sea. By starting to blog as a journalist, they can navigate to the open waters of the Web, and follow their own course in journalism to… who knows?

This is what openness means. It takes a stunted or cynical mind to find no importance in it. Any increase in human freedom—what people are now free to do for themselves—adds to democratic possibility. The weblog, I think, is an addition like that in journalism. Read James Wolcott in Vanity Fair on the blogs. He agrees.

No one owns the practice. In principle, it’s anyone’s game. The press doesn’t own journalism, entirely. And Big Media doesn’t entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn’t. These things were always true. The weblog doesn’t change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends “the press” to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night.

Journalism is Done for a Public

Journalism can be a commercial thing, done for money, or a noncommercial thing, done for love. It may be done as a public service, a way of entering into political debate, or for the simple and practical reasons people have always shared information or “talk.” It can be a purely human and expressive act. And, of course, it is sometimes done for reasons of power.

But what most identifies the practice of journalism is not power, profit, or free expression in itself. It’s the idea of addressing, engaging and freely informing a “public” about events in its world. It is an interesting question how many people it takes for, say, a political weblog to have a political public. I don’t know that it has an answer.

Philosophers disagree on whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound, if no ear hears it. But it is certain that the tree does not make news. Until it hits a house, and civilization gets involved. Then a public interest is at stake. Now there can be news. Journalism has something to do with things seen at stake in the world for a group of inter-connected people who share that world. Those are the people I’m calling a public.

To get even more elemental about it, and to go back further in time: Before you can have journalism, certain patterns in human settlement need to arise. The scale must be enlarged enough so that things happening all around the settlement are hard to know about without a lot of extra effort. Self-contained worlds on a truly human scale don’t need many journalists and may have none. Life there is self-informing.

Modern Scale and the Awayness of Things

I once tried to characterize this condition as the “awayness” of things. The harbor town small enough so that everyone knows when a new ship arrives needs no provider of shipping news. By going about its business, the town already has the news, so to speak. You could say that everyone’s a journalist around the harbor. You could say that no one is, which is probably wiser.

In this sense, journalism is modern because the scale that requires it is modern. Big developments in the awayness of things—wars, for example, or a growth in the scale of economic activity—always drive, transform and unsettle journalism. It seems we’re at such a point now. The Internet is a rather big development in the awayness of things.

If some say we are verging on a new era in citizens’ media; if they are tempted to phrase it melodramatically, as in “now the audience has a printing press,” or “now everyone’s a journalist,” then our discussion at BloggerCon must admit into evidence all the ways these statements misidentify the reality and over-estimate or misconstrue the weblog’s (so far) modest effects— all the ways they aren’t true.

But at the same time, it’s helpful to isolate the handful of ways that such sweeping and lyricized statements are true. “Now everyone can be a journalist” may be too idealistic, or just hype. But it speaks to a verifiable fact: barriers to entry have come way down in Web publishing. Monopolies of knowledge are being ended here and there. And there are in fact more citizen journalists out there today who do have their own printing press and perhaps a public too. They are interacting with the press more and more, criticizing it a lot. They are making use of their outlet to the sea.

Something New and Potentially Big

The same forces bringing us those developments are meanwhile writing a new chapter in the evolution of journalism, the professional practice, by its available technology. Which brings us to the possibilities of the weblog, a technology available to journalism, which also makes journalism more “available” to non-journalists. The premise of the J-track at BloggerCon (three sessions during the day) is that the weblog form and its setting (commonly but inelegantly called the Blogosphere) together represent something new in journalism— new and potentially important.

That’s very different from saying: the revolution is here!

What that “new” factor is, and how important it might become, what’s already happened in journalism because of weblogs— these are crucial matters on the floor, the meat of the subject at BloggerCon. The ticking heart of the subject, however, is why do journalism at all? What’s it good for? Why does it matter if it’s done one way or another? And why should webloggers even care about the practice? I anticipate good arguments around that.

One argument I do not anticipate making much room for is the most tired one: Are weblogs journalism? Frankly, I don’t care about this question. I think it’s dumb. As your discussion leader, expect me to lead away from it as soon as it comes up. But that means moving toward other, better questions, in pursuit of which there is the Comment section here (with 100+ entries) and here. (BOP News)

Finally, a Link

Ready? James W. Carey, The Struggle Against Forgetting. Carey, CBS Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University, has through a long career been Dean of the School of Communication at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, a member of the PBS Board, president of the Association for Education in Journalism in Mass Communication, and an author, scholar, critic concerned with journalism, culture and democratic life. The link goes to a speech Carey gave to entering journalism students at Columbia.

The snippet to get you interested:

“…Journalism arose as a protest against illegitimate authority in the name of a wider social contract, in the name of the formation of a genuine public life and a genuine public opinion. Journalism can be practiced virtually anywhere and under almost any circumstances. Just as medicine, for example, can be practiced in enormous clinics organized like corporations or in one-person offices, journalism can be practiced in multinational conglomerates or by isolated freelancers…. The practice does not depend on the technology or bureaucracy. It depends on the practitioner mastering a body of skill and exercising it to some worthwhile purpose.” More…

Aftermath: Notes, Reactions & Links…

A frequently productive discussion is underway in Comments, with over 100 replies so far. So hit the button and contribute your thoughts.

Interesting discussion at Tom Mangan’s Prints the Chaff: Bloggers and the Pulitzers. See the comments too.

Dave Winer, host and organizer of BloggerCon, decides to answer the question: What is Journalism? His notion: “”An independent view of a series of events.”

Dan Rosenbaum of Over the Edge: Blogging as Journalism Redux: “Weblogs are tools. What people do with those tools is up to them. Weblogs themselves are no more journalism than compilers are programming or automobiles are commuting. Tool. Function. Result. They’re different. Why is that so hard to understand?”

Former CNN‘er Rebecca MacKinnon, who will be leading the session on international weblogs and journalism at BloggerCom, starts her pre-conference discussion, in parallel to this one:

Weblogs are currently the most established and effective form of interactive, participatory media that can create these “cyber-commons”. But there are many other formats and tools other than weblogs that can also create “cyber-commons” – and may in the future do a better job of it. I do not want to limit the discussion to a particular set of software tools and hardware technologies. Some of the issues I want to raise pre-date the weblog, and most will definitely outlive the weblog as we currently think of it in 2004.

Interested parties should head over to LA Observed and check this post for the remarkable story of the World Journalism Institute retracting an earlier mission statement about Christians in holy battle with seculars in the newroom. The statement, by director Robert Case, apologizes to members for the earlier logic, and credits criticism from weblogs for the realizations WJI came to:

The World Journalism Institute has recently come under criticism in some blog quarters concerning its mission statement and its rationale for existence. The criticism has been directed towards the wording in our mission statement that suggests the Institute seeks to train Christian journalists to bend the news to fit a preconceived (presupposed) worldview shaped by the Bible, and then to send those propagandists into the mainstream newsrooms as agents (cadre) of Christianity.
The criticism, while unpleasant, is on target given that particular mission statement.

from LA Observed: Advocates for Christ no more. PressThink’s question: what is that a victory for?

In a post recommended to realists, Phil Wolff of a klog apart says

reading blogs is a zero sum game. Each person on earth has only so much disposable attention. Every content publisher competes for that finite pool. It’s not the blogosphere, of course, but the entire mediasphere and the real world fighting for attention.
The very popularity of weblogs and their ease for new entrants means that our marketplace for attention becomes more efficient. Like any nearly efficient market, overall rents (profits distributed) average toward zero. In an attention market, that means you may get your shot at the big time, but your content had better meet some niche’s needs superbly or you’re toast.

Fairness? Equal distribution of attention means that everyone has to read more dreck and that nobody ever gets to discover classics or bestsellers… it’s wrong to expect opportunity to scale.

The Oregonian profiles local blogger b!x (but without any links): Portland e-citizen doggedly chronicles local government: “during the past year and a half, this college dropout with no journalism experience has become the must-read source for those who follow city government.” And b!x (Christopher Frankonis) continues the discussion in Comments here.

Unbillable Hours has a detailed post, On How We Discuss Blogs, in anticipation of BloggerCon.

When she’s not serving as illustration in blogging articles, the unnamed “suburban mom” linked to above is Debra Galant of Debra Galant Explains the Universe (subtitled, “suburbia, motherhood and other black holes.”)

At commonplaces, Tom comments on this post: “Unlike TV news anchors, bloggers don’t all need to have the same hair, suit, desk. They don’t need to seem implausibly earnest when talking about things that do not interest them at all. Blogging is a realm where the professional conveyors of information can observe experiments with every variety of nuance, tone, image, feedback loop, voice, ellipsis, range of reference, linkage, obscenity, parody, fraud, uncertainty of data and of source, narrative, understanding of probability, personae, spidering, data packaging, genre, color, emotion, and any other conceivable component of form.”

At Reading A1, Michael comments: “… ‘journalism’ as such, as a categorical abstraction, simply doesn’t exist. Journalism is a practice, or a set of practices, enabled by the creation of certain social technologies (hard technologies + social forms adapted to their use) for the distribution of information. As the social technologies that structure the practice of journalism change, so does journalism.”

They’re planning to watch the BloggerCon session in China.

British blogger Harry at Harry’s Place, Some Thoughts on Blogs and Journalism: “I notice a tendency amongst the elite bloggers in America to treat blogging as a new form of journalism, or as part of journalism itself and I see dangers in both approaches….First of all I don’t think anyone in the news business really fears blogs. In fact most British journalists I have met seem to quite enjoy reading weblogs and it is fun to sometimes spot when they have taken ideas from blog posts. Secondly, I really don’t think bloggers need tutelage by people who understand. What is refreshing about reading blogs is that they are different from reading newspapers.”

And Jeff Jarvis reacts to Harry.

Posted by Jay Rosen at March 25, 2004 2:21 PM Print

Jagged thoughts, disconnected:

We set standards of excellence, but don't call us professionals. I juxtapose these two ideas because a friction exists between them. They don't necessarily contradict each other, but there's turbulence. While I agree that some of those who practice journalism for a living set a high standard for excellence, some also set new lows for despicability and unethical behavior. Perhaps journalists resist being called a profession because along with the idea of profession comes the idea of regulation and ethics. The best journalists need the least regulation and have a built-in sense of ethical reporting; unfortunately, the worst journalists, the ones who make others hate the "j" word, make me wish for some degree of regulation or standard to delimit unfair, biased, irresponsible reporting. At the very least, consensus on ethical behavior is welcome, and that exists already in some places.

My point: a free press is essential to democracy, but only if that press is free, fair, and ethical. Unethical, unfair, biased press is possible in a democracy but in no way advances the practice of it. Unethical journalism is the enemy of freedom and the champion of propaganda. Carey argues that the aspiration to democratic life is endemic to journalism. I'd like him to add the word "good" before the word journalism in that thought. While I agree with Jay's idea that restricting the practice of journalism to "approved voices" limits the freedom of the press, "unapproved" voices do not add to freedom either, if they are spawing crap and evil.

I can appreciate the idea that journalists exist outside "the media"; however, they also exist inside the media. You can try to separate the two, but as long as somebody else is operating the presses, hiring the staff, and paying the power bill, journalists remain a part of that larger system of media. Journalists are edited, and they don't write their own headlines. The very concept of "the editor" delimits the idea of journalists having a direct conduit to the public. A team effort (journalist plus editor) can both good and bad -- as Carey wrote, journalism "has the greatest virtue and the greatest evil." Unfortunately, journalists are
not always in complete control over the final virtue of their own stories, and they don't typically get up and shout on corner soapboxes to get a story out. They hand it in to an editor. No one owns journalism, but lots of people own journalists.

This is where blogs come in. I blogger is both the writer and the publisher, like in days of old when printers were the journalists. Bloggers aren't completely free to write whatever they want -- usually some restrictions come via the software distributor agreement the blogger acknowledges. Some blogging software companies are more hands-on than others. Otherwise, bloggers can post at their whim without any external editor (I'll argue that an internal editor always exists), and they can soapbox all they want. In fact, a blog is like a soapbox, some with higher aspirations than others.

I'm not convinced that journalists set a standard for basic accuracy in reporting for bloggers because bloggers really have no window on the practice of good journalism, nor do they have the ability to independently verify whether what they read in the news is accurate at all. Readers and bloggers only see the news, not the production of the news, not the newsroom. While bloggers might think they know good reporting when they see it, the problem is that they might not know bad reporting when they see that too.

Here's something to ponder. Jay wrote, "If printers and postmasters, who didn't set out to be journalists, can wind up as that, then in any era we should think it possible for people to wind up doing journalism because they find it a logical, practical, meaningful, democratic, and worthwhile activity." Conversely, Carey wrote, "Every despot creates his own system of media." We can surmise that bloggers find blogging meaningful and democratic if we want. Nevertheless, the possibility exists that the blogosphere is filled with mini-despots, people who want to create their own self-contained versions of the world and then project that for others to see or emulate.

Do bloggers write to create memorable experiences, as Carey suggests? That depends on whether they make their archives public : ) Honestly, I'm not convinced any journalist's task is to make experience memorable. Really, how long is the public's memory anyway, and who scrapbooks anymore? I'd argue that the good journalist's task is to uphold public accountability, with a secondary dash of public insight offered whenever possible. I don't believe this is the task of the blogger. The job of the blogger is more like observer or, if a comments section exists, engager. Blogs generate discussion, both between blogs and off-line. A blogger creates dialogue, even if it's with an imaginary audience, which is where Ong might have special relevance. Blogs can have entertainment value as well. They also provide an outlet for the "unpublishable," by any editor's standard. Blogs might represent chaos butterflying ideas into the universe. Good blogs have the quality of being genuine or real.

Ultimately, most bloggers are free, or as close to free as you can get. They can write their version of life and publish that to the world, and they can do it however they want -- narrative, poetry, fiction, images, sound . . . anything that can be represented electronically. True bloggers are accountable to no one but themselves, their "internal editor," and those who have a meaningful existence in the bloggers' self-defined worlds. Of course, this doesn't include opportuno-bloggers -- people who blog because they want to be elected or advance some particular cause or product. Opportuno-bloggers are sales clerks.

Posted by: Academy Girl at March 28, 2004 3:21 AM | Permalink

I'd like to address the issue of power a bit, and institutional cluelessness.

Atrios doesn't fit any definition of "journalist" I'm familiar with unless it's the cultural amanuensis sort, but he's a power in the sense that he's a premier distributor of news and opinion and he has the ability to channel large sums of money to what he believes are worthy causes. He rarely breaks a story, but he does synthesize the news and makes suggestions as to what his readers should do about what they're reading.

In other words, it's not a passive experience. I think someone upstream mentioned the transmogrification of readers into journalists, and I'd like to add to that concept the notion of readers as newsmakers. Their responses to what they read can change reality, as when Atrios funnels $100,000 in contributions to the Kerry campaign. The story there isn't just that Atrios had the audience and credibility to get that result, but that the readers acted, becoming news in their own right. Stories within stories.

Not many blogs have that sort of clout. Josh Marshall gets significantly more traffic than Atrios, but wouldn't and probably couldn't outdo the latter as an activist because he values his role as a traditional journalist, albeit a partisan one, and wouldn't want to compromise it.

The recent flap about South Dakota Democratic congressional candidate Stephanie Herseth's "secret" fundraising web site offers a dual lesson in power. The site scared her opponents, who reacted much as if she were clandestinely collecting money from France or some other equally suspicious source when in fact the site was linked from ads she ran on various left-leaning blogs.

At the same time, the blog-related fundraising affected Herseth's campaign. One of the sites she advertised on, The Daily Kos, was barraged by angry comments after Herseth announced her support for amending the constitution to enshrine marriage as a hetero-only deal, and Herseth amended her position shortly thereafter.

There again, the readers acted as newsmakers. The opinions expressed on the Daily Kos aren't going to win or lose votes in South Dakota, but they surely did affect her fundraising and her understanding of her constituency.

So there's one question: have blogs helped invert the news pyramid? That is, are the people who traditionally make the news now overtly reacting to the readers instead of the other way 'round?

On the institutional front, I think Bill Keller's defense of Judith Miller's Iraq reporting is as vivid an example of living inside the event horizon as could be found. Keller's defense is that Miller has fabulous sources that got the Times a lot of exclusives, and that most of them turned out to be more fabulist than fabulous is simply a contextual issue.

No doubt that's at least in part a closing of ranks behind a star reporter - the scarcity of her byline in the past six months or so certainly indicate some skepticism about her capacity - but it's also an indication that Keller is at least to some extent unaware of the coincidental reporting disputing Miller's work. Had he been a blog afficianado, he could have followed the simultaneous examinations of Miller's reporting and the pieces debunking much of what her sources had to say.

That he didn't, and that he didn't try even in retrospect, is symptomatic of the institutional unease with unorganized information. Keller doesn't recognize that although the Times is still the paper of record, the record isn't sacrosanct anymore.

So there's another question: can blogs help crack the insular world of elite journalism? The record on the Times is mixed: its reporters seem more inclined to resent or dismiss, or both, the daily barrage of criticism than to examine what their contribution to it might be, but the editorial desks seem much more responsive. One example of that is the faked Fonda/Kerry photo the Times ran with and then corrected, albeit without a mea culpa, in less than 24 hours.

Interpreting the news is something that most journalists do to one extent or another, but blogs pretty much have a license to ill. I think many bloggers, including the most opinionated among us, hold themselves to a higher standard of accuracy with regard to hard news simply because it's so easy for anyone to fact check the news upon which the opinions are based, and unlike as with the traditional press, reluctance or failure to own up to an error can be fatal.

At the same time, bloggers can synthesize such a large number of sources that they are in at least some cases creating news. A case in point is the recent Pakistani army crackdown in the tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan.

U.S. papers were filled with speculation about "high-value" targets and devoted very little attention to the actual conflict, while the Pakistani papers and others in the region were looking at the facts of the fighting - who was involved, who was getting killed by whom and how and why, what was the local and national reaction to the incursion, what did it mean to relations between Pakistan and the US, Pakisan and Afghanistan, even Pakistan and India and India and the US.

It took US papers almost a week to get into any of the internal ramifications of the fighting, and even now it's not being covered especially well. A number of bloggers, however, were able to assemble the various available sources to produce an overview that wasn't available through the parochial press here or there. Blogs could offer, in broad strokes or in detail according to preference, the perils facing Pakistan from religious turmoil and potential divisions in the army sparked by the conflict, the degree to which the US and Pakistan were serious about accomplishing their stated goals, the potential efects of success or failure upon the local tribesmen and the foreign militants living among them ... it was a cornucopia of news and opinion you really couldn't get anywhere else, and it came about almost overnight. That's reporting even though it doesn't involve beatin' feet to the war zone or the White House.

So there's another question: in the long run, can traditional reporting compete with the use bloggers make of it? I know this smacks a bit of the TV v. newspaper conflict, but the difference is that newshound bloggers aren't rushing to get their particular story on the air, but instead to assemble as many different sources on a particular story for readers to view and comment upon.

And that brings up another question: will bloggers eventually be absorbed into the traditional press as stringers? Rather than attempting to compete with the multitudes, will the traditional press attempt to put them to work to gain the advantage provided by that plethora of sources?

One other point on the question of readership as a measure of influence: I have a readership numbering in the tens, but I've managed to get a writer at a fairly major opinion magazine to amend his position after reading something I wrote, and Okrent's assistant at the Times recently told me that several people had made favorable mention of me in their comments to the public editor. Possibly that's my mom adopting disguises, but the point is that I've made a small dent in relatively high places with a very small audience. On the other hand, I couldn't raise a dime for a candidate of my choice and it's extremely unlikely that anything I write will ever inluence a politican one way or another. So you really have to define influence before you can begin measuring it.

Posted by: weldon berger at March 30, 2004 5:39 AM | Permalink

Jay,

I won't be at bloggercon, so I appreciate this opportunity.

As you know, I look at the media revolution in the context of cultural postmodernism. I think the energy for change comes from the bottom of the pyramid, and that's especially true with the press. The energy is fueled by eyes opening and saying, "You know, none of this works."

I view Weblogs as a natural part of the transformation, but where I run into difficulty is when I see bloggers searching for kudos, recognition and influence within the traditional media landscape. When I see this and "top 100" lists, I have to ask myself if blogging isn't evolving, instead, simply into another form of traditional media, albeit one wherein argument is expressed.

We have that human need to try to manipulate everything we encounter for our own gain, something that is hierarchical and, therefore, modernist. I would love to see us just continue what we're doing and let the people decide the ultimate role we're going to play in the world of journalism. Each should have his or her own manifesto, and the rules should be common sense.

That's not to say we shouldn't be able to support ourselves in so doing, but somehow I just don't think the revenue model is going to be based on modernist reach/frequency.

So my questions would be: Do weblogs really give power to the people?

and...

If weblog journalism is about power, what's to prevent weblogs from falling into the same trap that has snared the traditional press?

Keep up the great work. You're my hero.

Terry

Posted by: Terry Heaton at March 25, 2004 3:14 PM | Permalink

Jay, it's great that this piece is more nuanced than the typical blog triumphalism. But I'd say that the phrasing and focus is still an invitation for an echo chamber of abstraction. Nothing wrong with that _per se_, of course, if that was your intent.

I find this to be the key passage:

"It's the idea of addressing, engaging or somehow informing a "public" about events in its world. It is an interesting question how many people it takes for, say, a political weblog to have a public. I don't know that it has an answer, however."

It's easy to vamp on the idea, but much harder to grapple with the answer.

To give an illustration, last week, I committed an act of journalism:

Bruce Taylor, Declan McCullagh, and "rotten little kids"

As free, unpaid, working-for-nothing, voice in the wilderness, reporting, I mean "citizen journalism", I checked with a source to see if he had really said an inflammatory quote as widely reported by a powerful journalist. He gave an excellent explanation of being misquoted as to meaning, and leads where I could further check if interested in verification.

Abstractly, wow, I'm a journalist too. Practically, tens of thousands people are going to read the original, and only a few dozen will read my blog. Moreover, if I ever do have any effect, I'll likely be venomously smeared in a hatchet-job, and will have no way to fight back.

Maybe I'm just missing the focus. But my reaction is that practice has to inform the theory if the theory is to have utility.

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at March 25, 2004 4:04 PM | Permalink

Okay, Seth. I think I see what you are saying. (Although I don't know how much more I can do to signal that this is not "blog triumphalism.") But it would help me out, and the conference, if you would take this "abstractly, I'm a journalist, realistically, you got to be kidding..." point and phrase it as a question for my list. Possible?

Terry: Thanks for those comments, which I will absorb. Seems my list is missing one or two questions about power-- differentials in power.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 25, 2004 4:22 PM | Permalink

Here's an additional question, or at least the seed of one (since I'm just taking a quick first stab at the concept here to get it on the table for discussion or refinement):

What are the criteria or processes through which we can judge the "credibility" of citizen journalism in the weblog form, since traditional forms of journalism often have an established historical record of the news organization's credibility as an existing baseline?

Posted by: The One True b!X at March 25, 2004 5:20 PM | Permalink

Your effort to distinguish the practice of journalism from the profession and the platforms is laudable. When a reporter talks to a source, he is, after all, talking to a reporter, just one who happens not to be thinking of him or herself as a member of the press corps. The roles of source, reporter, editor and reader are constantly in flux, more than ever with web-enabled publishing. I would not let this careful framing of the subject divert the discussion entirely from the problem inherent in big media of the conflicts of interest between the act of journalism and the commercial setting in which that act is performed. Now more than ever that question should not be repressed, or dodged, in a forum such as the one you are happily putting together.

Posted by: tom matrullo at March 25, 2004 5:49 PM | Permalink

Oops, I meant my initial sentence to convey, as a compliment, "your essay is (above) (average blog triumphalism)" - not - "your essay is (above average) (blog triumphalism)". Sorry for the confusion.

Maybe my question is:

"How can the voices in the wilderness, be heard? How does the tree falling in the forest get someone to hear it, so that it does make a sound?"

The answer I've heard most often (besides the trivial be-a-happy-little-blogging-bear), is send a tip to a gatekeeper. This is hard, though, since that gatekeeper has to care, which brings us back to Big Media all over again.

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at March 25, 2004 6:00 PM | Permalink

It seems to me, Jay, that you have sketched out points dealing with ways that journalism can teach bloggers, but nothing about ways that bloggers are teaching/ critiquing mainstream journalism (# 6 touches on this).

I see blogs pulling the threads of a story together, challenging a dominant narrative of what happened, and being much better than the press at drawing attention to "last year's news" of relevance. Think for instance of blog reporting on what Cheney and Rice said for publication in 2001 vs. what they are presently claiming they said.

Or am I missing something, Jay, in the way you are seeking to structure your discussion?

Posted by: Julia G at March 25, 2004 7:34 PM | Permalink

I have some thoughts on the idea of the personal versus the editorial -- I'm still thinking about this -- and also on the issue of satire. Maybe more later.

Posted by: Academy Girl at March 25, 2004 7:50 PM | Permalink

Academy Girl: Please do return with those thoughts.

Julia G: You're not missing something. But my post is, and my list of questions is missing things too. I am going to work on framing something along the lines of: what are weblogs teaching journalism? It's an excellent observation.

Seth: Thanks for the clarification, and that additional question. Let me think about it a little more before revising the list.

Tom: There are indeed many problems involving "conflicts of interest between the act of journalism and the commercial setting in which that act is performed." The question should not be repressed, you say. But it's not phrased as a question yet. If the discussion is, What is Journalism? And What Can Weblogs Do About It? then how might your concern become a question on the floor?

B!X: How do weblogs establish credibility if they are not long established? is a puzzle. Something like it should definitely go on the list. But I am a little leery of letting "credibility" sit there like we know what it is, and what that term means. Not sure we do. Credibility is a bit of a mystery, as are all questions of trust.

Thanks, people...

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 25, 2004 9:36 PM | Permalink

We are planning to follow the webcast here from Shanghai with members of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club and of the blogging community. Have to find some time to actually read your piece, but that might work out in the weekend. Maybe interesting to make a short connection during the meeting.

Posted by: Fons Tuinstra at March 25, 2004 11:37 PM | Permalink

Jay, I wonder whether online journalism, both formal and informal, will merge in a way, in the future, as traditional journalist enterprises see that they may just be organizers of chaos (editors who pick through blogs to find what they want to reframe and highlight) as bloggers do now, and bloggers do more reporting. And then, do we, the users/participants/citizens just pick and choose ourselves through a host of people/sites who with varying degrees of reporting and reframing, linking and commenting, achieve trust, credibility, expertise, bias, or interesting content or all of their opposites depending? I think the online key is linking. Everything else we do on the web is really the same, with different degrees of ease, as we do offline.

But linking is different, and the linking expression has yet to become as noticed as I think it will in future. Now we understand it as something Google or Technorati see and use, but we don't yet see the full power of that act, that expression, on an individual basis or as a society. But online journalism as the rest of online content is all about this: who links out, who links in, how much, is there authority there in those links, or are they just references of indeterminate interest. But references matter if if that is all it is.

I want to know, does one kind of online work matter more because it gets more links, or sends more links, across the network, than others. I think so, but maybe that's not true for anyone else. Or does credibility come because you observe a writer over time, and when a mistake pops up, she deals with it upfront? (take a peek at this NYT post on Honesty: where Clive Thompson suggests we are more honest on the internet than in other social spaces because of the persistence of information.)

That's it for now. See you at the discussion.

Posted by: mary hodder at March 26, 2004 2:29 AM | Permalink

The transparency of the Internet changes everything about journalism. Everyone knows about anything, all at the same time. For example, in the SCO case, every time SCO posted another claim, dozens of members of the technical community responded with historic data from their own archives and memories, to set the record straight. Dictatorial regimes can no longer exercise the control they require because both their own citizens and journalists -- of all types -- from every country -- can provide up-to-the-minute information on the activities of politicians, armies, and activists.

This transparency makes lies difficult to uphold and improves the level of discussion by frequently injecting countering opinions. All of this happens in real time. No need to wait for tomorrow's paper -- or next Sunday's pundits.

Posted by: Amy Wohl at March 26, 2004 11:01 AM | Permalink

What can a pool of 100 journalists accredited to the Pentagon press corps do that 10,000 bloggers paying attention to defense matters can't? And vice versa?

Posted by: Phil Wolff at March 26, 2004 11:02 AM | Permalink

John Kerry has a press retinue following the campaign. They only have so much room on the bus. When should the press director replace a camera man, photographer, or a print, TV or radio reporter with a blogger?

Posted by: Phil Wolff at March 26, 2004 11:08 AM | Permalink

The One True b!X earlier offered this as a "seed" question: "What are the criteria or processes through which we can judge the 'credibility' of citizen journalism in the weblog form, since traditional forms of journalism often have an established historical record of the news organization's credibility as an existing baseline?"

My version of the question would be something like this: Is the culture of linking—together with developing means of reporting link depth and assessing the quality of links, like Technorati or Blogdex or Memeorandum—sufficient means to allow blog journalism to police its own credibility and to replace the traditional "gatekeeper" role played by editors (and by the economics of distribution) in print journalism? What other tools/social practices do we need to evolve if linking itself isn't sufficient?

Reading A1, the NY Times front page project

Posted by: Michael at March 26, 2004 12:49 PM | Permalink

I don't want to comment too much on everything, but do keep the suggested questions and responses coming. I am finding it quite useful, and starting to think I don't have any of the questions right, which is entirely plausible at this stage. They're starter questions, only. They shouldn't be the finishers, if participants and discussion leader succeed between now and April 17.

Thanks, Michael and Phil.

Amy: Your idea, I think, is that growing instances of "radical transparency," brought to journalism by weblogs and the workings of the blog sphere, are changing the conditions by which the truth claims of certain journalists get sorted out. (This happened to Howell Raines in a big way during his agonistes.)

This is one answer, then, to something I asked in the essay. What the "new" factor is with blogs around, and what's already happened in journalism because of it? But if radical transparency is one answer, what is the big question your observation ("The transparency of the Internet changes everything about journalism") raises?

That's intended for Amy, Academy Girl and others.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 26, 2004 2:00 PM | Permalink

A subtle difference exists in blogging between what might be considered editorial writing and what might be considered personal journaling. Genuine blogging "journalism" happens when bloggers break their own news online, which typically amounts to news they have some personal stake in or connection with -- hence their knowledge and experience of the event or information.

Other, more common, blogging "journalism" really amounts only to second-hand punditry, not journalism at all. What I refer to here is that class of blog commentary which really just reinterates or comments upon the daily news. These kinds of blog comments depend heavily on second and third-hand sources, which the blogger really has little ability to double-check. The worst of this kind of blogging represents rampant opinion run wild with little or no critical substance. Ok, that's harsh. At least if a post is humorous, it might be redeemed. Also of semi-interest to me are blogs that do good link round-ups every once in a while; however, these can become tedious very quickly.

I draw a line between the personal and the editorial in this discussion because, when bloggers editorialize, they often draw energy from the personal stake they have in an issue. If a blogger is offering pure punditry, editorial without any vested interest, then the only aspect of the blog that might keep my ongoing interest is sheer talent -- uniquely keen observations, highly skilled writing and, preferably, both. No shortage of editorializing exists today, and everybody seems to have an opinion about everything, so, for something to catch and keep my opinion, it has to be pretty special. The best kind of blogging, in my opinion, finds a unique path between personal experience and editorial, perhaps with the occasional "breaking local news" story as well as unusual and "bent" or inane observations about aspects of life/news in general. Humor helps.

A question I'll pose here: what kinds of restrictions or guidelines (awarenesses) inform a blogger's "internal editor"?

Want something on satire?

Posted by: Academy Girl at March 26, 2004 6:06 PM | Permalink

Michael said: My version of the question would be something like this: Is the culture of linking--together with developing means of reporting link depth and assessing the quality of links, like Technorati or Blogdex or Memeorandum--sufficient means to allow blog journalism to police its own credibility and to replace the traditional "gatekeeper" role played by editors (and by the economics of distribution) in print journalism? What other tools/social practices do we need to evolve if linking itself isn't sufficient?

This is interesting because my approach to the question I seeded wasn't meant to relate to the technology/nature of the Web per se (not that I think the point isn't relevant).

For me, it's more a matter of wondering how one convinces (if one should bother overtly trying to do so at all) an audience to be patient over a period of time in order to judge a weblog's journalistic credibility. A newspaper reporter, while they still have to work to create their own credibility, at least has the pre-existing advantage of their newspaper's own credibility that was built up over time.

I don't know that there's any serious distinction on this type of credibility, in the end. Perhaps it really is simply a matter of time and building a track record, same as any other reporting institution.

Academy Girl said: A subtle difference exists in blogging between what might be considered editorial writing and what might be considered personal journaling. Genuine blogging "journalism" happens when bloggers break their own news online, which typically amounts to news they have some personal stake in or connection with -- hence their knowledge and experience of the event or information.

It doesn't have to be limited to "breaking" a news story, I wouldn't think, but extends to include first-hand reporting of public events. Then again, I've done both on Portland Communique, so perhaps I'm biased towards including both of these in whatever it is we're conceiving as "journalism" when it comes to weblogs.

Posted by: The One True b!X at March 26, 2004 9:48 PM | Permalink

Jay, in view of your framing of the forum as a search for a definition of journalism and of a role for blogs, one might begin with the observation that journalism is a largely conventionalized affair that has built-in resistance to experimenting with rhetoric, image, narrative, tone, etc. I.e., Journalism has its own entrenched rhetoric, one that offers the somber face of credibility that comes with a relatively uncomplicated set of assumptions about reality.

Blogs that aspire to be like journalism are less interesting than those that attempt to offer something less hackneyed.

One worthwhile question for your group might be: What new communicative styles, modes and practices are developing in the relatively unconstrained world of blogs, outside of the pressures of corporate interests, and what can professional journalism learn from them?

Posted by: Tom Matrullo at March 26, 2004 11:39 PM | Permalink

I'd kind of want to echo Tom's point above, about new forms, but with a corrective emphasis.

"Journalism" as such, as an abstract category, doesn't exist. Journalism is a practice, or a set of practices, enabled by the creation of certain social technologies (hard technologies + social forms adapted to their use) for the distribution of information. As the social technologies that structure the practice of journalism change, so does journalism.

My old teacher, Walter Ong (rhetoric and media theorist, important in his own right and as an associate of Marshall Macluhan) said something in a class years ago that stuck with me: new media don't simply displace old media, Ong proposed, they reorganize them, they change the media ecology. (And, of course, organize themselves within that ecology.) The simple and provocative truth of the matter is that we don't know what journalism is in the blog context. We have a pretty good idea what mass-media journalism (print, broadcast) is, because it's been around for quite some time. And we can make a good guess that the interoperation of old-media and new-media journalism will create new forms of journalistic practice, some of which we have no real clue about yet.

Both Tom and Academy Girl treat "journalism" in its current state of mass-media practice as a static target—whether as a standard to be emulated (in AG's case) or avoided (in Tom's) by bloggers. I guess I'm hoping that the BloggerCon discussion can orient itself away from that (very tempting, I think) over-objectified picture of the relationship between blogging and journalism. And sorry, Jay, but I can't formulate any of that as a question just yet.

Posted by: Michael at March 27, 2004 2:09 PM | Permalink

Academy Girl: yes, I want to see your thoughts on blogs, journalism and satire.

Mary has a key point when she claims that linking is what makes journalism online a different animal. Weblogs take advantage of linking far more than traditional news organizations, and in fact set the pace in that art. Michael refers to a "culture of linking." I would also say there's an "ethic" of linking. All this seems important for the BloggerCon discussion.

For example, opinion journalism, news analysis and commentary at the more serious weblogs are-- because of linking--done to a higher standard, than in most of the press.

Tom, Michael: I'm still absorbing your latest comments, which reach deeply into the subject.

But Michael: See the post before this one for some comments on Ong and the "interiority" of the human voice.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 27, 2004 8:08 PM | Permalink

Phil asks: "What can a pool of 100 journalists accredited to the Pentagon press corps do that 10,000 bloggers paying attention to defense matters can't? And vice versa?"

Nothing -- but the problem is that neither group can do much. I'm afraid that rather than challenging the decrepit state of journalism, blogs are actually propping it up, by validating it through endless punditry, as Academy Girl more or less notes. Hack journalists in the press pool churn out mediocre fluff; blow hard bloggers call them to task, but only by discussing the piece. And the end result is: Nothing new in the way of information or narrative.

That's a pessimistic view, but how many people read blogs who don't blog? The fact that so many blog readers are also bloggers (or frequent enough commentators to count as such) isn't some kind of democratic achievement, it's an incestuous community. Sure, we welcome new cousins, but this isn't changing the world. It's making a new watercooler for media types and political hobbyists (no insult intended; I'm one myself and spend a lot of time reading others).

Of course, this critique is limited to blogs that deal with news. Personal blogs, religious blogs, food blogs, knitting blogs -- perhaps they're actually inventing a new journalism.

Posted by: Jeff Sharlet at March 27, 2004 10:12 PM | Permalink

"Both Tom and Academy Girl treat "journalism" in its current state of mass-media practice as a static target—whether as a standard to be emulated (in AG's case) or avoided (in Tom's) by bloggers."

Well, I'm not sure I believe that journalism is a static target with standards to emulate by bloggers. My question about blogging really tries to get at what you are talking about -- is there a standard, an "internal editor" and what is that for a blogger. Where is the editorial line, and, believe me, I strongly doubt that bloggers follow any kind of journalistic standard. Some try to be "newsy" for sure.

I like your reference to Ong. Could blogs be another kind of orality -- pushing way past secondary orality, with its seeming spontaneity and built-in teleprompters? I'd caution against applying broad strokes with the same brush to bloggers here, although broad categorization of blogs might be possible. Let me ask this question, out of my profound respect for Fr. Ong: have blogs reorganized the media by disorganizing it?

Posted by: Academy Girl at March 27, 2004 11:27 PM | Permalink

And some try to take the concept a bit more seriously than that. In the year+ I've been engaged in my Portland Communique experiment, which combines the "normal" mode of commentary on existing news coverage with original reporting from around town, I specifically set -- and published -- two sets of principles to which Communique tries to adhere: one related to journalism, the other related to weblogs, but both attempting to set a goal of, well, credibility.

How to judge "success" in this light is a bit undefined, since in some sense it's entirely up to the readers to decide whether or not Communique is (1) worthwhile and (2) credible. But with a growing readership which includes other weblog writers, visitors doing Web searches for Portland news, local media people, and local government figures, the questions of "worth" and "credibility" lately come to mind more frequently than they did in the past.

I don't mean this as an advertisement. It's just that in recent days the question of weblogs and journalism as it does or does not relate to my own personal experiment in the matter has been coming up in conversation. So this entire thread is not just an academic exercise for me, and I'm curious about these questions, especially since it's been more than a year since I bothered trying to follow the current state of "theory" when it comes to these questions.

Posted by: The One True b!X at March 28, 2004 12:13 AM | Permalink

This is getting really good, so please keep at it, because in this situation (roughly 20 days of discussion left until we act out this debate, live) the quality of your exchange in comments goes directly to the bottom line of the April 17th event. Having a deadline also adds an element of suspense.

All my initial 10 questions sucked, in comparison to what's coming through here.

In the meantime, for those interested, I have revised the essay, adding an argument for the weblog as passage to the public sphere, and a few other things. It's a rolling text, and so unlike other PressThink posts.

I have also, in customary form for this weblog, begun adding after the break line, bloggers reactions and links to related discussions in the 'sphere.

Let me know what you think. One more thing: I would be interested in anyone's read of the Carey essay, linked in the original post.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 28, 2004 1:04 AM | Permalink

"an outlet to the sea"?

Bah humbug.

For all but a very few, it is "a kiddie wading pool".

I admit I could be said to have a cynical mind. But being on the wrong end of quite a few journalisms helped produce my view.

What I think you're missing, is that while old barriers and monopolies may be lessening, they are being replaced by new barriers and monopolies.

At the top, all sorts of changes are going on, that is real, as the people in power shift around in the new environment, and there's winners and losers.

At the bottom, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at March 28, 2004 3:21 AM | Permalink

Tom says:

Journalism is a largely conventionalized affair that has built-in resistance to experimenting with rhetoric, image, narrative, tone, etc. Journalism has its own entrenched rhetoric, one that offers the somber face of credibility that comes with a relatively uncomplicated set of assumptions about reality. Blogs that aspire to be like journalism are less interesting than those that attempt to offer something less hackneyed.

I think this is true. Journalism--including the "straight" news story--is itself a rhetoric, which attempts to convince by saying: no rhetoric here, just factuality, news. It obeys conventions that make production easier, but original observation harder. The result is a language of cliche. Dave Winer says a true weblog is "the voice of one person."

This may be what makes credibility a different transaction in the blog sphere. Readers don't trust an account in the San Jose Mercury News because they find the personal voice of the reporter trustworthy, real, fresh, unforced and human. But they might decided to trust a blogger for those reasons.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 28, 2004 3:12 PM | Permalink

I'm finding that good blogs replace the need to read some newspapers. I'm reading The New York Times less and blogs like Altercation more. A good blogger reads the paper for you and eliminates the fluff. My question: Will the substantive blogs eventually force newspapers to improve the content of their reporting in order to postpone their demise?

Posted by: 6025 at March 28, 2004 3:19 PM | Permalink

Jay, "Why do you blog?" is a fair question, if it's taken with serious consideration of the answer.

That is, when I write comments such as I've done, I often feel I risk a shoot-the-messenger reaction, and perhaps for that reason, I shouldn't.

I started my blog because I heard so much about blogging. And so I thought I'd give it a try. My basic problem, throughout all the years of net-activism that I've done, is that I have essentially no voice, no platform, no ability to be heard, no way to counter the overwhelming power of higher levels of the journalistic pyramid.

I'd rate my blog pretty much a failure in those terms. I know exactly how many readers I get, from server logs, and it's not a lot. Around 100. That's better than 0. But it's a joke of journalistic impact (I gave an example above).

I do the numerical analysis, because I'm concerned with reality, with effect. It's hard to convey the implications of the abstraction of power-law distribution, but it's harsh.

The amount of time and effort needed to write a good "journalistic" post, given how few readers it'll likely reach, is extremely discouraging.

So I've come close to abandoning my blog at times. Should I just keep it as a ranting indulgence? I don't know. I don't think there's anything wrong with a ranting indulgence, but I recognize sometimes other people do.

There's a few social benefits. But overall, it's pretty marginal. So to me, any blog-triumphalism strikes me as somewhere between wrong and cruel.

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at March 28, 2004 6:53 PM | Permalink

The power of Bloggerism is its bias and intent. It embraces the bias of the individual voice. Bloggers have opinions. Bloggers wear bias on their sleves. Big B Bias. Bloggers don't have editors. Bloggers resonate with readers because they have no responsibility to be fair.

As a result, Bloggerists amuse, educate, piss off, and hurt those who wander through their pages. That's neat.

Big J journalism has a responsibility to cover, or at least a responsibility to attempt to cover, or at the VERY least pretend to cover, the broader story landscape.

And as a Journalism major and a reporter in my more youthful days--granted years ago--I always approached a story with the understanding that I would be doing a disservice not to cover the w-h-o-l-e story even as I sliced and diced my angle.

Bloggers? Screw the whole story. I'll tell you what I think, and maybe what he thinks and she thinks, and YOU, the reader, YOU write the story by assimilating and arranging the voices you like to read into your own head, and hopefully in your own posts.

In the blog world, the story is spread across voices. It is a kind of story landscape. Thanks to comments, trackbacks, and the like.

something like that.

I'm pretty sure I didn't stick with your questions.

Consider this a living example.

Looks to be a great talk, Jay, and I wish I'd be there to hear this one, even if I've been, well, a little hard on the meta-conference trend lately.

Posted by: jeneane at March 28, 2004 10:57 PM | Permalink

That's it...! I get what I mean now. In the blogworld, the *reader* is the journalist, as they weigh what they take in across blogs and across posts and across links.

Kind of like, one single blogger can't be a journalist. It takes the linkage and the broader context of the discussion/conversation/story to FORM the story.

So that's my newest: In bigJ journalism, the writer is the story crafter, or journalist. In blogging, the reader is the story crafter, or journalist.

Of course, if the reader's a blogger, well then the process is iterative and taking place 100 times a minute all across the net, and our head all explode in unison

try that on. ;-)

Posted by: jeneane at March 28, 2004 11:03 PM | Permalink

Jay,
Your session is going to be fabulous!

My three cents on possible questions...

Your essay rightly points out that blogging does not equal journalism. In one of your comments you elaborate on the question of when blogging becomes journalism and when blogging is not journalism. I’d like to hear other people’s views on the question: where is the line between blogging as journalsm and other kinds of blogging?

My next question is derivative of several excellent questions and comments above, but I'm phrasing it a bit differently: In what ways does the existence of weblogs change journalism – both in terms of the way we think about it and define it, as well as the way it will be practiced in the future?

What kind of journalism would best serve a democratic society? How can weblogs bring us closer to that kind of journalism? What journalistic functions are they NOT able to serve, which might still be better served by other forms of media?

What about the social negatives of weblogs? (Don’t lynch me please but we’re not doing our job if we don’t ask this question.) To what extent might they contribute to the spread of disinformation, and to tyrannies of misinformed majorities? I hear this question a lot from blog-skeptics. (This also leads to a question I want to deal with in my session: what happens when people are blogging in countries that don’t have a free press?)

In the next couple of days I'll be starting a similar discussion about my session "Blogging the world", at my Techjournalism blog.

By the way, as of last week I no longer work for CNN. As the Chinese would say, I've "jumped into the sea".

Posted by: Rebecca M. at March 29, 2004 8:45 AM | Permalink

This is sort of off-topic, but it seems that blogs as journalism have a parallel in how non-blog media formats that are traditionally not considered journalism - Daily Show - have more credibility and bigger audiences than the shows they mock. That is, I suspect that blogs are part of a larger cultural trend which is rejecting temples of authority.

Posted by: MattS at March 29, 2004 11:56 AM | Permalink

Hi, again, everyone. Anna: please reconstruct.

Clearly, the discussion to be held at BloggerCon has already begun, as participants pick apart the questions: what is journalism? what can weblogs do about it?

I don't want to make any grand claims about that. I do want to say: keep it going, please, because I am finding it helpful.

It's good news that Rebecca MacKinnon, formerly of CNN, will soon be starting a similar discussion about her session, "Blogging the World." I will urge Jeff Jarvis to re-introduce his session (on the business of blogging) and re-invite those witty and razor sharp Buzzmachine readers to the comments section of a prequel post. Dan Gillmore, I understand from his blog, is planning to do the same. I double-posted my essay at BOP News, so there will be a second comment stream for it.

Seems to me that it is possible, with a little conscious effort, to start these things--conference sessions--on second base, even third, if you begin the discussion in writing across the 'sphere, then pick it up from there.

One thing I noticed around the time of the first BloggerCon and again this time: in Blogistan, which is a complex nation, there's a lot of sacarcastic (but seriously-intended) commentary about how silly and pretentious, unnecessary and often elitist, these events are.

I suppose that's inevitable when you have a such a high brow "academic" setting and an up-from-the-bottom subject. And having been to hundreds of academic and industry conferences, there is always much to mock. I partake of the sport myself, and with enthusiasm.

The puzzling part to me is when webloggers who, as writers and kibbitzers at their own sites, often engage in serious and lively reflection on the form and how it differs from "journalism," (or other things) find it hilarious that there's a conference at Harvard engaged in the same act of reflection they, at times, undertake.

On balance, it is probably good to have skeptics who say: "well, that's a ridiculous premise for a conference." Makes you look at the premise.

I'm planning to junk the idea of synthesizing twenty questions. The ones I had were sounding pedantic to people, and my request, "phrase it as a question," wasn't helping. In place of that, I may draft a list of contradictory propositions about weblogs and journalism bubbling through this discussion.

Example: "Weblogs reduce barriers to entry for citizen authors." (Rosen, Jarvis, others.) And then:

"Weblogs reduce the old barriers, maybe, but the blog sphere erects new ones just as effective." (Seth)

Anyway, keep at it.

Question to B!X in Portland. How much of the journalism your weblog does is journalism about the Big Media in town-- reacting to it, riffing off it, incorporating it, or somehow using it? And how much is "original" work (whatever that means to you) done at your blog, free and clear of the local press and its product?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 29, 2004 12:08 PM | Permalink

Jeneane: You're on topic. There's a reporter for the "Circuits" section of the New York Times calling me this afternoon on the very point you make here. Readers now assemble the story from the bits available online. What does this mean? he wants to know.

It's coming up now because RSS literally does what you say, breaking apart content packages to give us the pieces to make our own "report." But you observe the same thing happening without mention of RSS, which means its bigger than technology.

"One single blogger can't be a journalist," Jeneane writes. "It takes the linkage and the broader context of the discussion... to FORM the story.: And then: "In bigJ Journalism, the writer is the story crafter, or journalist. In blogging, the reader is the story crafter, or journalist."

We might descibe this as a shift in story sovereignty.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at March 29, 2004 2:14 PM | Permalink

"In what ways does the existence of weblogs change journalism? .. What kind of journalism would best serve a democratic society? ...[what's the downside...]"
Rebecca, great questions!

[ignore the following if Op-Ed pages are a nonjournalistic no-man's-land not to discussed in polite company...are they?]

Two questions -

1. In what direction(s) will the existence of, excellent example set by, competition caused by, and public examination facilitated by weblog content, practices and capabilities force the Op-Ed pages of newspapers (or other news organs) to evolve?

(I can't see them staying the same. Letters to the editor are to comments threads as tortoise to Ferrari; assertions without supporting links are inefficient bluster; the "we have the biggest megaphone and thus need not engage" complex worked when barriers were high but is too arrogant to last...)

2. Given that Op-Ed change is desirable and inevitable, how can the page(s) best be structured to foster clarity, civil discourse, exposure of truth, education, and engagement?

(the answer to which might also help to counteract the weblog tendency - stemming from human nature, practiced to some degree by all - to talk past one's 'opponents')

Posted by: Anna at March 29, 2004 4:03 PM | Permalink

I've never sat down to try to find that ratio, or thought about it specifically since, in terms of how I work when I'm writing, in some strange sense, it's all the same to me. But typically I'm out to several events each week (City Council sessions, campaign debates, neighborhood meetings, etc.), and then there's the occasional heads-up from someone in local government, like advance notice of a news release on some City development.

For what it's worth, since you ask, today's Oregonian has a front-page profile (that's a link to my site) of me and my work on Portland Communique. I was shadowed by a reporter last Wednesday for about 12 hours straight.

Posted by: The One True b!X at March 29, 2004 4:22 PM | Permalink

"a shift in story sovereignty" - i like that.

glad to hear I was making sense. surprised even. ;-)

i don't think it's RSS or any other technology specifically. Although I have an RSS feed from my blog, I am yet to fall in love--even in like--with aggregators. I like cruising the neighborhoods. Stories I assemble as reader-journalist often range outside of the favorite feeds i'd be checking out via RSS (if I were actually doing so, which, as I said, I'm not).

The thrill is in stumbling onto the out of the way bits, isn't it? RSS doesn't lead you off the beaten path unless you get there via the well-worn paths you always follow. no?

The only technology enabling this shift (technically speaking) I see, pure and simple, is the net. It's net culture plus the tools that make it free and "push-button" simple for people to post and to comment. To talk.

That's why Blogger was as important as it was--because it welcomed anyone with a keyboard and a browser into a conversation that was once by, for, and about tech pioneers. Grandma, four-year old kid, and every one in between. No $. No tech know-how. Nothin' but Net.

That's a long way around saying, though RSS/aggregators are interesting and helpful to many, they are not the point.

I resist the urge to complicate the simple, wonderous elegance of the Web in looking at it from technology down. I like to look at it from voice up. Not eyeballs looking in; ears listening out.

Jeesh. I guess I'm going on and on. I should take this over to my blog and think about it more. But I do really like the idea of this sort of absorptive journalism idea of assembling stories from pieces--him to her to me to them--as reader-seeker first.

rap on...

Posted by: jeneane at March 29, 2004 7:02 PM | Permalink

The Portland Communique is extremely fine. Would that every city had a b!X...

Not a blog, not daily reporting, but Nevada County CA does have online citizen journalism, at www.yubanet.com - here's a page with links to some of last year's articles -
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_6858.shtml

(I have no connection to the proprietors)

Posted by: Anna at March 29, 2004 8:26 PM | Permalink

Yes, weldlon--well thought out and lots of good food for thought in your comment!

One thing that struck me as you jammed off the idea I contributed of reader-as-journalist, adding (i like muchly) your thought of reader-as-story-maker is the story pace difference here in blogging as well.

Traditionally, a story has really been an event. News-as-reported is an event. A "Ta-da" - here's the news, here's what it means, here are my sources: ta-da! Yes, with the net and online stories, discussion forums and feedback mechanisms have been added to facilitate discussion around the story event. But still, it's one story with event attendees gathering around it to talk.

If you're a smart journalist and it is a good story (even if it was someone else's) you remember to follow up on it down the road to find out whate ever happened with X to see if a follow-up story on X is worthwhile. That becomes a second event, both in time, space, and the list of attendees to the event.

Now, as reader-journalists inform stories across an entire landscape of context and content in the blogworld, stories have both a rapidly unfolding, unpredictable, and sometimes indefinite lifespan. Story re-informed by perhaps hundreds of other voices with other angles realtime. So stories hatch stories. And all of this happens so quickly with the "unknown" writers/readers in blogdom because of the nature of the space. Stories pick up speed with each link. No one scoops and everyone scoops at the same time.

Any