9/20/2005 11:19

I was lucky enough to present this morning at Portland's PRSA chapter event with Aliza Earnshaw of the Portland Business Journal and Jeff Hardison of McClenahan Bruer.

Our subject was blogging, and we were told we scratched the surface of the subject pretty well.

I was especially intrigued by Aliza's thoughtful review of the blogosphere from a professional journalist's perspective. She clearly articulated her point of view in such a way that – even as she was reading her presentation – I was thinking “What a great blog post!”

Of course, when she finished, I immediately blurted that out.

She agreed to send the text over to me so I could post it in our blog. So here it is.

(Please note, what follows is Aliza's point of view expressed at an event, and is not intended to be considered an article, nor does it reflect the opinion of the Business Journal.)

There's a lot of talk, and a lot of writing, about blogging as a new form of journalism, a way that anyone can be a journalist.

This belief is both a fallacy and not. Journalism has very definite rules, and while they do get ignored or broken, blogging has none, at least so far.

In some blogs, I've seen reporting that could have been done by journalists, or that is so close, it wouldn't take much more reporting to create something worthy of the highest journalistic standards.

On the other hand, I've seen plenty of blogs that appear to me to twist, distort, and simply misrepresent events.

The danger, of course, is that people will take whatever is published online as fact, without appreciating that there is no filtering going on at all.

Unfortunately, you can say the same thing about traditional reporting, whether in print or broadcast on television or radio. Even aside from the problematic area of news re-enactment, and the problem of unsuspected plagiarism, there is simply the problem of an ever-faster news cycle. Overworked reporters are tempted to cut corners, or may not have been trained adequately in the first place; overloaded editors may let pieces backed by insufficient reporting slide.

The tyranny of quarterly results, the drive to ever-increasing profits, also haunts newsrooms. It's harder to slow down, take time, free up a reporter to investigate something deeply, because papers don't have as much staff as they used to, and they don't have the freelance budgets they used to. Fact-checking, too, can suffer in the climate of profits-first.

Given that traditional reporting has difficulties of its own, what can we say about how blogging influences those of us who report the news?

We can be informed by bloggers about what concerns people, what they are interested in reading about and discussing. Especially in politics, I think blogs can tell you a lot about the churn of current ideas. And blogs can be quite valuable if you want to read about personal experiences.

One blog I have found very useful, just as a citizen who wants to be informed, is Hackworth.com. David Hackworth, who died earlier this year, was a career soldier and author. He encouraged soldiers to write to him, and he posted their correspondance while protecting their anonymity. Hackworth called attention early on to inadequate arming of soldiers in Iraq, and to the epidemic of pregnancies among female soldiers. He was an informed, educated person who intimately understood the world he wrote about. He provided a forum for those afraid to speak up elsewhere, and it seems to me that he was careful about his reporting.

One thing I'd say is often missing from blogs is what I'd call real reporting. People often write from their own experiences, they invite discussion, but they seldom go out and report the way we do. They seldom seek out the people of the story, perform rigorous interviews, or make an attempt to verify their sources.

This is what makes blogs both useful and not-useful to me as a reporter. I might discover from a blog that there are certain issues out there – for example, I found out from a blog that a product made by one of the companies on my beat was selling at an insanely low price, which clued me in to the degree of price erosion they were facing. But information on blogs is no easier to verify than gossip I hear around town, or an anonymous tip I get by email or phone. In fact, it can be less easy, because I can't call around to find out how credible the person sharing the gossip really is.

Though I am not using blogs very much at present, I see some trends out there that are quite interesting.

The most obvious one is that you can now read a reported article on MSNBC, for example, and there at the bottom will be a list of links to related articles, say on the Washington Post's web site, or at Slate.com.

There will also often be a link to a blog. In a way, MSNBC is putting an equal value on the blog to that of the Washington Post or Slate. It's like saying that they trust the blogger as much as they trust the reporting on the site of a respected newspaper like the Post.

Blogs provide an immediacy and a completeness of feedback that simply isn't available in newspapers or magazines, even in the letters to the editor.

Recently, NY Times reporter Andrew Revkin reported on the resignation of an atmospheric science professor who had been researching a report for the Bush administration on the causes of climate change. The professor took issue with the article and vented his frustration on a blog, starting up a discussion that included scientists, the professor, and reporter Revkin himself.

In the end, the reporter made his apologies, explained how he made his error, based in part on the professor's own statements. The professor in turn apologized for his miscommunication, and all was well.

This entire exchange took place on a blog, within a very short time. The New York times then published a correction, along with a link to the professor's blog – a valuable piece of information for any reader wanting to learn more about the controversy, and an example that should probably be emulated.

We do need to realize that the constant availability of plentiful information online does not absolve those of us in the mainstream media from reporting on issues. In fact, in some ways, the blogosphere forces us to reconsider what is news.

For example, Trent Lott's remarks about Strom Thurmond at the former senator's birthday party were reported in the mainstream media, but then the media just went on to other stories.

However, bloggers took up the story, digging up and publishing things Lott had said over the years that built up a picture of him as a person consistently willing to voice racist sentiments where he thought they would be welcome.

It's unlikely that Lott would have been forced resign, were it not that the sheer volume of blogging about Lott finally forced the mainstream media to take notice, investigate and verify the reporting the bloggers had done, and then report Lott's history of racist remarks themselves.

It was the blogosphere that essentially wrote the story for the mainstream media, and pushed it until the media simply couldn't ignore it anymore.

There are two lessons here: the increasing power of bloggers to set the agenda, and decide what is news; and the fact that the mainstream media are still more powerful than the bloggers. For now, at least, the mainstream media still has more credibility with those who hold power.

Another interesting phenomenon is the sheer volume of what's being called “citizen reporting” on Hurricane Katrina, ranging from an interactive map posted by a non-journalist, to which others have contributed, to personal reporting on those suffering in the aftermath of the storm.

Here again, however, we have a caveat around the lack of professional control. The accuracy of the interactive map was compromised by some who posted nonsense, and that material had to be removed.

It's also important to realize that even personal accounts that seem very sincere may be flawed. When an experienced journalist interviews someone for a story, he or she can often spot the account that is less than truthful, that somehow contains an “off” element, and can filter that account from the final story.

People reading personal accounts on the web are simply going to have to be their own filters, and some of these folks lack the experience in filtering out the unlikely, the unreliable or the just plain untruthful.

I've recently seen some excellent critique of mainstream media in blogs. One blog pointed out that two pictures published after the New Orleans flooding showed people taking things that did not belong to them. The caption under the picture of black people said they were “looting,” while the caption under the photo of white people said they had “found” the goods.

Discussions of this kind seldom make it into the mainstream media, but they are valuable and should be more public.

Blogs are changing things in ways we don't fully understand yet, but in terms of journalism, I think most of us still believe in the ideal of professional journalism: that journalists verify their information, vet their sources, and inform their reporting with experience and expertise.

Even when we are faced with notable exceptions like Stephen Glass or Jason Blair, those exceptions themselves point to our expectation that professional journalism will tell us the truth.
Aliza Earnshaw

Posted by at September 20, 2005 11:19 AM

Comments

Toby email - www.divamarketingblog.com

Great post. Very much agree with Aliza's on this -

"One thing I'd say is often missing from blogs is what I'd call real reporting. People often write from their own experiences, they invite discussion, but they seldom go out and report the way we do. They seldom seek out the people of the story, perform rigorous interviews, or make an attempt to verify their sources."

More often than not bloggers seem to build their posts around "observations" only. For bloggers who are using the medium to promote their business, a little research can be the difference between the perception of a gossip column or that of a credible source of information.

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