August 4, 2005 @ 7:38 am
Traditional journalism is puzzled and bothered by the expanding role of blogs and boggers in reporting. Those people are not legitimate reporters, they're trained neither in schools of journalism nor in the rough and tumble hustle of daily newspapering.
I’ve been puzzling about this for some time and have come to the conclusion that in one very important sense the traditionalists are right: For the most part bloggers are not reporters. Very few blogs, to my knowledge, originate new stories. (I would rejoice to learn of those that do.)
One reason for this is simply the fact that an independent blogger lacks the credentialing and legitimizing that comes from employment with a traditional news organization. This makes poking your nose into potential story material more difficult. If you don’t seem legit you can be brushed off. After all, there is no chance that your subject will read about himself in the Daily Blatt: "Johnson refused to talk with our reporters."
But reporting is not all there is to journalism. Editing and story choice is the other side of great news coverage and it is here that bloggers shine. They are great editors. Every day thousands of them cruise traditional reportage and point us to stories that were not covered by our local papers. They push on under-reported stories until the traditional news sources can no longer ignore them.
Bloggers are leaving a considerable mark on the changing face of journalism.
August 4, 2005 @ 8:10 am
When Ojo Caliente fades away into the archives, to be replaced by The Data Port, a regular feature of the blog will be commentary on the local press. That means all of it and not just our two daily papers...weeklies, monthlies, magazines and throw-aways will be fair game.
But, hey, why wait? The new Editor and Publisher of the Arizona Daily Star is David Stoeffler, who was sent to Tucson by the Star’s new owner, Lee Enterprises. Stoeffler has been getting to know us and has been asking what we’d like to see in the Star.
Wags have been suggesting news, but they’re just mean spirited. They don’t understand that the journalistic ethos of Lee enterprises is small local dailies. (In fairness they do own what was once considered one of the nation’s great papers, The St Louis Post-Dispatch.) On the other hand the mighty South Idaho Press in Burley Idaho has a daily circulation of 3,371.
Even before Lee the Star was essentially a local paper, reporting local news and trying to entice readership with serialized short stories for kids, fashion tips on the Accent page, and major sports coverage. Folks who were interested in complete national and international news coverage read elsewhere.
Okay, Mr. Stoeffler, here’s my suggestion. A reporter/researcher ought to be assigned to roaming the web to find backgrounders and stories related to news you have devoted limited space to, or not reported at all. In other words why not perform the editorial function now performed by so many blogs?
This column…perhaps called "The Backgrounder"… should not appear in the online editions, but only in print. I know I’m shooting myself in the foot here, but you guys give too much away as it is.
I’ll have more to say about this in a later post.
