Random acts of journalism

Beyond ‘Is it or isn’t it journalism?’: How blogs and journalism need each other

Here are the remarks I prepared for the March 9, 2003, panel discussion on Old vs. New Journalism at the 10th annual South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. Other panelists were Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, Joshua Benton of the Dallas Morning News, Evan Smith of Texas Monthly and Matt Haughey of Metafilter.

Aquick story: On Super Bowl Sunday I was one of the millions of unfortunate souls who tuned in to see Jimmy Kimmel’s new show after the game. The best thing about it was a two-song set by Coldplay. I wanted to find out the names of the songs played and, naturally, abc.com, coldplay.com and the usual suspects in the online news business provided not a clue.

But a 10-second search on Google turned up Jessica, a 22-year-old blogger in Los Angeles who braved the freezing cold to attend the outdoor concert, came home and blogged it, writing about her take on the concert and providing the answer to the mystery of the missing song names. Jessica probably didn’t know it, but she was committing a random act of journalism.

Those of you in what Dan Gillmor calls the former audience who are blogging this panel live — if you’re dong more than a mere transcription, if you’re providing summary, synthesis, analysis or commentary, you’re committing a random act of journalism.

We’re seeing more random and not-so-random acts of journalism taking place in the blogosphere these days. I’m constantly astounded at the breadth and depth of expert knowledge displayed by bloggers on subjects as diverse as digital media, wireless networking, copyright infringement, Internet video, and much more, all written with a degree of grace and sophistication.

Now, is all blogging journalism? If a weblog does nothing more than show off photos of your pet cat Boca, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it probably isn’t journalism, unless Boca is one special cat. So not all blogging is journalism, by any stretch of the imagination. But a lot of what you read in the newspaper isn’t journalism, either, at least not in the strict sense.

It is becoming clear that millions of people are turning to weblogs for news, information, commentary and entertainment — just for the pure joy of taking in writing that’s vivid, vibrant, telegenic, emotion-laden, and driven by personal experience rather than the formula of detachment that deadens far too much traditional journalism.

What does it take to be an online journalist? You don’t need a professional publication with a slick Web site behind you, though it doesn’t hurt. All you really need is a computer, Internet connection, and an ability to perform some of the tricks of the trade: report what you observe, analyze events in a meaningful way, but most of all, just be honest and tell the truth.

All of this makes a lot of people in Big Media nervous. I worked in newspaper newsrooms for 19 years, and I think it’s fair to say the attitude of most old-school journalists can be summed up in the pithy phrase, What the hell is a weblog? Or, if they have heard of blogs, they airily dismiss it, saying none of this is journalism, or at least not real journalism.

Toward a future of cross-pollination

Now, I don’t share the view of some that blogging will drive news organizations out of business. When the bombs start falling in Baghdad, my first media pit stop won’t be at our young friend Jessica’s weblog. You can bet that millions of us will be tuned in to CNN or checking out the web sites of the major news organizations. But the story doesn’t stop there, for the weblog community adds depth, critical analysis, alternative perspectives, foreign views, and first-person accounts, perhaps by Iraqi citizens or friends or family of U.S. military personnel.

So we need to stop looking at this as a binary, either-or choice. We need to move beyond the debate of whether blogging is or isn’t journalism and celebrate its place in the media ecosystem. Instead of looking at blogging and traditional journalism as rivals for readers’ eyeballs, we should recognize that we’re entering an era in which they complement each other, intersect with each other, play off one another. The transparency of blogging has contributed to news organizations becoming a bit more accessible and interactive, although newsrooms still have a long, long way to go. MSNBC and other news sites such as the Providence Journal and Christian Science Monitor have incorporated the form into their missions, with mixed success. In a small way, blogging is helping to repersonalize journalism.

Old Media may have something to offer the young turks, too, in the trust department. Bloggers who dabble in the journalistic process would do well to study the ethics guidelines and conflict of interest policies of news organizations that have formulated a set of standards derived from decades of trial and error.

But more needs to be done to make this coming together a deeper and more meaningful phenomenon. Too many newsrooms are still shrouded in veils of secrecy. If I ruled the media world, I would take a blasting cap to every single newspaper reader forum and replace them with weblogs to make the former audience a central part of the conversation about public policy, news coverage and niche subjects. If I ran a newspaper chain, I’d hire someone plugged deeply into the blogging world, as Harvard University did recently when it lured blog pioneer Dave Winer with a fellowship to start a blog experiment.

The emerging romance between weblogs and traditional journalism will not be an easy love affair. The Washington Post’s Leslie Walker recently suggested that readers will never be able to dependably rely on weblogs for news and information because bloggers don’t cling to the same “established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth” that traditional journalists do. An old-schooler at the London Guardian wrote dismissively, “Blogging is not journalism. Period.”

I think, ultimately, they’re wrong. We need to get away from the notion that journalism is a priesthood that’s inaccessible to the masses. The No. 1 rule of journalism, really, is simply this: Tell the truth. Report something as accurately and faithfully as possible. Can bloggers tell the truth? I suspect so. Over time, they build up a track record, much as any news publication does when it starts out. Reputation filters and circles of trust in the blogosphere help weed out the nonsense. We all need to fine-tune our bullshit meters. But as one someone once said of the blogging masses, “We can fact-check your ass.”

What’s ahead? Keep an eye on what I think will be the next big wave: visual blogging, or multimedia personal journalism. Already, blogger Lisa Rein is bypassing the mainstream media by posting video footage of the Feb. 16 peace demonstrations in San Francisco on her weblog, complete with color commentary. She plans to be out there again this Saturday, camcorder in hand, for the next rally. In two to three years, as the tools become more widespread and cheaper, we’ll see an explosion of multimedia blogging, with riveting stories of first-person reportage, reviews — and other media forms no one has yet imagined. And that will be extremely cool.

Note: J.D. Lasica will participate in a panel discussion on whether media sites and journalists should do weblogs at 7:30 p.m. March 24, 2003, at the University of California, Berkeley. The session is designed for mid-career journalists.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.