A couple of days ago, the Poynter’s Steve Outing had a piece on What journalists can learn from bloggers.
He completes his two-part series today with a look at What bloggers can learn from journalists. Bloggers could better protect themselves if they took a few pages out of the reporter’s notebook. Great advice here. Excerpts:
With so many new people involved in blogging, most of them having no training in journalism practices, ethics, and media law, personal legal liability is a big deal. Bloggers publishing without the protection of an employer to pay for their libel defense are on their own should they make a mistake. In the years ahead, I expect to see some solo bloggers get in trouble — and some get driven to personal ruin when they lose libel lawsuits. It’s a wonder it hasn’t happened yet.
Ah, but some bloggers say, audience members are our editors. Mistakes are pointed out quickly and bloggers readily acknowledge and correct their errors in plain sight. Good point, but a blog item that libels someone will remain on the record, likely archived for a good long time, and a libelous statement left online for even a day puts a blogger at tremendous risk. So bloggers, take a tip from traditional journalists and find yourself some form of editing safety net. …
[S]olid reporting can help any blogger. Learn the value of journalistic legwork. Talk to multiple sources, and check out the credibility of those sources. Double-source information that seems suspect. Seek out the aid of public- and media-relations professionals for corporations and public institutions; today, many of them are accustomed and willing to work with bloggers as well as traditional journalists. Don’t be afraid to go to the top of an organization for comment, but also know the value of seeking information from those much further down the organizational ladder. …
The U.S. Freedom of Information Act is a journalist’s best friend, and a blogger’s, too. Anyone has the right to access public records (at least here in the U.S.), and sometimes FOIA is the tool necessary to get the job done. It’s not just for professional journalists.
Bloggers also would be wise to frequent resources designed for journalists. Poynter Online, publisher of this article, can be a useful site for bloggers. And there are so many more journalistic and reporting organizations whose resources will help bloggers produce better, more accurate work. Poynter Online maintains lists of them here and here. …
f there’s one area about blogging that raises the most concern, it’s ethics. …
Bloggers need only to look at the ethical standards developed by various journalism groups to get ideas on important issues to be included in a bloggers’ guide. Cyberjournalist.net’s Jon Dube also wrote a Blogger’s Code of Ethics in 2003 that’s worth reviewing.
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.
Mr. Outing’s piece interesting, but he missed the boat in regards to one major thing journalists could learn from bloggers: how to write. One of the reason that I and so many people–especially my peers in the much (unsuccessfully) sought-after 20-30 year old group–read blogs is because they are written well. They don’t use the same stodgy style journalists use. Bloggers write with personality and a sense of style. Bloggers are not detached and dry. They’re personable. Newspapers refuse to adopt these styles for a number of reasons, but the main reason is they believe their reporters are suppose to be in-personable. They’re objective. Assuming that journalists aren’t the machines they write like, objectivity doesn’t exist. Imagine, though, for a minute that it does. You can still write compelling prose that is void of any ideological slant. Adjectives do wonders. Use them. And why not write the way people talk? Bloggers do, and that’s why they’re a good read and so popular among an age group that newspapers haven’t been able to reach, despite spending millions on misplaced efforts. Young people are interested in the news, and not just the news about who is sleeping with whom and who is the latest star to get a boob job (we’re not nearly as interested in that stuff as news execs think). Attempts to gain young readers like RedEye and RedStreak in Chicago are an insult to our intelligence. If newspapers would only write the news in a style that made it interesting, my peers would read it (I already do, but that makes me odd among the 20-30 crowd). Much of the news, especially the international news a la Saddam and the Iraq war, which is supposedly of least interest to young people, is more exciting and has better back-stories than the latest Hollywood blockbuster. You wouldn’t guess that, however, by reading a newspaper. The experience of reading a blog is very different.
Differences between Journalism and Blogging