Thoughts on blogging and journalism part II

So it looks like my thoughts (see below) made it on Metafil­ter and are start­ing to make their way on other blogs with inter­est­ing com­ments com­ing up in each cases. While I appre­ci­ate the acco­lades, what I find most inter­est­ing is that peo­ple are divided over whether blog­ging is jour­nal­ism.

It’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion and one for which I have my own per­sonal answer: right now, for the most parts, it isn’t. But is there a ker­nel of truth to the pos­si­bil­ity that it is? Some say it will never be. If that’s truly the case, why is it that the media is paint­ing it as such? Is it because they do NOT under­stand the weblog phe­nom­e­non? Is it because they have been mis­in­formed by peo­ple in the blog­ging com­mu­nity who believe that it is? And if it’s not, what is it? Has the “pro­fes­sional press” been swin­dled into buy­ing a non-story?

Some­thing tells me that this is not quite the case. I do believe that some­where, between where blogs are right now and where they could go, lies a grain of truth to the blog’s poten­tial for being a new jour­nal­is­tic form.

Let’s dis­sect the job of a journalist.

First, the jour­nal­ist hears about an event/fact/technology/policy/etc… He ana­lyzes the value of the infor­ma­tion. If it’s some­thing that needs to be cov­ered imme­di­ately, he starts research­ing. If not, he stores that infor­ma­tion some­where (either in a doc­u­ment or in his mind) for poten­tial later use.

For research pur­pose, he con­tacts his sources (the value of sources evolves over time. Ini­tially, a young jour­nal­ist relies on pub­lic rela­tions peo­ple. As time goes on, he devel­ops con­tacts within his beat and gets past the PR peo­ple by going straight to peo­ple who have pro­vided him with good infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject in the past). His sources pro­vide him with more details and/or analy­sis, based on their own knowl­edge, which the reporter plans to use in his story. Some of those appear as quotes; oth­ers are “off the record” and are to be used as back­ground infor­ma­tion only.

Based on his own knowl­edge of the field, the jour­nal­ist starts craft­ing the story, using what is called a reverse pyra­mid struc­ture: most impor­tant infor­ma­tion at the top, least impor­tant at the bot­tom. Depend­ing on the medium, the jour­nal­ist could be lim­ited in how much infor­ma­tion he can include in a story (in tele­vi­sion or radio, this is lim­ited to the num­ber of sec­onds or min­utes given to a story; in a paper, it is lim­ited to col­umn inches (or words). Inter­est­ingly, because the economies of free­lance jour­nal­ism are still based on a per word rate, the word limit has also migrated to the web).

Once the story is done, he gives it to his edi­tor, who may or may not ask for more clar­i­fi­ca­tion or inves­ti­ga­tion of a par­tic­u­lar part. The same loop hap­pens again until the edi­tor thinks the story is good and it is then published/broadcast/distributed.

That’s more or less the way jour­nal­ism work today. If you apply the same model to blog­ging, links in a story are the sources. The prob­lem I’m try­ing to high­light here is that, in jour­nal­ism, a reporter usu­ally has sources that his com­peti­tors do not (because of an “estab­lished rela­tion­ship” with that source). What I’d like to see is more of an emer­gence of a dis­trib­uted model. All blog­gers cover the same story, but why do they have to go to the same sources?