Thoughts on blogging and journalism

There is a bit of a pack men­tal­ity among blog­gers. For most, one source is all that’s needed. Instead of read­ing about a sub­ject from mul­ti­ple source (an acqui­si­tion, for exam­ple), most peo­ple link to the same story again and again. This has its advan­tage (the story shows up at a higher rate in rank­ings like Day­pop or Popdex) and dis­ad­van­tages (a few voices drown out the rest). I admit to being as guilty as any other blog­ger but it’s a cause for concern.

The main thing that both­ers me about this is that, as a result, few blog­gers take the time to take in infor­ma­tion from dif­fer­ent sources. Read­ing a sin­gle story about a sub­ject is good if you want to get some quick facts but, in order to really act in a jour­nal­is­tic fash­ion, you need to develop a fuller picture.

For exam­ple, if News.com pub­lishes a story about a new technology/company/whatever, then most blog­gers will link to that story and add their com­ment on it. Mean­while, the San Jose Mer­cury News could pub­lish a story on the same sub­ject but, hav­ing talked to other peo­ple, pro­vide tid­bits that could be asso­ci­ated to info received from the ini­tial News.com story. In another cor­ner, a blog­ger who’s involved with the technology/company/etc… could add his/her thoughts on the sub­ject adding more data. A com­peti­tor would do the same and so on and so forth. How­ever, in the blog world, the empha­sis is on link, add your opin­ion, move on. Few blog­gers seem to be revis­it­ing sto­ries and adding more analy­sis as the story devel­ops. This is a shame and if it remains as it cur­rently is, weblog­ging will never replace jour­nal­ism fully.

Since the 80s, pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists have been mov­ing fur­ther and fur­ther away from analy­sis, focus­ing instead on deliv­er­ing facts quickly. I believe that niche (the inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism one) is the one where blog­ging could add a lot of value (and if blog­ging is to dis­place jour­nal­ism, it needs to add value). Can we do bet­ter, I don’t know the answer to that but I sus­pect that col­lec­tively, the blog­ging com­mu­nity needs to exam­ine its role and fig­ure out whether it wants to go beyond the opin­ion page (where it would be sit­ting right now if it were a newspaper).