You are hitting on the right points but there may be a need here for more details related to investigative journalism. In the past, reporters were given more of a chance to spend more time on a story. In today’s world of deadline every minute and producing volumes of copy to feed the paper, site, syndication engines, there is more of an emphasis on getting the story out, and getting it out before one’s competitors.

In the process, investigation is dropped. As the deadline every minute frame of mind becomes more common, less time is spent on doing more research. If Watergate happened today, I fear that the story would end up getting buried and Woodward and Bernstein would be redeployed on other subjects. In a way, the Watergate scandal and the Trent Lott ouster parallel each others. A small, apparently insignificant event builds over the course of time and becomes a significant issue that eventually topples a powerful politician.

The only difference between the two is in who did the research. In the case of Watergate, the Washington Post editor gave its reporters enough leeway to investigate further. In the case of Trent Lott, a group of webloggers decided to do their own investigation and share the bits they had found. In a way, the Lott story could be a good example of collaborative journalism and could bring forth a rebirth of investigative journalism. Investigative journalism is time consuming, very costly (think of the output of an investigative reporter vs. a beat reporter) and can be risky from a legal standpoint (most investigative stories uncover things that people don’t want known).

On the other hand, collaborative journalism can spread the load. It allows for multiple people to build on research from previous people. I would not be surprised if, a few years from now, every serious newsroom has an internal blog with section broken out for bigger stories, allowing for multiple reporters to work jointly on stories.

Ultimately, blogging is about community, it’s about people sharing knowledge, and building on other people’s knowledge. This is why the Lott story happened. Someone posted a note about the original remark, a reader remember another fact related to the story and contributed it to the conversation. That triggered an answer by a third person, and so on and so forth. Because bloggers are passionate about what they are doing, they provide heavy background in the form of links to actual sources, making it more and more difficult for anyone to hide in plain sight.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title A response to Dan Gillmor. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The main problem here is the way journalists are trained (and, as a journalism graduate, I went through it): we learn to gather facts and write quickly and efficiently (I know, I know, some people are going to complain about how wordy I’ve been getting lately) but most J-school students do not learn anything else. What should happen is that journalism schools should require that its student also have another major so they would develop field expertise in something else than just gathering facts and writing on deadline.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Water found to be wet. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

If you take Dave Winer’s definition, you end with a definition that is much more limited than thinking of blogs as journalistic tools. Let’s examine the four basic tenet Winer presents as the basis for a blog:

• A weblog is personal: if that is truly the case, what does this mean for “community weblogs” like Slashdot and Metafilter ? Things they are not driven by a single person, can they truly be called weblogs? And what about the whole trend of companies setting up weblogs? Doesn’t that go against this concept?
• A weblog is on the Web: It’s pretty much a given (hence the weblog name). But so are web pages? What is the big difference between a Geocities personal page and a weblog? Is there any? Is it just the rate of updates?
• A weblog is published: Does that mean that any CMS tool is a weblog? Does it mean that only cheap or free ones are?
• a weblog is part of communities: Once again, the same could be said of any web page grouping.

It seems that there are few answers to be found here. Looking for more details, I ended up re-reading Meg’s “what we’re doing when we blog”. In it, Meg talks about the weblogs-are-links-plus-commentary definition. Is that it? Does that then make any page of links with a few commentaries a weblog? Does that mean that Dmoz a weblog? It has links and commentary on each link. Each of those is categorized in a group? I’m being facetious here as I don’t think it’s a blog but it does technically fit the description.

Meg does provide a good framework for what weblogs are. Based on her extended definition, a weblog includes short posts and links, an email address (does that mean I don’t have a blog since I offer a web form instead of an email address?), and is united by common tools that “spit out our varied content in the same format — archives, permalinks, time stamps, and date headers”. So is that format the basic point of blogs? And is the assertion that “Weblogs simply provide the framework, as haiku imposes order on words” the core of the weblog revolution?

If so, what is the big deal? There are many formats out there and it seems that a particular writing format does not a revolution make. And if it is just a new writing style, it cannot possibly be journalism (since journalism is a task and not a format) but can be applied to journalism.

Somehow, though, I think that I am missing something here. Otherwise, why would there be so much fascination about blogs? There is a bigger story and I cannot put my finger on it. If you can, please contact me!

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title What are weblogs?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

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?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Thoughts on blogging and journalism part II. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

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).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Thoughts on blogging and journalism. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.