January 18, 2005, 7.06am • 18 comments » • 1,561 Views

LA Times to bloggers: “Sorry, you’re not journalists”

Just when you thought “bloggers vs. journalists was over“, time to read more on why bloggers will never quite make the grade as “journalists” anyway. Ex CNN-er Rebecca Mackinnon dug out this recent opinion piece from the LA Times in her bookmarks. Summary:-

• Bloggers, with few exceptions, don’t add reporting to the personal views they post online
• They see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject (that’s what last year’s whole episode was really about, I think - bloggers don’t really want to be journalists, they want to be better than, and have the power of journalists; there has been a rhetoric of technolibertarianism that paints journalism as just another industry due to be knocked aside by technolory)
• The blogosphere is full of vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar
• In these early days, blogging still has the charm of guileless transparency, which in the blogosphere means that everyone — no matter how cranky or hysterical — is presumed to be speaking his or her mind with sincerity
• Blogging is especially amenable to introducing negative information into the news stream and for circulating rumors as fact
• Blogging’s fact-checking apparatus is just the built-in truth squad of those who read the blog and howl loudly if they wish to dispute some assertion (yes; although, is it a bad thing if this automatic, intrinsic adversarialism produces a cynicism that results in accuracy, if accuracy can ever be achieved in the context of a single truth?)