Blogging and Journalism are not Synonymous
Sometimes you read an article that just pricks your ears in several directions at the same time… enter Michael Arrington’s post on The Tyranny of Government and our Duty of Confidentiality as Bloggers. If you don’t know the story… bloggers Steven Frischling and Chris Elliot were approached by TSA agents to reveal their source over a leaked TSA travel directive. Elliot refused and Frischling obliged… and Arrington says Frischling is a coward.
Which is another tangent entirely from what I really think is worth pulling onto the wrestling mat. Arrington asserts that bloggers are journalists.
Bill Buxton put this one quite succinctly in his book Sketching User Experiences… everybody isn’t a designer just because they choose the clothes that they wear and make colour choices in their home decor. He points out that we aren’t accountants simply because we count the change we get from the corner store, we aren’t doctors because we pulled glass out of a wound and disinfected it and we certainly aren’t dancers because we had a few too many drinks at that karaoke bar on New Year’s Eve.
My apologies to Bill for inserting some of my own examples in there rather than going directly to his page for a quote (another clue that I’m not a journalist). Bill is right, it would do a great disservice to doctors, dancers, designers and journalists if we overlooked their years of training and specialisation. How arrogant of us to presume ourselves as any of those things without the requisite experience and accreditation.
In that vein we’re not journalists simply because we blog on a website. So what?! Just about anybody can put up a quick WordPress on a paid hosting account – or find a free service – to tout our opinions to the rest of humanity. But where are our fact checking, controls for biases, editorial process, membership of an established professional body, or actual qualification in journalism?
I’d assert that bloggers may flock to a term like citizen journalism because it sounds credible. We want to feel like journalists. We admire the idea that we’re digging for the truth. But without checks and balances anybody can be anybody, we’re simply opinionating ourselves out to a world with their own opinions. We may even be opinion influencers like Arrington. But that is a far cry from actual journalism.
Don’t by any means think that I’m denegrating the role of social networking and blogging and other forms of communication. They offer a different information paradigm with differing checks and balances; they have a different purpose for being than journalism. Please, let’s give real journalists some credit for their skillset.
