Should Journalists Blog?

The Guardian's blog posts the simple question of whether journalists should blog and it is raising the hackles of some comment writers, one of whom essentially says, get stuffed. Another reader says media bias is the main reason blogs are thriving:

<<the Blogger/citizen journalist can be closer to the truth, without paying the consequences of telling it.>>

The question may initially appear silly in a way, like asking in 1908 whether teamsters should be permitted to drive cars.  Some journalists such as Mathew Ingram, Mark Evans and even a few at the NYT & WSJ now have blogs that extend the boundaries of the newsroom and the value of the news franchise. The WSJ's law blog, for example, had great minute-by minute coverage of the Enron trial.

Smart media guys HyperGene published an insightful report in 2003 for the Media Center at the American Press Institute on how mainstream media should evolve. The report is especially interesting because it stands up well in 2006. If I can try to summarise (apologies if I don't do the report justice):

• There is a rising trend of participatory journalism in which the media consumers are the innovators;
• The rise of network technologies are accelerating this trend
• Traditional media need to embrace these trends to stay in the network and  remain in a valuable position by  providing continuous connections to other sources and through email, RSS, web updates etc.; more extensive network connections including external web or media sources; more peer-to-peer connections through social networking such as blogs, message boards etc.

**Another view**:
The New York Times like many newspapers has been slow to get into blogging, but is into it now, with a small number of special-interest blogs on tech, finance and restaurants (this is New York, after all), for example.  The entry looks tentative. Here is one of the early management memos on the subject that shows how clouded the issue can become for a mainstream publisher.

Comments

[Bill Thompson]

Mike
Bill Thompson here - I wrote the original Guardian piece about journalists as bloggers, and just wanted to clarify that I'm not arguing that professional journalists shouldn't blog, just that we shouldn't expect readers or listeners to treat what we write or say there any differently from the material we put in the paper or on TV. I want us to recognise that when we blog what we are doing count as journalism, and we can't have two standards, one for the paper and one for the blog.

There are lots of journalists who blog with skill, and lots of bloggers whose writing is wonderful, but as more and more paid journalists are being pushed into the blogosphere by their editors, I thought it was worth debating the issue. We're going to do it anyway, we might as well know what we're getting into!