The Ongoing War Between Newspapers and Bloggers
August 23rd, 2007by Glynn Wilson
A few newspaper reporters used to have courage. Now they are afraid of bloggers. Or just maybe, they are afraid of their Republican publishers.
There is a wild debate still going on out there on the role of bloggers and journalism and politics. And the bad information gets just as much play as the good.
In the interest of playing an education role using blogging software, and yes journalism, here are today’s must read links.
Blogs: All the noise that fits
The journalism that bloggers actually do
Skube vs. Marshall and the LA Times’ editorial kabuki
After you read those stories and know what we are talking about, here’s my informed editorial comment on the subject.
The journalism professor who wrote the first column, Michael Skube, is a rube who did no homework, but lectures us all on how bad bloggers are at journalism. Woops!
Jay Rosen of NYU responds, but does not mention the two most important journalist bloggers who publish stories important to this area of the world: Scott Horton at Harpers.org and yours truly, who not only conduct journalism AND use blogging software to publish on the Web, but make money at it too.
Even before I woke up this morning and read this claptrap, I was thinking about some of the problems of the news business around here. And I remembered something an editor from the Birmingham News said a long time ago at an appearance at a junior college here in a symposium on journalism.
I can’t remember the editor’s name. It was about 1981. And I’m sure he’s no longer with the News and most likely dead.
But when I asked him a question as a young aspiring reporter something about freedom of the press and the central role of a newspaper in a democratic society, he didn’t hesitate. He said in effect that freedom of the press is reserved for those who own one, a printing press that is. And he said the central role of a newspaper in society was to make a profit for the publisher.
That was a not so funny answer at the time. And it certainly didn’t correspond to what is written in every journalism and communications history textbook ever published (I know because I’ve read most of them, and taught out of a great number of them).
Journalism historians and college professors always glorify the press in America for being the defender of freedom and the watchdog of government. Although they often skirt the fact that the times when the press actually played that role in our history can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
So-called objective journalism really is - and always has been - about the money.
That Birmingham News editor also said the role of a newspaper was to inform, not to educate, as if there was a significant difference between the two. In fact, according to journalism historians, in the early days of the mass circulation daily newspapers the late 19th and early 20th centuires, publishers were interested in using their newspapers to educate the public to help them become more informed citizens to participate in democracy. And some of them were especially interested in promoting a knowledge of science.
Our Pulitzer Prize-winning op/ed contributor above spends a considerable amount of time bashing bloggers for working for free, while using as examples journalist bloggers who make a considerable amount of money doing it.
I suspect I made more money last month blogging than any single newspaper reporter made working for a corporate newspaper in Alabama, but I can’t even get the good folks at Alabama Public Television to realize that I am not a nutjob blogger that is somehow separate from any other journalism being conducted in this state. Just because it is not printed on paper with ink does not necessarily make it less than journalism.
Now there are a lot of bloggers who do not claim to be journalists. And some of them are highly partisan, to be sure.
But what’s wrong with that? Maybe they can energize our political system and draw more people into the process. And just maybe, they can help educate people and contribute to a change in our obviously stagnant political system that continues to elect rubes like George W. Bush and Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions.
I don’t say that about our president or our senator because I am a left-wing blogger. I say it because there is a considerable amount of evidence that it is true.
Isn’t that what we expect journalists to do? Tell the truth? Does it really matter if the truth is printed on paper or read on TV – or published on a Web site?
This particular Website, for the benefit of those who may be new readers here, is being read by almost as many people as a number of the newspaper Websites in this state, including the Anniston Star, the Decatur Daily, the Tuscaloosa News and the Montgomery Advertiser. We get about 80 percent more traffic than my favorite newspaper columnist in this state, Tommy Stevenson at the Tuscaloosa News.
When he first started his blog over there, I met him at Egan’s pub in Tuscaloosa to talk about blogging. The last time I talked to him about his blog, he said he was getting a couple of thousand hits a day, while we were already getting more than 10,000 hits a day. After the recent series on the Jill Simpson affidavit and all the interest in the jail sentence of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, we topped 20,000.
True, they are not all in Alabama or even from Alabama. In fact, most of them probably are not. That’s the beauty of it, you see. To reach a global audience.
But as the circulation continues to slide in the corporate, chain newspaper business, they will continue to bash blogging – even while engaging in it themselves.
Now, who are you going to trust? Newspaper reporters – who rely primarily on press releases from corporations and lobbyists for a majority of their news – or a blogger, who has the freedom to say what he really thinks?
We report. You decide. Isn’t that what journalists are fond of saying? What’s the difference here?
Tags: Blog News
August 23rd, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Well put, Glynn. When I worked in Camden, South Carolina, as a copy editor in 1980, the publisher told the news staff that without advertising they was no newspaper completely ignoring the need for news. He was crass enough to believe people were more interested in reading advertisements than news! Education is important where ever you can find it and do a world class job in educating.