Yostivanich

A ques­tion that has been run­ning around both the blo­gos­phere and around the main­stream media, is try­ing to decide if blog­gers are “jour­nal­ists”. Not just in the sense of can their news and infor­ma­tion be trusted but also whether or not they should be given the same rights as a reg­u­lar jour­nal­ist. I do not pro­pose to answer this ques­tion, I per­son­ally feel that it is far to com­pli­cated to be given a sim­ple yes or no answer. How­ever, in this post I do hope to present my thoughts and if pos­si­ble nar­row the scope of the ques­tion so it can be rea­son­ably answered.

Blog­gers come in many forms, some merely write their own per­sonal thoughts down in their blog, an online jour­nal and diary. For a vast major­ity of blog­gers this is all their blog is, a form of per­sonal ther­apy com­mit­ting some thoughts to the web as opposed to paper. These blog­gers I think both sides, both blog­gers and main­stream jour­nal­ist, can say they do not deserve the pro­tec­tion of an actual jour­nal­ist. They aren’t pre­sent­ing news, there are no inside sources, there is noth­ing else to pro­tect other than the basic 1^st Amend­ment right to be able to speak your mind in a pub­lic forum. Now the next type of blog­ger is one where they present their analy­sis on news sto­ries and inter­sperse it with per­sonal thoughts from time to time. This type of blog also appears to not require the legal pro­tec­tion of being labeled a jour­nal­ist. The sources of news to be ana­lyzed are either other blog­gers or news arti­cles. Again it seems unnec­es­sary to pro­vide the pro­tec­tion of being labeled a jour­nal­ist where jour­nal­ism is not being practiced.

Now, the crux of the prob­lem is when you have sites such as ThinkSe­cret¹, TechCrunch², and other sites that present news that is not pre­sented in any other form other than an online blog and that work to break a news story. Sev­eral com­pa­nies have sued blog­ging sites, unsuc­cess­fully I might add, to try to find out what employ­ees leaked con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion, and argued that since there is no for­mal­ized busi­ness struc­ture, no edi­tors vet­ting the infor­ma­tion and the sources, that these “news blogs” (Note: I am using quotes around the phrase “news blogs”, not because I dis­like them but rather because there is no good def­i­n­i­tion for what this third type of blog is.) are the same as Joe/Sarah Smith stand­ing on the side of the street and scream­ing the infor­ma­tion. In a way their argu­ment makes a great deal of sense. In many, but not all “news blogs” there is no stan­dard pro­ce­dure to guar­an­tee accu­rate infor­ma­tion, how­ever we have also seen main­stream media fail at prop­erly check­ing their sources³.

Yet I also feel that any cit­i­zen should be able to present infor­ma­tion, and if ThinkSe­cret has a rumor from Apple that they wish to blog about, who am I to stop them. The ques­tion should not rest on the qual­i­fi­ca­tions of the site or the blog­ger. The blo­gos­phere has on more than one occa­sion pre­sented infor­ma­tion before main­stream media⁴. CNN now even has a part in their daily line up when they go through and see what some of the blogs are discussing.

This ques­tion is not so much of whether all blog­gers should also be labeled jour­nal­ist but rather which blog­gers are jour­nal­is­tic in nature to actu­ally need the pro­tec­tion of being labeled a jour­nal­ist. Is a blog­ger a jour­nal­ist by any other name? That is for you decide, hope­fully this blog has pre­sented the ques­tion in a dif­fer­ent light.

Ref­er­ences:

1. http://www.thinksecret.com/

2. http://www.techcrunch.com/

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogs