Stepping Out on a Blog…

To a lot of folks, the first words I write will sound presumptuous.  But I can’t help it; the words reflect how I feel.  They are my truth, and as I understand it, a blog should always be about truth. So if you are a blogger, please accept my apologies, and, well, here goes…

I’m a professional journalist.  In fact, I’m that breed of journalist that calls himself an investigative reporter.  I have spent most of the past two decades chasing one lead after another in hopes of breaking the big story, and in so doing, strengthening our democracy.

As a professional journalist (this is the part I suspect some folks won’t like), it is tempting to simply shrug off the blogger as an amateur who is broadcasting a message without thorough reporting or objectivity. Even though I know it’s not fair to describe thousands of independent voices in the same pejorative fashion, I have wondered how a blog fan tells apart the good voices from the weak.  There are so many writers. How does someone assess a blogger’s credibility, especially when it comes to news reporting?

I began reading Dan Gillmor’s “We the Media,” and in some ways, the interactive and hyper-communicating world he describes is helping to soften my anti-blog views. Gillmor makes the argument that the emergence of the World Wide Web and the creation of blogging that soon followed is the latest in a series of media revolutions that have fundamentally altered the way we communicate.

Referencing the Cluetrain Manifesto’s first thesis that “markets are conversations,” Gillmor proposes that journalism itself is a conversation.   It always has been, but until the blossoming of the Internet, Gillmor points out that it was a decidedly one-sided conversation with the media lecturing the public and not really wanting to hear a response.

Now, technology has opened the window to a truly multi-sided conversation, where hundreds of voices can communicate with each other in mass or one-on-one.  He describes tools, like read/write Wiki’s, where news consumers become news producers by adding their two-cents to a group generated story that is ever evolving and improving.

I have to admit the possibilities of the technology excite me, but I’m still worried about the idea that blogging is journalism.  Ok, that didn’t sound quite right; so let me take another swipe at it.   What bothers me is the fear that some folks might see blogging as a replacement for journalism.

In my limited experience, it seems that bloggers are good at opinion and the analysis of reporting that has largely been done by others.  In fact, there seem to be a number of tools that help bloggers find material by aggregating actual news stories produced by professional journalists.

Commentary is fine. I have no problem with commentary, but it’s not objective reporting, it’s opinion.  Anyone who consumes any media in the United States knows that we don’t have a shortage of opinion.  However, we do have an increasingly scary shortage of real news.

In America, there is clearly a journalism crisis; it’s the cataclysmic drawdown of professional reporters by the corporate media.   Everywhere you look, the mainstream press has abandoned traditional news beats, like courthouses, city halls and statehouses.  While it can be argued that the loss of professional journalists creates an opportunity for new media ventures, I believe America needs more than volunteer journalists to protect our democratic values.

We need a new (probably for-profit) business model for journalism that will incorporate the conversational tools of the new media, along with the professional standards of the old media, to guarantee the stability of our democracy’s fourth estate.