Mashable's Jolie O'Dell: How to tell a journalist from a blogger

7/21/2010

It's interesting that in 2010 we're still discussing (whether there are) differences between a blogger and a journalist. More interesting still is that the latest piece on this issue comes from a technology writer for Mashable, Jolie O'Dell, and that it is worded quite strenuously.

The effect is bound to get O'Dell attention, perhaps not the kind she'd like.

She has some basic advice for bloggers: Get into school and learn journalism. You're different. Journalists have standards you don't.

In her post, O'Dell articulates the differences she perceives:

1. Journalists have training, have thick skin about editing, and restrain themselves in expressing opinions in their stories.

2. Journalists cite sources, are obsessed with the truth, serve the public and are critical and skeptical.

3. Journalists care about form, don't snitch and are committed to the craft.

"A blogger touting his love for journalism is like a high school choir girl saying she loves opera: She might be sincere, but she’s got a hell of a lot to learn," she writes.

What do you think?

Rebecca link

7/21/2010 08:38:23 am

I think it can go both ways. Some journalists think that they can be a blogger by losing all sense of grammar, using "txt" speak, and tossing casual opinions into pieces simply because they are publishing for an online audience.

Reputable bloggers follow the Code of Conduct. They cite their sources with links, credit their photos, and respond genuinely to comments. It's just harder to find those responsible bloggers because their work is not on store shelves, but they do exist.

Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD link

7/21/2010 08:49:22 am

I am surprised we are still having this debate. Clearly, both camps have their own opinions. I completely agree with Rebecca that it can go both ways. There are some lazy and poor journalists and some outstandingly ethical/rigorous bloggers. De todo hay en la viña del Señor, we say in Mexico (you can find anything and everything in The Lord's vineyard).

To be quite honest (and here I am wearing the academic hat, not the popular blogger one), for the most part, the only people on whom I have some degree of trust to not have a bias, obsessively cite sources, and credit are other academics. Not even journalists. I am proud to know some excellent bloggers (Rebecca included, for example, and I can cite a number of others) who adhere to high standards of ethics. There is such a thing as a blogging code of ethics, and many of us bloggers follow it (if you want more information, search Morten Rand-Hendricksen's blog for it, he's written a lot about it).

My black notebook is filled with notes of journalists who were too lazy to check a fact or a source, who misquoted me when requesting my expert opinion as a scholar of the environment, and of bloggers whom I tip my hat to because of how good investigative blogging they do.

The standards I adhere too are the one I learned in my doctoral studies - pursue knowledge and do rigorous, theoretically-sound, empirically-based research, be the first to publish your research, advance the field, credit the people who did work before you and be in an endless pursuit of learning.

I know some amazing journalists and some amazing bloggers. And some outstanding scholars. And I'm always dismayed at the fact that the debate continues. As an academic with a personal blog, I write the way I think applies the highest standards, but I'm also not a journalist nor a reporter nor do I pretend to be. That's why I write a personal blog, I don't do investigative reporting. I have no desire to do so.

Andrew

7/21/2010 08:52:33 am

Hi Kirk ...

I'm interested in your view on the differences between a blogger and a journalist. Is there somewhere on your site where you've written about this?

Andrew

steffani cameron link

7/21/2010 08:58:11 am

I have me a fancy little journalism degree thingie but I'm a blogger.

I blog because there are no rules and I can do what I like. I blog because I'm tired of the foolish notion that journalism is "objective", when any half-brained consumer thereof realizes that's as rare as seeing a bowler hat downtown these days.

Where blogging has a problem is, anyone can do it.

Painting ME with the same brush O'Dell paints other bloggers with -- people who don't care about their content, who act like their hits counter should have more action than a revolving door, and who kowtow to advertisers or schwag -- is REALLY offensive.

In fact, I'd argue that any op-ed you see coming off my blog is potentially more objective and filled with integrity than any newspaper's is, since my little bloggie is beholden to no corporation, contains no ads, never offers schwag, and doesn't care what the readers want.

O'Dell needs to pull her papered head out of her ass and realize there's more ways than one to get a glass full, and bloggers are onto something.

Blogging is making journalism better, and journalists calling out bloggers for hypocrisy is making blogging better.

It's time everyone just shut up and realize it's all about getting the truth and stories out, and half the people will always suck at it -- be they bloggers or journalists.

It's the law of averages.

Rick Rake link

7/21/2010 09:11:54 am

If you follow the rules of journalism, then why not be called a journalist? Journalism is really recording history on the run. Opinion is not journalism.
I was a journalist for 30 years and now I've joined the ranks of social media.
Don't tell me what I respectfully report (without opinion) on Twitter and Facebook has no value. Traditional media types have to wake up to the fact that platforms like Twitter can be faster than normal journalist channels. When news of Michael Jackson's death was tweeted out from a hospital on a cell phone, was that journalism? CNN wasn't there. But believe me, if that same Tweep offers another bit of news like that, I am likely to take notice. Integrity is everything in journalism. Keep getting the story right, and you will have a following . . . whether you "blog" or just "report" the facts. Cheers.

John Bucher link

7/21/2010 09:20:16 am

Holy Christmas, O'Dell's entry is a chore to read, and manages to annoy both the journalist and the blogger in me. I pray she never writes a post praising a writer I like.

She does make some points everyone can agree with. (Journalism, by definition, does not "play fast and loose with 'everybody knows' logic": okay, fine.) But those points expose an unpleasant simpleness in her thinking: see the journalists--hard-boiled, welcoming of criticism, slaving in the public interest--standing on their pedestal; and there the bloggers--lazy and unscrutinized, their fingers crusted with Cheetos-dust--slinging opinion from their couches.

An argument with two straw men isn't much of one, I'd suggest. Both depictions are past their sell-by date, and here on the new media frontier, where the lines aren't clearly drawn, we need all the fresh thinking we can get.

Stephen Harris

7/21/2010 09:24:15 am

As O'Dell pointed out, it's not about the medium (though McLuhan would disagree). Reducing the debate to form vs content misses the key point: it's all about the content, and the form is irrelevant.

Unfortunately, bloggers get painted with the same 'less-than-a-journalist' brush because many of their blogging brethren are breathtakingly bad or irresponsible.

It's akin to the slur that became attached to 'tabloid' newspapers. Tabloid refers to the size and shape of the sheet of paper; the connotation of 'sleazy' came when users of the tabloid format printed 'sleazy' stories.

Is it fair that responsible, well-written, and legitimate tabloid newspapers be thought of as less-than their broadsheet cousins? Nope. But that's the reality.

Life's tough in the aluminum siding business, as the saying goes.

I work in PR. People routinely call me a spin doctor, and think that my job is to lie. They couldn't be more wrong. But it's a perception that has, fairly or unfairly, attached itself to my profession. So, my recourse is to do what I can to change that perception.

Same for bloggers. If the good ones keep doing well and pushing the lunatics to the margins, eventually they'll get the respect they crave.

Renee link

7/21/2010 09:43:43 am

There are few enough journalists who fit all but point #1 on that list that the audience of her article should perhaps be journalists themselves, rather than bloggers. And her conception of "Truth" and how it should be represented is, er, dismayingly simplistic.

As another commenter noted, her idea that journalists must be "unbiased" ignores a huge portion of the history of journalism. And as talented, award-winning journalist Stephen Colbert once said, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."*

Though the idea that journalists work for the public i laudable in principle, it's laughable in practice (unless we're talking about BBC or CBC journalists, that is... and even then, well...) The business of journalism preempts many of her principles right out of the gate, alas: most stories exist to hold apart ad copy and capture reader eyeballs so they can be strategically directed to the higher-paying portions of the paper, not really to inform. There's that, too, but then the informing that gets done is highly dependent upon budgets, the ideological bent of the publisher and the editor, and the number of hours in the day.

Anyhoo. Real journalism is rare enough; drawing specious "us v. them" distinctions, attempting to artificially separate it from unjournalism based on form, artificial credentialing methods, writing style (wasn't the 1970s all about "I" and ditching the inverted pyramid?) etc is just SO not useful.

* Seriously, though, Colbert and Stewart have done more "journalism" in a few years than many professional journalists do in their lifetimes. Sad, but true.

Kirk LaPointe link

7/21/2010 10:30:39 am

It's obvious right away that this issue touches a nerve because the posting draws conclusions about definitions of a blogger and a journalist.
One of my own opinions on this wide-ranging theme: If the information gathered and distributed is done so with the discipline of verification, how it is published is irrelevant.

Darren link

7/21/2010 01:52:44 pm

Here's the key issue that O'Dell overlooks: most bloggers don't aspire to journalism. The vast majority of blogs (though not the majority of the super popular ones) are focused on the personal, and have a perceived audience of a few dozen friends, family and colleagues.

So, it's specious to even compare journalists to bloggers.

That said, bloggers with journalistic aspirations should probably adhere to much of what O'Dell advocates, but those are a tiny minority.

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Mashable's Jolie O'Dell: How to tell a journalist from a blogger

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