Blogging is helping, not hurting journalism
The best answer I’ve heard to the “is blogging journalism?” dilemma is that blogging alone can’t be considered journalism. Blogging is just a medium. It can be called “journalism” as much as you can call a pen and piece of paper journalism
After that comes the debate over whether or not blogging is hurting journalism. That issue is discussed in an interesting article in the Toronto Star.
Blogging is not a substitute for journalism. If anything, this past decade shows that blogging and journalism are symbiotic – to the benefit of everyone.
To its many ardent advocates, blogging is displacing traditional journalism. But journalism – unlike blogging – is a practice with a particular set of norms and structures that guide the creation of content. Blogging, despite its unique properties (virtually anyone can reach a potentially enormous audience at little cost), has few, if any norms.
Consider another, more established medium. Books enable various practices, such as fiction, poetry, science and sometimes journalism, to be disseminated. Do books pose a threat to journalism? Of course not. They do the opposite. Journalistic books, like blogs, increase interest in the subjects they tackle and so promote further media consumption.
The same market forces that apply to books and newspapers apply to blogs.
Readers will judge and elect to read based on the same standard: Does it inform, is it well researched and does it add value?
David Eaves and Taylor Owen, the article’s writers, explain that blogs do have the ability to compete with traditional journalism and some of the world’s best papers. Traditional media fears that blogging amateurs will sully the world of news but they should fear the skilled reporters who now have a voice.
Traditionalists’ concern with blogging is rooted in the fact that the average blog is of questionable quality. Ask anyone who has looked, and cringed, at a friend’s blog.
But this conclusion is based on a flawed understanding of how people use the Internet. The Internet’s most powerful property is its capacity to connect users quickly to exactly what they are looking for, including high-quality writing on any subject.
This accounts for the tremendous amount of traffic high-quality blogs receive and explains why these bloggers are print journalists’ true competition. As technology expert Paul Graham argues: “Those in the print media who dismiss online writing because of its low average quality miss the point. No one reads the average blog.”
Once this capability of the Internet is taken into account, the significance of blogging shifts. Imagine that only 5 per cent – or 75,000 – of daily posts are journalistic in content, and that only 1 per cent of these are of high quality. That still leaves 750 high-quality posts published every day.
Even by this conservative assessment, the blogo- sphere still yields a quantity of content that can challenge the world’s best newspapers.
In addition, as a wider range of writers and citizens try blogging, the diversity and quantity of high-quality blogs will continue to increase. Currently, the number of blogs doubles every 300 days. Consequently, the situation is going to get much worse, or depending on your perspective, much better.
The goal of all journalism is to inform the general public. If blogging gives more people the ability to inform others then journalists should not fear the constant change. They should embrace it.