Blogger Vs. Journalist — Access Denied

An anonymous reader writes "The Application Delivery Networking blog has an interesting take on bloggers vs. journalists. The post is a response to a complaint on Mark Evans' blog about why Nortel wouldn't give him access, despite the fact that he's the only blogger that focuses solely on Nortel. As a tech PR guy I can tell you that the article hits the nail right on the head about vendors' tenuous relationship with bloggers." Quoting: "You probably aren't aware of the hierarchy out there [in] the media community. Access to information from vendors is based on your status within the hierarchy. The information a member of the press gets from a vendor is different from what's given to an analyst and is different than what a blogger is going to receive. Bloggers... [can] be dangerous because they aren't bound by any rules. And that's what you're missing because you've not been a member of the press... And guess where bloggers fall [in the hierarchy]? Yup. Stand up straight, there, private!"

Comments

Re:Bloggers = = Avg( Journalist ) to me

[Nasarius]

Given the sheer quantity of idiot bloggers to drag the average down, I'm not sure I'd go that far. But it's certainly true that people like Glenn Greenwald have been doing vastly better journalism and analysis than 99% of the "professionals". As he says about the recent idiocy of Chris Matthews and friends:

These are not journalists who want to uncover government corruption or act in an adversarial capacity to check government power. Rather, these are members of the royal court who are grateful to the King and his minions for granting them their status. What they want more than anything is to protect and preserve the system that has so rewarded them -- with status and money and fame and access and comfort. They're the ludicrous clowns who entertain the public by belittling any facts which demonstrate pervasive corruption and deceit at the highest levels of our government, and who completely degrade the public discourse with their petty, pompous, shallow, vapid chatter that transforms every important political matter into a stupid gossipy joke.

Re:Interesting take?

[cultrhetor]

Sorry to inform you, but blogs have been around for a little longer, since the early 1990's, at least. The earliest form of the blog was literally an online log of sites visited, occasionally annotated, but not quite as pretty in Netscape 1.0 as the contemporary embodiment. Some consider the Drudge report one of the earliest versions of the modern weblog, others point to obscure technoevangelistic sites that dotted the web in 1993 or 1994. In any case, even our current blogging systems have been around for nearly a decade: it was early summer, 1999, when Evan Williams, Paul Bausch, and Meg Houlihan launched Blogger.com.

For more info, see Mallory Jensen's history of weblogs in the September/October 2003 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (vol. 42, issue 3).

What makes a journalist?

[Teancum]

Are you trying to say that you are only a journalist if you have a formal license to be a journalist from the government, like a doctor or lawyer?

There are perhaps some people who would suggest that this should happen (and some countries even have issued licenses for this kind of activity), but on a basic level that is huge interference on the part of governments. An alternate way to look at this is if the "journalist" has a degree in journalism (or a degree in anything) or not. There are plenty of very excellent journalists who get their job without going through the route of college graduate -> small market TV/radio/newspaper -> major media outlet journalist.

Yes, that is the more typical behavior to be "accepted" within the community of other journalists, which is exactly what this article points out.

There is nothing that is stopping somebody from getting a printing press and setting up their own "newspaper", just as you can do that with a website. The only difference is that setting up the newspapers costs quite a bit more money than the blogger website. In fact most blog sites don't even require you to know HTML any more. But in the case of somebody throwing some money together and creating a newspaper, radio or television station, all of these media outlets started somewhere. You or I can create something like this if we wanted, and give us some "legitimacy" in terms of being a journalist.

CNN, to give a very good example, started when Bill Tish used to stand in an alleyway behind the transmitter at WTBS with a paper bag over his head reading some AP wire copy for ten minutes each day at 11:30 PM.... to meet the FCC "local programming" requirements that included news coverage. I would say that in spite of these roots, CNN certainly is near the top of the food chain in terms of credibility as a news source (taking discussions of political bias between CNN vs. Fox aside).

What happens is that for anybody to be taken seriously as a journalist, you have to build a reputation. And if you "belong" to a certain organization (say a group called "The New York Times"), your efforts as a journalist also help to build the reputation of the group you work with as well. And some groups have been around for some time to have a reputation that perhaps is even undeserved because the "journalists" working for that group are in reality inferior to their predecessors who built that reputation in the first place, or that in time people forget the awful mistakes and only have nostalgia for reporters who were around over a hundred years ago.

Getting back to CNN here again, they also went through some growing pains when they got started (trying to shed the image of the unknown reporter I mentioned above) and went through some hassles trying to get a White House press pass. The first several times they applied, they were turned down nearly repeatedly, even though they clearly were at least acting like a national news agency. It gets back to the reputation thing again, and I think having the Bush White House turn down CNN for credentials would be today laughable.

That this one blogger is complaining that he didn't get credentials for something he thought was his area of expertise, he shouldn't be crying foul or "freedom of speech". He is standing in the proud tradition of other journalists who have been kicked out of similar events. It is up to that blogger to demonstrate the reputation that he has credibility necessary to be considered in the majors. Just ask Matt Drudge. He is a blogger that would rarely get thrown out of a Washington D.C. press conference any more, and it took him some time to build that reputation.