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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!"
Look, I don't think that professional journalists are somehow better than the rest of the world or that their opinions matter more, but at the same time, just because you're some dick with a fucking wordpress or blogger.com site doesn't mean you're owed admission as press to anything anywhere. Get over your god damn self. You have a keyboard and an opinion not necessarily a degree and a practice sense of professionalism.
There are two things I hate. Journalists who have huge egos and think they are superior and bloggers who think they are journalists or even superior to them. I have a video camera and an idea for a movie. That doesn't make me a fucking member of the Directors Guild.
A man named Terry Shannon published a newsletter called Shannon Knows DEC (and later Compaq, and HPC after that) for many years before he died. Shannon fit the definition of blogger except for the fact that his newsletter predated blogs. Shannon relied on rumor and secret information from his contacts at DEC. His newsletter was seen as a valuable contribution by the DEC user community, and alternately as a nuisance and a useful side channel by management. I would wager that the difference between Shannon and the blogger of the current article is that Shannon tried harder and didn't expect anything for free. He cultivated his information sources over the course of decades and frequently in the face of open hostility from the companies in question. Perhaps the blogger in question needs to cease whining and simply find a better way to operate.
Bloggers will never be considered real journalists, just like people who sell herbal supplements will never be real pharmacists or doctors. Journalists have degrees. They are professionals. Bloggers are... well, people with an opinion and a keyboard and an inflated sense of self-entitlement.
If I was holding a press event or an industry meeting, I would invite journalists. I might extend that offer to very established and reputable bloggers that I was very familiar with if I felt particularly compelled - but I would feel in no way obligated to start sending out passes and invitations to every jackhole with more than a dozen people reading his RSS feed.
I have been blogging for 5+ years and I can vouch for the fact that most companies cant understand blogging or other means of "citizen journalism".
I actually find the job of a journalist very confusing. To me, it appears that they are supposed to
1- be able to grasp when an event is newsworthy
2- to report is accurately
3- to comment on/critique it
4- follow up later with more related news if any
Point 2 is something that an observant person can do with reasonable accuracy (without needing a background). Everything else needs a significant understanding of the business at hand. You dont need to be a doc to be able to say that a road-accident is serious; but when you are reporting technical/business decisions of a company, there is no way, a reporter can do a good job of it, without having a significant grounding on the background.
Most reporters dont, and that makes most news look like press releases of a company.
This is where a good blogger can fill in the gap. At the end of the day, what should matter is whether the writing is relevant, insightful and accurate. Whether or not, the person is a professional journalist is irrelevant. Most companies however seem to prefer the safety of renowned newspaper against the uncertainity of an unknown blogger.
I guess the bloggers need to shrug it off and move on with whatever they can find. As long as the articles are useful, the companies will begin to eventually take notice. I know, at least in my work, we keep a watch on what some specific people are writing about us.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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).
"Tu fui, ego eris" - Virgil
Look, I have a blog, and I am pretty sick of people treating blogs, for good or for ill, as qualitatively different from other types of publications.
If you were a blogger and spent as much time ass-kissing/finessing/building relationships with Nortel as the traditional press does, and had readership numbers in the demographics Nortel wanted to reach, you'd get that press pass.
If you were a traditional publication and spent a lot of energy writing stuff that pissed Nortel off, you wouldn't get that press pass.
The fact that a blog is involved has nothing to do with anything.
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.
It's all pretty obvious. Certain publishers can get press cards for their journalists. Why? Not because the journalists are better writers than "bloggers", but because they are consolidated into a company and must obey certain rules. This means that I know the information I give will be treated within the rules of the press.
I disagree. Bloggers can be considered serious, but they don't have the ability to claim instant "credibility" by being a junior reporter for some major publication. They have to instead build that reputation themselves as a serious journalist, if they care to put the time and effort that is needed to do that.
I can name a few bloggers that IMHO do an even better job of covering a particular focused topic much better than even the regular media outlets. One that comes to mind very strongly is Matt Drudge, whose website is followed by just about every other major media outlet for breaking news in Washington DC, even through they may not take his spin on things as seriously. And he is even invited into most DC press conferences if he cares to attend.
I could name some others, and those bloggers do indeed have a huge reputation and audience. Most of the best of the bloggers focus on one very narrow topic, again because they are usually one-man operations (but not always). If you have worked hard at blogging and have tried to be a reliable source of information that people who study or need to know about that topic can turn to, you will be invited to press conferences about that topic. But it takes a level of commitment that goes way beyond writing a post in a blog every six months or so. Or writing random musings about random topics that look like some sort of diary. Those kind of bloggers that do a half-hearted job of blogging certainly can't be taken seriously.
I would have to agree, however, that somebody who has just created a blog last Friday and put one or two postings certainly not be considered on the same level as somebody who has turned the blog into something nearly full time and tries to write brilliant prose that also has a huge audience.
As an ex-journalist in the UK, I have to point out that journalism is a trade, not a profession. There are no professional exams to take to get into the business. Certainly there are media degrees but they are of debatable value when it comes to actually getting a job. Training is more-or-less based on the apprenticeship model.
Like any trade, there are good tradespeople and bad ones.
When it comes to getting access it's about 4 things:
I don't care if you're the only blogger covering any topic. I don't care if you've got 10 times more comprehension of a topic than the guy who writes about it for a major paper. If you're not firing on all four of those cylinders, you're not getting access.
The bloggers with big audiences, good writing, known style, and who make the rounds of the conferences... they get access. But they've earned it by playing the same game the old media guys have... writing well, building a reputation, and shmoozing contacts. Some old media players may still consider them bastard stepchildren of media, but the PR world understands online media a lot better now than it did in 1998.
It's a four cylinder game... Audience Size, Audience Composition, Writing Quality, Shmoozing Skill. Fire on all four and you'll get what you need, blogger or "journalist".
- Greg
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