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In the Unverified Digital World, Are Journalists and Bloggers Equal?
oztechmuse (2323576) writes "As the source of news moves increasingly away from traditional channels to the millions of people carrying mobile phones and sharing commentary, photos and video on social networks, the distinction between journalists and bloggers has become increasingly blurred. Making sense of this type of information has been as much a challenge for journalists as it has bloggers. Journalists, like bloggers, have had to learn new skills in working in this environment. Highlighting this has been the release of the Verification Handbook which attempts to educate journalists in how to process user-generated content in the form of videos or images acknowledging that much of the reporting about situations, especially emergency ones, comes from the public. The techniques outlined are accessible to anyone reporting on a story, adding to the eroding gap between bloggers and journalists."
Shield laws mean that professional (read: attached to a major news organization) journalists will always be more legitimate than bloggers, as they have legal protections that bloggers can only dream about.
Journalists (as the world's professional content creators) versus Bloggers (the world's amateur - sometimes very much so - content creators) are similar in the same way that the guy hacking together application code in his bedroom in his spare time is the same as the salaried analyst programmer employed full time to do that.
They both produce content, and the amateur may produce content which would be considered of an acceptable standard by the professional. But the average amateur produces content which is of a much lower standard than the average professional (no, I have no specific citation to prove that, other than my own experience of working with both types on projects).
And all people should demand freedom of speech, regardless of their profession, or lack thereof.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Rather than asking whether they are equal, we should instead think in terms of how can we verify what they're worth? Is a source quantifiable? If not, it makes little sense to consider whether one type of source is equal to another. Just being able to identify what type of source a source is may be difficult or impossible.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
To answer the question, yes, they are equal. They are both pretty much worthless.
Kinda like this comment.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Seems to me that myths were presented successfully as facts back when dead-tree, radio, and television ruled the roost. Back then, you could scream about falsehoods in newspapers until you turned blue and your word only carried about as far as your voice. Today one can do a good Fisking of most of those articles and get some traction in a wider circle. The biggest problem is the successful rent-seeking efforts of larger, traditional media organizations wooing politicians into granting them special protections that are not afforded to anybody else performing the same tasks as them.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
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You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
We've all seen the professionals get it wrong. Sometimes very wrong.
Furthermore, dedicated ammatuers who focus on a particular subject often have quicker and better coverage of news on that topic. Professional mass media news often over simplifies news, sometimes to the point of almost losing the story.
Then we've all seen the bias of professional news organizations. Freedom of the press is for whoever owns one. Look at how all mainstream mass media was completely silent about SOPA until the Internet forced the issue into the public eye. Then, the professional journalists all told whatever story their owners wanted us to hear.
I'm not saying that professional journalism is all bad. It's just not all good either. And the same for ammatuers. It is up to you to decide what news sources you trust. Some professionals have, and should rightfully so, not be given any trust.
We now have news channels that are more about info-tainment and the most fantastical splashy graphics than they are about real news. Closing down bureaus and getting rid of real investigative reporters because it is cheaper to just do talking heads? Then we also have professional news sources whose entire purpose is to promote a particular ideology. So maybe, increasingly, the only difference between the ammatuers and professionals is how big a budget they have? Now TV news anchors have to be fashion models. But in the past they had to be journalists who eventually earned the position of anchor. They weren't models, they just had to look okay.
So I find arguments about the goodness of professional news over news on the internet to be less than completely convincing.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
which attempts to education journalists in how to process
We should attempts to education the editors in how to process a story!
Enigma
I've often thought about what differentiates a blogger from a journalist. To suggest that there is no difference is demeaning to journalists -- and yes, I know there are lots of those are hardly worthy of the name, but to just flatly equate the two is unjust to the professional, fact-checking variety that is supposed to be the standard.
Before the rise of the internet, there was no platform for any old person to put their opinion in print (digital or otherwise) and reach a broad audience. Sure, you could print up pamphlets and hand them out on street corners, but wide distribution was gated by publishers. We've removed a lot of middlemen between content producers and content consumers, and a lot of that is probably good. But one of the benefits (and problems in some cases) was that some of those middlemen provided filtering. It's great that we no longer have that filtering in one aspect; it's allowed a lot of things that the 'powers that be' judged uninteresting and turned out not to be so. But it also means that a lot of pure noise that was filtered out is now crowding out the signal in some cases.
Part of the problem journalism faces is that in order to compete on speed, they're skipping steps. There was a time when a juicy story was held back while they triple-checked it. That happens less & less because time-to-print (or broadcast, etc.) has become the defining metric. When you're competing with someone who doesn't check anything they put up, you start to look pretty follow-the-leaders when you post after fact-checking.
So while some of this is definitely a problem for journalists, namely how to stay relevant in a world of instant publication, a lot of this is our fault too. If we were willing to wait a bit, preferring immediately accuracy instead of immediate attention grabbing, it would give those who want to do things right the breathing room to verify. So long as we're all grabbing click bait the second its available, we're screaming loud and clear to the conglomerates that run our news media that its far more important to be first than accurate.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
It's not that bloggers are great, but what passes for journalism in the USA is little more than a bad joke. Fact checking? Broad knowledge of the world? Deep thought? When was the last time you saw any of that from a "professional" mainstream media journalist? Even the Economist has become hopelessly myopic and superficial.
That's not the only reason. Intellectually, most of the journalism majors I met in college were fighting it out with education majors for last place. Try and explain something as complex as resource depletion or peak oil, and their heads looked like they'd explode.
Consequently I find that I read bloggers with great enthusiasm (e.g. nakedcapitalism.com), while simply rolling my eyes at the "news" on MSNBC, Fox or NPR.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
A lot of people (most people, actually) tend to believe that the usage of the term in the First Amendment implies the "fourth estate," a characterization of the 'professional' journalistic media; however, according to etymonline.com, the term "the press" was not used in reference to professional journalistic endeavors (i.e., the 'fourth estate') until the mid-1820's, long after the Constitution was written and ratified. Prior to that, the term "press" in literary reference was commonly accepted to mean the printing press.
Thus, it stands to reason that the freedom our founding fathers were protecting in the First Amendment is not the freedom of the fourth estate, but rather the freedom of the common man to disseminate information freely, be it in blog, newspaper, or other format.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
http://www.aljazeera.com/progr...
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
These days journalism is a lot of opinion and drama designed to lure readers or television viewers. Very often the stories lack fact checking and verification and are subject to quite a bit of hyperbole. Good, objective journalism has died with a large thank you to Rupert Murdoch who promoted the news as a business versus a true information source.
No. People object to the idea that everything is a "narrative".
Journalism is no longer about facts. It's just another form of fiction. This is what the fixation over "narrative" has done to journalism. Meanwhile, so-called professionals still attempt to pretend that they are objective.
The old school party rags were at least honest about their bias.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
At least in America, "the press" means "the printing press" and by extension any technology which accomplishes the same purpose as the printing press, i.e. the dissemination of information. Blogs would certainly fall into this category. You can either believe me or read this very convincing paper by Eugene Volokh: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... So sorry, "media," you aren't "the press." The protection is for the medium, not a particular type of messenger.
I'd say a better question is what is the average level of quality produced.
Even using that metric, your conclusion is flawed.
CNN may post "Child Run Down by Drunk Driver,"
Or that a plane was swallowed by a black hole...
you generally don't have to slog through a million pages of "My Cat Did the CUTEST THING!!!"
Hint: BuzzFeed is not a blog, and most blogs do not have that problem. They have some advertising on the side but so do most commercial news sites (CNN does on the home page).
The other major problem has been that many commercial news sources have been count countless times now posting inaccurate stories. Bloggers at this point, overall, are MUCH more careful with accuracy and careful presentation of facts. Commercial news sources are much more pressured by a deadline to get ANYTHING out.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As someone who made a modest living for 30 years as a "journalist" (or whatever you want to call me), I can summarize the most important thing I learned in 30 seconds:
Every time you attack someone, always call him to get his side.
(Variation 1: Every time you write something that you strongly believe, always call somebody on the other side to find out why they disagree with you.)
That's it. If you follow that rule, you'll always get a decent story.
I think you're absolutely right about the trend in news shifting towards immediacy vs. verification of content. Maybe professional journalism has a marketing problem, in that regard? I think the general public, especially in the "Internet age" where everything seems to be available at the click of a mouse, might need reminders of the value of fact-checked, accurate news reporting?
Really, there's no true need to be first, if doing so means only having part of the story, or an inaccurate one. The *perceived* need to do so only comes from the content consuming public who is trained to make the assumption that whatever news they get is already properly verified as accurate. There's a perception out there that, "If it comes from a name-brand news source, it's good content. So whichever of those professional source gives it to me first, consistently, must be the best at doing it."
I don't think most of us are anxious to see another negative ad campaign attacking the competition for doing things wrong .... but emphasis on a news team going the extra mile every time to ensure you get complete and verified news reporting, "even if it takes us a little longer" might help change peoples' priorities?
Are journalists and marketing directors equal? Are journalists and advertisers equal? After all, they all produce digital copy to inform the public. OTOH, if there is something that separates journalists from these other information producing groups, then there is probably something that also separates them from your run of the mill bloggers.
As to what that something may be, I will leave to others to determine.
Groklaw had the best journalistic coverage in the world of the SCO v. IBM case, but it's "just" a blog. There's no fine line where a blog stops being "what I feel" and reports hard news. Take MSNBC, it's 85% commentary, yet still considered news, and their standards, such as using facts and verifying things, aren't that high.
because I know that the journalists are, as I said, under pressure to run a story as soon as possible, and often play fast and loose with facts in a way bloggers cannot and still maintain readers.
You really think so?
Personally, I would think if what you said were true, we wouldn't have any vaccine deniers, Oprah would be penniless, & Rush Limbaugh would never have been famous at all. Really, how does Rush keep any viewers despite his wonderful record of lies, b.s., inaccuracies and hypocrisy?
No, they don't write, but they're of the same class as youtube bloggers. They are 2 of many that have proven the only thing you need to get readers or viewers, is a well-presented story. Facts be damned.
Bloggers just don't have the resources, the time, the inclination, the requirement, or the ability to do the kind of fact checking that mainstream media does. If a blogger spends 6 months intensely investigating a story, that is 180 blog posts they didn't write. The only thing that hurts bloggers total viewer #s is not posting regularly. While many outlets, *cough* cnn *cough*, have tried to follow the blogger money train in terms of story quality, and there have been scandals and honest mistakes in mainstream, they still have the power to produce quality, in-depth, reports. Bloggers don't. Just like individual code-whizes can produce some stunningly awesome apps, hacks, & snippets, but can't, in a 1000 years, just "whip up" a quality OS.
Do *some* bloggers do better and produce quality stuff? Sure. To me though, that only proves a million monkeys working together can eventually produce Shakespeare: 999,999 monkeys throwing shit + 1 Mojo Jojo.