Folks might recall the criticism from Jason Wilson bloggers were subjected to over the Windschuttle/Wilson hoax. John Quiggin has written an excellent post in response to the implicit claim that bloggers are “lazy amateurs”. In so doing, he also highlights the invalidity of one of the premises of the interminable “journos v. bloggers” arguments – the assertion that journalists report news and bloggers provide opinion. Go read!
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Mark says:
Quiggin does NOT invalidate the distinction b/w bloggers and journos. He identifies the difference, correctly, as the cultivation and citation of primary and secondary sources. Or, as he puts it, “picking up the phone”.
This reduces journalistic “news” to the publication of abstracted quotations about newsworthy events, coaxed from news makers amongst the elites or news takers in the populace. The cultivation of sources takes time and skill: background knowledge, street savvy and the personal touch. YOu have to get to know your way around a beat. Again, this is not the strong suit of bloggers.Bloggers seem neither willing or able to
do this because they lack the authority of representing a news agency (a lack that freelance journalists seem to overcome without much trouble).
Bloggers frequently provide secondary output (analysis and comment) superior to te stuff churned out by opinion journos. But op-ed journalism has always been regarded as a second rate form of journalism, below news reporting and investigative journalism. “Talk is cheap”, “comment is free but facts are sacred”.
Before bloggers start thumping their chests about the imminent end of the MSM they should ask themselves a couple of pointed questions:
– When have bloggers broken a news story or at least scooped journalists?
– When have news journos derived their copy off bloggers?
We bloggers all know that the answers to those questions will be – after a long, uncomfortable pause and a good deal of foot shuffling and throat clearing – rarely, if ever.
So current affairs blogging remains a fairly derivative, if not second rate, activity. Particularly when it is anchored on partisan ideological reaction rather than corroborating quotes or substantiating statistics. (A big reason why my blogs/comments are so lengthy.)
Mind you plenty of what poses as news journalism is not much better than derivative. Many news stories are published on the back of PR releases, rehashed talking points of interested parties or drip fed by authorities with their own agendas.
One area where bloggers get the jump on journos is scientific anlaysis ie blogging which utilises scientific methods to derive interesting and novel information from statistics published by various agencies. Sci-blogging requires some familiarity with algebra, statistical methods and excel spreasheets. Not something that typical bloggers seem comfortable with.
Although nerdy types like Peter Brent, John Quiggin and Steve Sailer do pretty good work in this area. Which is why I make it a point to derive predictions when ever I blog or comment – this is where scientific bloggers can really add value, even if their predictions are refuted.
I mean, what do we have to lose if we are refuted – our highly unpaid moonlit jobs? I’m mortified, mortified.
Please read more carefully, Jack. I didn’t say that he invalidated the distinction. I said that he questioned the validity of one of the premises of the distinction often invoked. You seem to have completely misread and/or missed the point of Quiggin’s post, and just reinscribed the usual guff written about this stuff, which is disappointing, though it does show how strong a hold this frame has on far too much discussion in this area.
John’s point about what would happen if he just rang up people and demanded information is spot-on. It’s in journalists’ interests to be pleasant and accurate when doing this, as their power to do so is very much a licence, not a right, and licences can be withdrawn or cancelled.
Quiggin gets it half right. What he is missing, and to repeat what I have already said elsewhere, is the role of the temporal dimension of journalistic practice. He does touch on it in terms of ‘breaking’. There is no ‘breaking’ news online because ‘news’ or whatever can be published at a whim. News can appear to have an urgency (or ‘proximity’). The production of a ‘story’ from the information at hand is a material process and subject to the resources available to the journalist (or whoever). Professional journalists and bloggers do not have the same resources.
The production of the ‘story’ is a process. Bloggers are in part victims of their medium in that they can publish whenever they feel like. They are not subject to the constraints of print media’s daily news cycle. This is actually a good thing for print journalists as it gives them time to reflect upon the information and its quality before making a decision on its newsworthiness and whether or not it should be published.
Bloggers publically speculating of the identity of the article writer may have been proven right, but they were not right before being proved as such. They needed evidence, which requires basic investigatory practice. Mere speculation is not journalism.
Media event theory is just coming to terms with what it means to have an arrhythmic news cycle due to the impact of online media and its mostly dissonance effect.
That seems to me to ignore or downplay the arrythmic cycle of the MSM itself, glen. The News Ltd. rule now is “publish online first” is it not? You also need to take account of shrinking resources – at best a lot of the time it seems as if any time delay is taken up by belated subbing, not a process of research and reflection!
“This is actually a good thing for print journalists as it gives them time to reflect upon the information and its quality before making a decision on its newsworthiness and whether or not it should be published.”
This reminds me a bit of the claims that used to made about the adverse effects of word processing software on the quality of writing – claims that I’m sure were previously made when typewriters replaced handwriting and when papyrus replaced stonecarving. Not entirely invalid, but making lemonade out of what is, in the end, still a lemon.
Yep.
I think it also ignores the conventions about what constitutes “news” and in fact the editorial interface, which is these days driven as much by commercial considerations as anything else. I don’t think the picture painted of scholarly gentlewomen and men journos sitting around pondering while waiting for a deadline has much at all to do with what goes on in actually existing newsrooms.
Oh and on Jack’s question about the supposedly one way interface whereby bloggers “derive their copy” from journos:
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/02/08/picking-up-the-phone/#comment-228262
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/02/07/blindsided/#comment-628881
It happens frequently, actually. Almost always without attribution.