Blogs Are Not Journalism, But They're Changing It

Dana Blankenhorn: "To say a blog is journalism is like saying web pages are journalism."

Comments

[Eric Eggertson]

Dana's bang-on. Blog software is a content management system that allows words and graphics to be posted on web pages. What you do with them after that defines what's IN the blog.

The same could be said of newspapers and magazines. They are publishing formats. Throwing a bunch of ads, pictures and words into a newspaper or a magazine doesn't automatically make that content journalism.

I won't even get started on broadcast "journalism", and the many grey areas that exist on the edges of plain vanilla journalism on radio and TV.

[Justin Gardner]

I understand what Dana is trying to say, but, respectfully, I think it's really short-sighted. I've read more succinct, objective blog entries in the past year than news stories. The beauty of blogs is that you can simply post three sentences. You don't need to fill up a lot of space with fluff. Sure, blogs are usually highly opinionated, but they can ultimately help us focus more on the facts.

To that end, I believe some web pages are journalism and some blogs are journalism. Sure, this brand of journalism heralds can sometimes seem like a throwback to the days of William Randolph Hearst where the media seemed too subjective, but blogs definitely have their place on the journalism foodchain. And if blogs aren't journalism, what would we call Walt Mossberg's columns? How about Roger Ebert's reviews? Is all this stuff not journalism? And by the way, didn't Ebert win a Pulitzer?

Thanks for the post Steve.

[Frances Flynn Thorsen]

Steve: We're issuing a call to real estate bloggers to cover the National Assn. of REALTOR convention in San Francisco this autumn. That will be a first.