Many newspapers (and other news organizations) have turned to bloggers as a "novel" form of news producers, lured originally be the fact that such bloggers would typically write for free. Here, however, is a situation where free has masked a significantly new set of expectations that are fundamentally different from what news organizations were expecting. Most serious bloggers write in order to either promote an idea or to promote themselves and their business. They are not journalists in the traditional sense. They are usually not objective, they are not interested in reporting the news unless the news is significant and important for them.
Moreover, most bloggers are not willing to work for free, or even for a nominal fee, if what they are asked to write is not consistent with their own objectives. This is very much at odds with the editorial model that has emerged over the last century, where typically an editor assigned a story to a writer, the writer wrote it, and the writer got paid if the editor accepted the story. While many "professional" journalists might decry the lack of journalistic integrity of bloggers, in reality most such journalists failed to understand that there are very different motivations at work for bloggers (and indeed that many bloggers might actually have a higher standard of personal integrity than the journalists who claim objective neutrality even when they're working under a very non-neutral editorial policy). - Kurt Cagle
NVDL: So true: "...many bloggers might actually have a higher standard of personal integrity than the journalists - and editors - who claim objective neutrality."
Yet this begs the question of whether in fact such quality journalism is solely the province of the newspapers. While most news publishers would have you believe otherwise, in practice everything but local news production was usually purchased from a syndicate.
The local news, on the other hand, fell into a few distinct areas - reporting of sensational crimes or disasters, coverage of local government and business actions and human interest stories. What's fascinating here is that online social media is beginning to take over the first of these - Flickr and Youtube feeds of Hurricane Ike provided a much faster response to fast breaking events than a journalist could, typically with links providing multiple viewpoints from the perspective of the people who were actually there witnessing (or even participating in) the events.
Moreover, most bloggers are not willing to work for free, or even for a nominal fee, if what they are asked to write is not consistent with their own objectives. |
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