If Blogging Isn’t Journalism, It Will Be
Boing Boing has gotten nailed for some allegedly sloppy reporting. Scoble says it serves ‘em right.
I’d enjoy saying the same, I suppose. However, I don’t know that I know the truth of the matter any more than I did yesterday.
Is there a “blog of record” that I can really trust? One where, having read one story about a matter, I can trust that the facts I now think I know are facts indeed?
Those engaged in the debate about the relationship between blogging and journalism ought to be aware of how journalism came to be. Guttenberg’s invention didn’t bring it about. In fact, journalism as we now think of it didn’t emerge until less than 200 years ago. By “as we think of it,” I refer mostly to the division of labor within newspapers, which created the reporting profession and brought about the constant, usually creative tension between reporters and editors.
The editor is the most crucial element of journalism that is missing from the blogosphere. But that can’t last forever, and the Boing Boing debacle, if that is what it turns out to be, tells us why. Both reporters and editors need to understand libel law, but reporters must usually expend too much effort digging up news to exercise every precaution to ensure that the news they send in to the editor is factual. Even when the facts are fairly clear, it is not always prudent and in the public interest to print a story, and an editor should be expected to have a cooler head on that question than a reporter who has pursued the story with all the concentration, and presented it with all the pride, of a cat hauling home birds.
After a few bloggers face libel suits, many more will become properly cautious, and many others will become too shy to keep blogging. And it won’t be many more years before “properly cautious” means having one’s writing vetted by a cooler head. When that day comes, blogging will no longer be viewed as a great threat to journalism. Rather, having grown up, it will be journalism.