The Wardman Wire

My piece “Columnists and Reporters are the new “bloggers””" featured in the Britblog Review this week, and has had some good feedback. I’ve reproduced some snippets, and a long comment from Ruthie Zaftig that deserves front-page exposure.

From the Chameleon

She periodically engages in such gratuitous outbursts, so much so that I wonder if it is not simply another exercise in self-promotion on her part…after all, I expect she receives a great deal more attention when she spews hatred over her blogging rivals than when she tackles other subjects.

Yep.

From Ruthie Zaftig

I know a lot of journalists who have personal blogs unrelated to their jobs as well. It’s somewhat cathartic to be able to inject personal opinion, or write about your cat, or your kid, or whatever you like, rather than a 500-word piece on a big house fire that killed two kids. That gets old fast.

I’d like to think that bloggers fact-check as rigorously as journalists do, but:

A. Journalists make mistakes, and

B. I see a lot (a LOT) of bloggers falling back on preconceived notions, the direction of the wind, third-person accounts or secondary sources to determine their position, rather than… you know… primary sources. That frightens me a bit. Here in the U.S. there’s been this big blogging movement about Barack Obama, one of the democratic candidates for president, being a Muslim extremist. It’s patently false, and even the most rudimentary amount of research makes that clear, but a lot of American bloggers ran with it anyway.

“I don’t say it too often, but I think we have some things to learn from the staider end of the US Newspaper Industry in this respect.”

I’m inclined to agree with you, and although the U.S. media have their own problems, I’m alarmed by the direction media seem to be heading in the UK. The mainstream media in the UK don’t seem to operate under even the pretense of objectivity (with a few notable exceptions). I could be wrong about this, because I do live in the U.S. and don’t read British newspapers regularly. I hope I am. But it’s a trend I see in the U.S. too. “Civic” journalism is gaining support over traditional, staid notions of objectivity.

By the way, what is a cat flap, and what on earth does she have against blogs? Did a blog bite her? Did a blog steal her car? Did a blog poison her soup?

Yep.

From the Ill Man

My take is that every blog, from the sharp, witty and satirical, to the brain numbingly banal, is there for a reason. That reason is to enrage shiftless hacks like Street-Porter, and in the case of the better ones (the 1% ?), put her over-paid dribblings to shame. I can state here and now, that nearly every blog in my sidebar is a better read than Janets dreary, half arsed, ‘will this do?’ excuse for a collumn.

Bah!

Yep. Sometimes.

From Jon Worth

I seem to spend more and more time on my own blog dissecting the news and working out where the mainstream media have got things wrong. But as I write mostly about EU politics errors from journalists are sadly very common.

I check all the facts in as far as I can, but I can also count on those commenting to correct me - it’s no problem to leave gaps, or state what is unclear or unknown. Pity JSP cannot take the same approach.

There’s a thought … leave gaps where you aren’t confident of your own knowledge. Even point to your own areas of ignorance.

From the ThunderDragon:

The problem with bloggers checking all the details is that most bloggers also have full-time jobs, and thus tend to lack the time to check every [or even many] details that the newspapers provide.

I tend to google a subject or look it up on Wikipedia before I write about it, but I don’t have the time to do much more!

Yep - acknowledge the limitations of your own approach.

From Janet-Street Porter

Silence…

That’s a first … perhaps I was stuck in a catflap when she held forth, or she was walking in a straight line across the Humber or something.

And a Question …

In the meantime I’m wondering, if ‘Columnists and Reporters are the new “bloggers”‘, then I can follow and invert Janet Street-Porter’s assessment:

But 99 per cent of blogs just soak up your valuable time without giving anything meaningful back in return.

And ask:

Who are the 1% of columnists and reporters worth taking seriously?

Could it - perhaps - be those with blogs, who are therefore more transparent with their background information and receive a modicum of third-party criticism?

Wrapping-Up

Finally, I note that the Waitrose “Fat Man in the Corner Office” blog has now received 80 comments on 12 entries (you need to read my first article to understand that).

Tags: bloggers, journalists, blogs vs newspapers, columnists, janet-street porter[tags]bloggers, journalists, blogs vs newspapers, columnists, janet-street porter[/tags]