Outlaw journalism

Ashley Friedlein of e-​​consultancy made some good points about blogs and blogging in a post yes­terday, noting some defensive cri­ti­cisms of the blo­go­sphere in tra­di­tional news sources. However, I think his argu­ments don’t go quite far enough.

In an era of scep­ti­cism, where tra­di­tional news media are viewed with a critical eye, all of our news is suspect. How has this been edited? What are the news values ruling this? Which advert­isers or view points does it favour? Friedlein suggests that the appeal of blogs is linked to a desire for authen­ti­city in our com­mu­nic­a­tions and that blog readers favour “honesty, trans­par­ency, self-​​expression, indi­vidu­ality and fun over accuracy, control and mediation”.

I think this is often true. Why do 9/​11 con­spiracy theories achieve a higher PageRank than official explan­a­tions? Because those indi­vidual, rebel­lious and (often) irra­tional explan­a­tions are, for many, more inter­esting to read. They chal­lenge the estab­lished truth, and making the chal­lenge is, for many readers, more important that whether the altern­ative explan­a­tions are valid or not.

However, I also think that this explan­a­tion of the appeal of blogs is far too broad. If we accept the expana­tion that blogs are chal­len­ging the dom­in­ance of the tra­di­tional media because we’re all zany, spon­tan­eous free-​​thinkers then in some respects we’re giving in. We’re admit­ting the old media’s cri­ti­cism that our writings and other cre­ations are not as accurate or con­trolled as other sources. That simply isn’t true in the majority of cases. Yes, the stuff I write here has not been edited and fact-​​checked by another person, like the stuff I do for print pub­lic­a­tions. But that actually makes me quite anxious about being accurate. And I can trust readers to inform me of my mistakes.

Bloggers who write about the news want to be taken ser­i­ously. Why would readers ever come back if it seems like you’re just making the whole thing up, or giving a reaction that hasn’t been throught through? The 9/​11 con­spir­acists, for example, aren’t putting up their altern­ative analysis for a joke. It’s because they believe that they are right, or that there are holes in the existing explan­a­tions, and they’ve got evidence to prove it. And their readers aren’t stupid. They aren’t going to accept your explan­a­tion whole­sale just because it has appeared on a web site. Your views become part of the truth. It puts other explan­a­tions into context and allows for the further devel­op­ment of critical thinking about the news. Getting dif­ferent per­spect­ives on events or ideas is a good thing, and it’s a powerful part of the appeal and value of blogs.

Journalists com­plaining about bloggers – who are you to talk?
If you’ve been reading the national media press recently you may well have read more than an article or two by estab­lished journ­al­ists which attack the rise of blogging. Principally, they cri­ti­cise the lack of quality (fact checking, grammar, sources, reg­u­latory com­pli­ance etc.) exhib­ited by many bloggers.

But are they really just annoyed that bloggers are threat­ening their status? Are journ­al­ists asking them­selves sim­il­arly tough ques­tions about how their readers perceive them?

There are some fant­astic journ­al­ists out there, no doubt. But there are also some fant­astic bloggers. There are lots of very poor bloggers too. I guess the poor journ­al­ists don’t make it to press.

But I keep reading articles by respected journ­al­ists where the sub-​​text seems to be an intense irrit­a­tion on the part of the journ­alist at the blo­go­sphere as somehow cor­rupting and tainting their pro­fes­sion. Bloggers are the ‘cowboys’ of journ­alism it seems.

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