I am not a journalist.
The Prince Edward Island media intelligentsia has been all aflutter for the past several weeks over the admittance to and subsequent expulsion of local blogger from the Legislative Assembly’s Press Gallery. Following on from the original story there’s been a column in the local newspaper and a panel discussion on the local morning radio show.
The common thread running through these discussions has been a tacit assumption that blogging is sort of “journalism lite.”
Guardian Editor Gary Macdougall used the phrase “hobby journalists” to describe what bloggers do, and underlying the CBC panel discussion was the notion that we all need to consume this stuff called “the news” and that there’s a battle between bloggers and journalists to see who’s going to deliver it in the future.
But these bloggers vs. journalists debates set up a false dichotomy: in straining to compare blogging to journalism commentators are making the mistake of assuming that because bloggers and journalists both “write about things,” they are, of necessity, somehow part of the same enterprise.
Comparing journalists to bloggers is like comparing journalists to poets or novel writers or songwriters or graffiti artists or priests: yes, we all interpret the human condition in our own peculiar ways, but the blogger is no more treading on the domain of a journalist than the poet is.
I’m a committed and passionate blogger: it’s deeply woven into the fabric of how I live. But the exciting thing about blogging for me is not its perceived abilities to “recast the news landscape,” it’s the notion that regular everyday citizens have, in the Internet, a publishing platform the likes of which we’ve never seen: low cost, low barrier to entry, global distribution of words and images.
And what’s exciting about that has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the process.
What happens when, for all intents and purposes, everyone has a printing press and a television studio and is responsible to no entity but their own conscience when using it? How does that change public discourse? How does that change how people think about themselves in relation to society’s institutions? In a world where anyone can publish anything at any time, how do we attach value to our own small bit of the dialogue?
By obsessing on the “market for content,” we’re missing that the tranformational aspect of these “new media” isn’t about consumption but rather about production: what happens when we’re all free to create in ways that have heretofore been beyond the means of the common person?
Who cares what gets created – that’s simply the by-product – the heart of the matter is how it’s created, who is creating it, and what doing so does to them.
Obviously journalists need to be part both of interpreting this and considering its implications for what they do. But so do school children and portrait painters and guitar players and choreographers and ecologists.
I am not a journalist.
The words I write in this space I write for myself alone, without consideration for their consumption. I write about things that happen to me, things that interest me, things that happen in my neighbourhood and things that happen in the world.
If you happen to read what I write here, that’s great, but I’m not writing for you, and while I may be interested in your reaction to what I write, this blog is not about you, or what I’m writing about. It’s about how my life is enhanced by the very fact of writing itself.
That’s not journalism.
And because you have to be inside it to truly understand it, it’s not something that’s easily hashed out in a David vs. Goliath-style morning radio debate or a journalist’s newspaper column.
Should bloggers be able to join the Press Gallery? That’s no more than a bureaucratic diversion: the real and profound questions concern whether an engaged population of producers actually needs a Legislative Assembly at all.
Comments
I listened to the podcast of the CBC segment you have written about Peter. I guess the question is, what defines a journalist? I recently started writing for SpacingAtlantic.ca, the Atlantic Canada blog of Spacing magazine. When the writers, editors, etc. for Spacing participate in the online realm, do they somehow relinquish their role as journalists? Perhaps there should be some sort of entrance exam or criteria? A degree in journalism, some might say. However, I recently discovered that a journalist friend of mine does not have an ounce of education in journalism, in spite of holding a masters degree and, yet, he is still paid to contribute to both online and offline publications.
I believe the question at hand is not whether bloggers are journalists, but what type of journalists are bloggers? It is not the medium that defines journalism, but the intent, perhaps even the standards and ethics, that separates the journalists from the bloggers. As I debated this topic with my wife, she said "Not all bloggers want to be journalists!" to which I totally agree, but excluding those who want to be recognized as journalists, reporters or even editorialists simply because they don't publish and paper or magazine is elitest and destructive to the common discussion that is public media.
On a brief aside, the suggestion that for-profit media is somehow more trustworthy, credible or even factually accurate is absurd and offensive. (This was one of the statements made during the podcast) Mainstream media is as tainted and maligned as they claim alternative media to be. While bloggers do write out of passion for a particular position, journalists write for profit. It takes a pretty gritty editor to approve a scathing story about, say, the largest advertiser in a newspaper, or a close political ally of the owners of the media outlet. We are all jaded, independent and for-profit media alike, but bloggers, in my experience, are more likely to admit their allegiances and agendas than the so-called public media.
Which ever way you believe, it was high time to that this discussion was undertaken in PEI. It's been a battle raging across the globe for years. I guess we are just playing catch-up.
In any public communication there is a producer and consumer (to extend your terms, maybe a bit reductionistic?), though the “scriptor” doesn’t have the power in any sense (rhetorically, authoritatively, or logically) to prescribe meaning to their work. The meaning is constructed by all participants in the dialogue, stating that you are not a journalist doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t matter that Gary Macdougall claims some sort of authority on behalf of professional journalists, the readers and the milieu they are part of, have a major role in creating meaning (see Death of the Author, Barthes).
Regarding the statement, “tranformational [sic] aspect of these “new media” isn’t about consumption but rather about production,” I would classify that as a false dichotomy. It’s dangerous to undervalue the civic utility of a larger diversity of information sources (I guess we’d lump that on the consumption side of things), that new information technologies have afforded us, especially for those people who are still unable to create content for public discourse. Imagine the transformation when the authority of traditional information gatekeepers evaporates and everyone has a chance to participate in a diverse and meaningful public sphere, not as producers or consumers, but as humans naturally communicating and connecting.
I think we already have this, and it is truly, utterly, horrible. It’s why the whole concept of there being news organizations in today’s society is laughable. News, and journalism in general, is about presenting facts. When you look back at the people who are considered great in the news industry (the Edward R Murrow types, even up to Dan Rather and Ted Koppel) they would present the facts of a situation in a rather dry manner, but you could be reasonably sure that what they were saying was true. Modern “news” is really no more then commentary. A short blurb is presented, and then it’s just opinions on what that might mean, what the significance is. Combine that with the rush to be first (so very minimal fact checking) and the push for news to be “entertaining” (so balloon boy gets more coverage than the multiple wars going on right now or terrorist bombings in Pakistan) and the public is no longer really informed. The gatekeeps were there for a reason: to keep the crap out and ensure the accuracy and dignity of the content produced. Not to censor based on who would be offended, but to censor based on quality of the work.
Back to the original subject, what the difference between a blogger and a journalist is, I’d say the difference is simple: a journalist present facts; a blogger gives commentary. Of course by that criteria, most of the people in the news industry today are really bloggers, not journalists.