Journalists must stop being in denial: bloggers are here to stay
A good article by John Naughton, pointing out that although blogging makes a small but significant change in our media ecology, it should neither be denied nor be percieved as a monocausal threat to journalism.He pitches a sharp criticism of how some traditionalist commentators like David Shaw (an uber-hack who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his media criticism) describe blogging as a "solipsistic, self-aggrandising, journalist-wannabe genre". Shaw stands for a view where bloggers are seen as "practitioners of what is at best pseudo-journalism" and "many bloggers... don't seem to worry much about being accurate".
Contra this, Naughton points out that
Shaw omits to provide any links to blogs which illustrate these dismissive claims — in itself an interesting lapse in journalistic standards. But that is par for this course.read more
And it isn't just professional hacks who editorialise like this. Non-journalists who are dismissive of blogs behave similarly — and in my experience those who are most critical have rarely actually seen any blogs, and certainly have not read any serious ones. But in truth the view that 'all blogs are x' (where x = 'self-indulgent', 'vanity publishing', 'solipsistic' or whatever other term of abuse comes to mind) is as absurd as the view that 'all books are x' or 'all newspapers are x'...
see also: John Naughton's own blog
posted by Jonas Andersson @ 4:44 pm
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