Is Blogging Journalism?: To Question the Unquestionable

Is blogging what?

To question whether blogging is journalism, is like questioning whether paper is words. Let’s ask another question: Is printed papers journalism?.

There you go.

There have been numerous discussions on whether this is that and that is this, but the substantial question is: Will blogging, social media, and the open source collaborative intelligence, can deteriorate the pride and sovereignty of conventional journalism?

Just to set the record straight.

One thing that misled people to the glitches of function is how people define blog itself. Blog is the software, not the writer, and definitely not the message, thus blogs are the medium of journalism, not the activity itself; the activity of blogging is publishing using the blog platform, the activity then can be extended by using social tools. As long as the human users empower the activity of journalism, blogging can never factually contradicts journalism, it can only disintegrate or merge. Journalism can happen on a blog, and blogging can also happen to journalism. Can we say that the writers on news blog-powered websites are not journalists? Instead, are they bloggers? The discourse is similar to how personal bloggers aka the Dear Diarists, moneymaking bloggers, and commentary writing bloggers can clash and argue endlessly with each other, not only in a sense that each contents may not carry the same purpose nor paradigm, it also has discriminating effect on each other. For instance, there are news-like writers initiatively opposed themselves to PayPerPost or ads on their system, some even refuse to join (self-)promotional facilities such as StumbleUpon; there are also personal bloggers who have stated sarcastic remarks on how niche-bloggers “just take things too goddamned serious”; and of course the moneymakers, the compulsively obsessed ones waiting to be exorcised by the blogging activists. However, the blogosphere, being the mash-up of paradigms, is progressing towards a point of compromise whereas each areas have each different strengths that can contribute one another.

The business model is relatively simple: small teams hitting vertical spaces, and doing it faster and better than anyone else.

– Eric Berlin on The Economics Behind the Rise of the Blogs

How can blogging be considered as a form of journalism, even if it’s not? Blogging facilitates the works of independent writers (along with the rest), and these writers start off by questioning introspectively and voluntarily: “If you’re a reader, what would you like to read? How would you like to read it?” Then these writers branch into field reporters, political analysts, feature writers, fashion journalists, novel writers, columnists, scriptwriters, and so forth. If such questions remain resonating or not, the public might not have the control of it, nevertheless the constant resonation maintains the continuation, even expansion, of the blogosphere as the new media environment. Blogging itself –as a method of publication– generally adapted the methods of journalism, as in a way journalism have been classified into several genres, such as advocacy journalism, citizen journalism, investigative journalism, literary journalism, narrative journalism, visual journalism, and so forth.

Journalism too has evolved along its establishment; it has historical significance of playing a role as media of sensationalism, rebellion, and a guerilla counterpart to the authority, which authored by farmers, lawyers, merchants, not intellectual elitists. In public’s eye, journalism have indeed earned its sovereignty, not only because journalists have hunted, written, and presented the news, but journalism requires lifetime commitment, even life-at-stake, by referring those who stood amongst the soldiers, the deaths, the victims, and the cold-blooded truth of the world –not necessarily the ones who stood behind the journalists’ exclusive elitism. The bubble of social sharing ecosystem also enhances a sense of familiarity to the Fourth Estate, which connects the journalists to their readers by relying on not merely accuracy of information, but also passion, genuineness, and integrity. It’s almost nostalgic. In return, the blogosphere owe it to the press for its disclosure, evidently TIME’s commemoration of “Person of the Year: You” and TIME’s mention of several “Web 2.0″ apps such as Twitter and WordPress. In addition, this year’s Knight International Journalism Award have honored Wael Abbas (Misr Digital) as the first blogger to ever win the award, he is rewarded for his “stories on subjects generally avoided by local media, such as protests, corruption, and police brutality. His vivid first-hand reports, videos and photographs have attracted thousands of readers and the attention of mainstream news outlets, which have begun to pick up his hard-hitting stories.”(Source: International Center for Journalists). Obviously, the blogosphere also displays a major proportion of what have been seen and read on the conventional media as common ground facts, or at least breaking news to be “stumbled” or “dugg“. The symbiosis between the two then becomes essentially mutual and respective.

This media revolution, by far have made an impact to conventional journalism, not always due to idealistic reasons but also for profitable gain of readers worldwide. Giant media industry such as CNN and BBC have applied the blogging technology as part of the publication infrastructure. They too have allow blog posts to be published as a supplement to their articles, for instance using BlogBurst or Sphere as the third party agents, allowing them to feature high-quality blog contents aside from their own articles. BlogBurst (and blogs submitted in their facility) have been serving customers such as Houston Chronicle, Reuters, USA Today, and FoxNews, while Sphere serves CNN, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TechCrunch and Real Clear Politics. Reuters and Yahoo! News also partnered in bringing citizen journalism upfront at You Witness. The media industries have no other choice but to re-examine the traditional methods, and starts adapting to the new media dynamic. In marketing business, this is a call for retrospection which brings the industry back to branding process, motivating them to figure out how they would position themselves in the society. The long tail of the blogosphere effects not only the mainstream media, but also the governments and the regional authorities. Malaysia has several incidents concerning the blogosphere, the last which involves the restraint of a politician Nathaniel Tan for publishing somewhat insulting illustration of Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Najib Razak. Just this November, China has blocked WordPress from its cyber territory. The country has tried to negotiate with the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, by launching a specialized sister site for China that censored content and agreed to give up information about users to the Chinese government. Mullenweg refuses by the notion that WordPress is made to be “open source,” meaning the software and its code is free and open to the public, with no intellectual property restrictions.

Exactly. Newspapers need more creativity, not less; they need their reporters and editors to be more expressive, not less. Newspapers should do all they can to encourage their staff members to as creative as possible outside the office with the hope that this energy returns to the newsroom.

Blogging is writing. Blogging is photography. Blogging is communicating. These are all good things for newspapers.

– Tim Porter on Why Journalists Should Blog

Journalism has its eye on blogging since the popularity of Iraqi’s Salam Pax few years back, Salam Pax (also known as Salam Al-Janabi), is a pseudonym blogger well-known for his blog Where is Raed, for it has received notable media attention (specifically CNN’s) along the 2003 invasion of Iraq [More on Wikipedia]. Salam Pax was blogging from Baghdad, where he could deliver reports and commentaries based on eye-witness account of events. This, and how the media respected it, accelerated the era of citizen journalism –the act of citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. Citizen journalism in Indonesia was first popularized when tsunami hit Aceh Darussalam on year 2004, which led the media to expose clips from amateur videos, dramatic footages taken by the local Aceh Darussalam citizens (and victims of the tsunami). Users’ demographic in Indonesia also becomes limitless by age and social backgrounds since the Friendster boom, as part of the 35 million users from the Asia/Pasific region out of the 50 million registered users worldwide. The streams of opinion, analysis, even rants inclined rapidly after 9/11, knowing that Indonesia, as third largest Moslem country in the world and also target of terrorist bombings, was on a part of world’s priority issue.

Significant numbers of journalists have gone blogging, naming Jonathan Oatis from Reuters, Walter Mossberg from Wall Street Journal, Glenn Gaslin from E!, Jeff Jarvis from Media Guardian, and from Indonesia, we should name Goenawan Moehammad from Tempo, Ong Hock Chuan from Bangkok Post, Andreas Harsono from PANTAU, and Budi Putra from Jakarta Post. Not only the newswriters have gone aboard, but there are also the newsmakers, the what-known-as politicians, namely General Junowo Sudarsono (Republic of Indonesia’s Defense Minister), Yusril Ihza Mahendra (the former State Secretary), Wimar Witoelar (Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa and former spokesperson for the former president, Abdurrahman Wahid), and Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim (former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia). Only in the blogging world that we’d find the politicians run after the journalists, and not the other way around.

The blogosphere can also be considered as an investment to the breed of young journalists, as the culture of information outsourcing, the social media, and collaborative intelligence is being affirmed as today’s living standards. By blogging, freelance writers and journalists-to-be are encouraged to showcase their talents, hereby engaging themselves into the activity of news-researching, virtual deadlines, and responding the readership. “All journalists should blog. If you’re starting now as a young writer… you have to engage with the format and try it out.”, as said by Emily Bell, the editor-in-chief for Guardian Unlimited.

The bad that comes with the good.

Wherever passion is, there’s also the pain of it. As journalists, blogging may not the right move to simply “embrace the larger public” or a mere distribution of what is already printed on the local newspapers, for the cyber audience might be more critical, invasive, and attentive-to-concept than any conventional desk editor. In Indonesia, the common threat to the media is apathy and conformity. The nation’s intellectuals have been known for self-defeating if the enemy is unseen; and over time, the purpose of news-writing becomes vague and disoriented, hence effecting greatly to the news-reading. The larger audience will hold to that judgment, until the blogging journalists can provide a better sense of purpose in delivering news, no matter what the medium is.

Blogging is not a happy ending either. The first professional blogger has already quitted his job, Jason Kottke, claiming that “I haven’t grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org…those things just aren’t interesting to me.”. Jason Kottke has received around $39.900 from blogging. Another point to note is when a journalist blogs, people consorts its content as a part of their professionalism, hoping to discover the passion behind the labour. Therefore when the public finds journalists blog solely to exhibit their personal braggadocio, it can draw the wrong assumption on journalistic professionalism. This, could be a moral burden to unwary journalists, especially ones who are hoping to gather admiration in the name of journalistic elitism. As we recall, United States of America’s media professionals have previously experienced series of attacks from the cyber audience for the last years, which led to the resignation of Eason Jordan from CNN, Jeff Gannon from Talon News, and Dan Rather from CBS. Who (attributively) did this? Bloggers. And bloggers aren’t always right. As an act of precaution, a local journalist may have to ask themselves if they have made the most out of their career, in a way that it’s what they do, not merely where they earn their paycheck. Because in blog world, they have become questionable, debatable, and challenged by quality. In addition, Anne Spackman, editor of Times Online, furthermore elaborated: “[online] is a high risk business, it’s fast changing. It’s very different from that loyal audience that we have on the newspapers. To be honest it’s like operating in the Wild West.”. And the “Wild West” may not go as smooth as having power lunches with colleagues. Or profitable whistleblowers.

Nowadays, when we ask whether someone is a journalist, we may need to refine the question. We should ask: Is this the kind of journalist who presents analysis, commentary, or political rants? Or, is this the kind of journalist who offers the fruits of reporting? Or some of both? The issue is not the job title but the activity.

– Chris Daly on Who Is a Journalist

The common problem that still exists, and yet also stimulates the new media environment, is the inability of conventional media to work as an integration with the public. The media relation positioning traditionally formed a tube-shaped hierarchy of “Press” and “Public”, disallowing the interconnection between the two both essential elements. Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University, admitted that we are entering an era in which professionals have lost their monopoly over information–not just the reporting of it, but also the framing of what’s important for the public to know. The contrast of content representation between the new media and the conventional one is broadly visible when compared with the magazine and tabloids media industry. Newspapers journalists may have been the ones who are responsive enough by nature, for they were trained to treat an occurrence as quick as possible within their reach, but the magazine and tabloids journalism is the industry who have naively assumed that they are not in danger in future time. This is implied by supposing the demographic of internet active users in Indonesia (lies between 18 to 35 years of age) are also the demographic shared with the magazine and tabloids industry. One problem that most local print medias, especially magazines, have: they haven’t tell the public things public haven’t already known yet, most likely because they don’t know what the public already have known. Most mainstream lifestyle journalists can only dig up the surface of events, in worst situations, it is similar to ways of yellow journalism; in which they are standardizing sensationalism as accountable facts to the public. Contents offered are far from being determined on reactive topics, and the writings became distant. Articles tend to become repetitive and pretentious, acting out only as a mannequin of urbanity–not the agent of it. Generally, it fails to treat readers in a creative contemplative manner; readers are forced to feast such articles, and readers are the ones who should keep up with the pace. For those who are willing to be lowered by such standards, can sit back and turn on the gossip TV show or any mind-numbing soap opera, and for those who are not, find the Internet, discussion forums, and the blogosphere.

Journalism-by-blogging is uniquely characterized by the conversational context of the content, –it means one article can be a form of response of another article, in addition to the live commenting system it provides. The context of writing are narrowed into specific niche subjects, e.g. niche on tutorials, lifestyle, fashion, current events, bridge-blogging, politics, cyberculture, etc, and each of its own consecutive topics. On the other hand, the context of audience is broadened, it can serve up to the global level. News are community-enabled, allowing news syndication, email forwarding, social bookmarking, or using a commenting system. The drive towards the new media isn’t typically rated by subscription counts or sales; it becomes significant because the readers react to produce, instead of react to consume. When compared to printed news, blog articles primarily adapted the style of feature writings, commentary articles, op-ed, and essays (text or photography) using first-hand personalized style; as claimed by senior editor JD Lasica from Online Journalism Review, “Bloggers are increasingly engaging in random acts of journalism whenever they report on events they witness first-hand or when they offer analysis, background or commentary on a newsworthy topic.”

Even so, the strength of personalized and opinion-based journalism can also be its weakness. As to blogging, the elements of journalism itself: reporting, researching, and offering audience-oriented publication is often disregarded, for the reason that traditional journalism do not permit conversational methods as nature of their contents. It only goes one-to-many. Everything personalized, without editorial supervision, can lead to one-sided, disreputable, or plagiarized opinions, therefore there should be an ethical guidelines that should be followed by journalistic bloggers. In Indonesia, in becoming a professionally legit journalist, you have to be registered in the Dewan Pers Indonesia. It isn’t compulsory, but it’s highly necessary so that your works are justified and protected by the law. In the blogosphere, all you have to do is put Creative Commonworks badge just below your posts, and say your prayers. The actual law taken place in the blogosphere is practice of self-governance. Consequently, community-governance. Presently, the only formal guidelines (not regulations) published on the internet is the Bloggers Code of Ethics, a modification of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. Bloggers Code of Ethics was published on year 2004, then the codes of ethics were also adapted by the Media Bloggers Association as standards required from their candidate members.

Standards we encourage include:

Honesty, fairness and accuracy: State what you know and how you know it. Use links to supporting documents on the web wherever possible; credit sources and link to other bloggers. Distinguish fact from rumor and speculation. Be intellectually honest when expressing opinion. Don’t plagiarize or pass off others’ work as your own. Act responsibly and with personal integrity.

Transparency: Clearly disclose conflicts of interest including personal relationships, financial considerations or anything else that might influence or appear to influence your independence and integrity. If you accept payments from advertisers or sponsors, clearly demarcate advertorial from editorial content.

Accountability and trust: Use your own name and offer a means for readers to communicate with you. Engage your readers and trust them to form their own judgments and conclusions. Correct your mistakes promptly using strikethroughs or editor’s notes.

Respect for the privacy of private citizens: Private individuals may not want photographs, videos or information about them made available to a global audience, even if they’re in a public space. Use your judgment, and use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.

We will not be an arbiter or judge of whether our members are following these standards; nor will we resolve disputes between members. We encourage members to adhere to these standards, and we encourage the community to call our members to task when we fall short in our words or deeds.

A note on anonymity

As a general rule, the MBA does not accept anonymous bloggers as members. We are willing to make exceptions and have done so, but this is done rarely and only when there is a clear and compelling reason for anonymity. Regardless, all member applicants must disclose their identity to the chairman of the membership review committee, who will make a preliminary determination on whether to put the applicants forward under a pseudonym.

More or less, journalistic bloggers must provide credible and accountable content to the public, as it is the major factor that determines if one’s publication is a work of journalism. Both journalists and bloggers, or blogging-journalists and journalistic-bloggers, carry the similar responsibility of facts and audience. If journalists carry the more juridical and editorial responsibility, the bloggers strives the force of responsibility within themselves and their own “status quo”-ed community, in which the community is playing a role of both as readers and as critics. If journalists must face a thick brick wall between their profession and their readers, bloggers must accept the frailty of professional standards and copyright protection. This is a test for all independent writers seeing that the nature of bloggers’ analysis and reports are often understated, in a way that the terminology “Web 2.0″ is nothing but another hype, regardless the social technicality it provides. But this also can be a test to journalists, to not hide behind their certificates, government connections, master degrees, and actually write, and make an impact. If they hesitated, their readership will question their credibility, hence the journalist’s blog becomes just-another-quack-blog. Nevertheless, when balanced, and commonly serve the right purpose, it is the adjoining powerful force that can preceed… well, please end the sentence with your own opinion.

In the long run, experts may speculate on the media power struggle on the Internet, but human-users set its own course. Not sovereignty. Not elitism. It’s not factually about the question, it’s what stimulate such questions to arise, or how. The discourse is still a question of virtual superiority over the ideas of grandeur –intimidation and suppression are the tools of dictatorship of such. The revolution will not be stagnant and cease to a drop, as the dynamic of human civilization will not, it can only change with the changing times. Even if the world would’ve had lost its entire Internet data, a journalist is still a journalist, a writer is still a writer, a politician is still a politician, and a corrupt is still a corrupt. Journalism itself is a matter of idea, and if the birth of an idea occurred in the society, not apart from the society, the idea will surely question even the unquestionable.

If you want to understand the blogger mentality, think of us as evangelists. We’re zealots. We want to bring you in. We want you to use our tools. We want you to learn what we have learned and then make the world a better place. We are the idealists. We are into, you know, truth and justice and so forth. We have a passion for news, and maybe that can act as a reminder to the professionals that somewhere deep inside of your core is that same passion. That’s the thing that unites us. That’s the bond that we share.

– Dave Winer – Scripting.com

Regards,

Note: Author of this article considers herself as a commentary or feature writer, not courageous enough to call herself a journalist for she haven’t yet entered the battlefield. Until the day has come. When an editor calls her and instruct her to do a story somewhere in the exotic islands of Mediterranian.

Please do give a shoutout if there’s any information needs to be corrected.

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