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BLOGGER! tries to explain the difference between BLOGS! and journalism ...

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Chi City 81, Jan 24, 2008.

  1. GBNF

    GBNF Well-Known Member

    LOL, no but I wish I was! I would never want to stop being a "real" reporter/writer, but I'd also love to be able to simply write my thoughts on a subject.
     
  2. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    Heh-heh ... you said hard.
     
  3. jgmacg

    jgmacg Guest

    Couple of coffee cup thoughts.

    When making the statement 'blogging is not journalism,' he needs to add the parenthetical '(to me)'. Because there are plenty of bloggers who think it certainly is journalism. And plenty of readers who do, too.

    Which leads to the second point. He makes his case in part by saying that readers know the difference between 'bloggers' and 'journalists.' Then at the bottom he posts some reader comments from mjd's debut on Yahoo which clearly prove the opposite.

    In fact, part of the risk in allowing 'journalism' or 'blogging' to be defined externally, by the consumer, is their inability to differentiate between the one thing and the other.

    It's also an apples and oranges comparison - at least semantically, insofar as 'journalism' is essentially a practice across all technologies, and 'blogging' is shorthand for a practice married to a particular technology and delivery system.

    The risk, of course, to all concerned, is that over time the leveling effect of the delivery system grants all things equal weight in the readers' minds.
     
  4. He has contacts from his past job in sports journalism, and he uses them to his scoops that have usually been correct. When he was posting here on Reilly leaving SI, everyone was bashing him, and look what happened.
     
  5. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    Thanks, FriendofTBL.

    Let me know how that Matt Leinart scoop worked out for him.

    And just so we've got our facts straight, TBL didn't have it that Reilly was leaving SI. He had a link to a Newsday blog that said Reilly was leaving. People bashed him because he passed on a EDSBS link that said Reilly was stoned and making out with his girlfiend at an LSU game, then claimed he had no responsibility to do anything other than pass on the link.
     
  6. My thoughts on the debate as a whole:

    Technically, blogging isn't a type of writing at all, just a medium to disseminate information. A blog is just a website with posts aligned up and down over the page in chronological order.

    Most blogs happen to offer opinion and commentary, not rumors or journalism (or fake journalism). Most sports blogs don't try to break news, they just comment on news that has already been broken.

    If you happen to disagree with a lot of the opinions or think that some of them offer false facts, that's because of the writer, not the medium. Just as there is bs online, there is bs offline. Does a Jay Mariotti column about Ozzie Guillen being a bully have more integrity than an online blog that engages in the same sensationalism and misrepresentation of the facts?

    Does Stephen A Smith have more credibility, having graduated journalism school and covered basketball, when he talks about politics on CNN, than a political junkie does when he blogs about politics?
     
  7. Tom Petty

    Tom Petty Guest

    you know, i've fucked up a few posts in the past. i'll admit it. but i sure as to hell would have proofed my first post ever on a journalism board.

    maybe that's the difference between bloggers and journalists ... that and you guys just shit facts instead of, you know, spending time searching (and researching, confirming) for those facts.
     
  8. I give the guy credit for at least trying to devise a systematic explanation for the difference between BLOGS! and journalism. I think he's giving readers too much credit, though. There's so much information coming from everywhere that people have lost the capacity to judge the relative worth of each individual piece of it. We are a nation of undiscerning informational omnivores now and the media - old and new -- have bent to that reality, largely because the technology has moved too fast for standards to keep up. Think about how many stories we see now that "cover" what are essentially Internet rumors. For example, The WaPo got crucified a while back because it ran a front page story about the Internet chatter concerning Obama's religious heritage. What percentage of the readers came away from that story believing that Obama was a Muslim? More than we're comfortable admitting, I'd say. That's the big old elephant in the room for this discussion -- people have forgotten how to read well and think critically.
    I like dick jokes, though.
     
  9. I think of them in the sense that Derrida did.
    Constantly.
     
  10. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    Yeah. That's it.
     
  11. poindexter

    poindexter Well-Known Member

    Bill Plaschke critiquing a football or baseball team is as mindless and uninformed as just about anything a BLOGGER can post.
     
  12. No.
    This is decidedly less than true.

    And, OK, here's a test. This, to me, is an interesting story. It's a measure of the depth of dislike held by the GOP base for John McCain, something mustardbased and I are discussing on the Moving The Primaries thread on N&S.
    http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3426

    My question is, who is Mike Lux and should I believe this and why?
    Discuss.
     
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