What exactly is a Journalist again?
November 9, 2009
Filed Under: in Analysis, New Media vs. Old Media, News, Social Media
Author: Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
Welcome back.
Like many of you, including Dan Lyons and Dave Winer, I was irritated as hell by Techcrunch’s Paul Carr this weekend by his lambasting of all of citizen journalism, as he judged everyone who might participate in that activity by the actions of two or three Twitter users.
I won’t rehash the whole thing, mostly because I think being irritated as hell is sort of a benchmark of success for Paul. Of all the viewpoints I’ve seen on the matter, though, one that hasn’t gotten a lot of airplay is a post from Frank X. Shaw, who is analyzing Dan Lyon’s analysis of the debacle.
Here is where Dan is missed a key point:
What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere "aggregators" and the "real journalism" gets done at places like the Times.
Um, Dan? TechCrunch is a news organization, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t paying attention. Ditto for GigaOm, for Engadget, Gizmodo and so on. Real reporters, doing real news. However you want to define it.
What’s changed is not the journalism, it’s the underlying business model. There will be plenty of journalism in the future. But it will look at the business and staffing level more like TC than NYT.
I don’t deny for a minute that he’s right: large blogs who engage in news discovery, aggregation and broadcast should be considered journalists.
Where does that leave the rest of us, though? Although I editorialize in a number of different ways in my role here at SiliconANGLE, does that mean I’m a journalist? In a certain sense, yes, but I’m curious about your opinions on the topic.
I mentally flip flop often on this topic. I like to think what we do here at SiliconANGLE is a bit beyond journalism (though that could be me just elevating my own sense of self-importance). We don’t tie ourselves to the news cycle, but it’s impossible to deny that we’ve delivered breaking news from time to time, albeit they may not be the most important news stories of all time (tech news rarely is).
Add to that the fact that any time you have a group of thinkers and writers together working towards common goals, news will happen on it’s own. Does that make us all inadvertent journalists?
I’m legitimately curious on the community’s thoughts on this. My thoughts on this used to be pretty well formed, but the very organic way that news-telling has evolved this year have put my previously well formed thoughts into turmoil on this.
Well to me journalism and journalists still means there is an editor involved to shape or twist the story (depending on your point of view) into its end result. So the prose can be manpulated. With blogging, you are chief cook and bottle washer. I'm sure the big blogging sites have a final set of eyes for legal purposes.
But I see bloggers more as opinionists or shapers of public opinion. Still, I agree, the business model of news and opinion has been turned on its head.
This is always an interesting debate to me. I am a journalist. I have written and produced TV and news stories for years. I have a degree in journalism. But that degree is not what makes me a journalist, it's the writing, researching and reporting that does that. I am also a blogger, and I wear different hats. I feel that when I interject my own opinion in pieces, I am blogging because I believe that journalists present facts, not commentary. I just wrote an article for EContent Magazine on Measuring Community Effectiveness. It has no opinion. I reported the story and wrote it through, using the perspectives of others to show many sides and trains of thought. Now, I do believe that the line is beginning to blur and that a title is now what deems your content journalistic. I think that anyone can commit an act of journalism, though they may not label themselves a journalist. i will stop now, because i can literally talk about this forever. There is room for everyone and new models HAVE to emerge.
I meant to write "TV/broadcast and print"news stories.
Let us recall the sequence of events:
1) A terrible tragedy happened.
2) Techcrunch published an editorial about the events and people who were there.
3) Paul Carr wrote an editorial about the Techcrunch editorial
3) Dan Lyon wrote an editorial about Paul Carr's editorial
4) Frank X. Shaw wrote an editorial about Dan Lyon's editorial
5) Mark Hopkins wrote an editorial about whether the above sequence was arguably a journalistic endeavor.
6) I followed a link on twitter that landed me here.
Let's be clear: journalism is the gathering and presentation of facts about events for the purpose of educating a group of people about what (might have) transpired. It's pretty simple to define (albeit exceedingly difficult to perform, and thus deserving of great respect when done properly).
Saying
"any time you have a group of thinkers and writers together working towards common goals, news will happen on it’s own"
is like saying that any time you get a group of SEO experts together a successful website will make itself. It's not just wrong, it sounds like it doesn't even know what it's talking about.
Please pardon my error -- Carr wrote the Techcrunch article, not the editorial about it. I'm clearly no journalist. I don't think this changes the overall absurdity of the sequence with respect to my above argument.
Christopher, I think I could respond one of two ways: either you're outrightly wrong, or we have a difference of opinion on the definition of news and journalism. I think I'm going with the former.
At this point, it's pretty undeniable that large groups of people can act as journalists without trying. Look at the nature of Digg, Twitter, and Facebook. Sure, every system has it's flaws, but it's serving the purpose and intent of journalism for wide swaths of the population, and doing at least as well at it's job in that as traditional media has.
To believe otherwise is to put your head in the sand.
Uh, interesting point, save for one tiny detail. Neither Frank X. Shaw nor Dan Lyons were talking about my post. In fact they were talking about a totally different post by Mike Arrington concerning social gaming. A casual glance at either should have made this obvious.
Still, I think you just made my point about social media repeating errors as fact - so, thanks, I guess.
Best,
Paul