Blogging, Journalism and Credibility

"Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility: Battleground and Common Ground," a conference held in late January at Harvard, featured a group of fifty journalists, bloggers, news executives, media scholars and librarians trying to make sense of the new media environment. The relationship between bloggers and journalists was a particular focus. Since the conference, the resignation of CNN's Eason Jordan and the Jeff Gannon White House scandal have only underscored the power of weblogs as a new form of citizens' media. 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. Have blogs chipped away at the credibility of mainstream media? How have they influenced the way news is being reported? Is credibility a zero-sum game--in which credibility gained by blogs is lost by mainstream media and vice versa? Conference participants put their minds to these questions, among many others. We've excerpted and abridged some of their thoughts below:

[Elaborating on an essay, "Bloggers vs. Journalists Is Over":]

Even though it makes for good feature stories and blog posts, "bloggers vs. journalists" doesn't help us understand where the world of journalism is going, where the Internet is taking it and what this new revolution sometimes called "citizens' journalism" is about.

So bloggers vs. journalists is over. It doesn't mean that they're not going to fight anymore or that we won't have arguments, or that it's all peace and love or anything like that. In fact, the tension between the two will go on. It's necessary and it's inevitable. But we shouldn't see these two camps as adversaries or enemies or opposites, because if we simply look at what happened with the tsunami story, and the way that independent citizen journalists were able to contribute to that, it's obvious that blogs have some role in journalism. We just have to figure out what that is.

First of all, there has been and there is a power shift going on: from the producers of media to the people formerly known as the audience. That's what I like to call them, because they're not really an audience anymore. And terms like "audience" and "consumer" and "viewer" and "reader"--which have become threaded into journalism--aren't really that accurate for the people on the other end of the process. So there has been a power shift from producers to users, mostly because of the Internet.

Secondly, this has led to a loss of sovereignty in the press. What I mean by that is simply a loss of exclusive control. Areas that once were under the domain of the journalist are now not exclusively under the domain of the journalist. You are not the boss anymore. What you say is not the law.

The third key idea is that because of this power shift, because of the loss of sovereignty, a lot of pressure is being put on mainstream journalism's key ideas--the ideas and principles that make it what it is. There's pressure on those things, and they haven't been subject to critical examination for a long time. And that is one of the contexts in which blogging has erupted.

Objectivity as an ethical touchstone, as one of my sources said, is faltering in mainstream journalism. It doesn't provide the kind of guidance and direction that it once did. And this is part of the intellectual crisis. Problems of finding a believable voice keep growing in mainstream journalism, and this is related to the shift in power.

Blogging is very well adapted to the world that I describe. It is well adapted to a world where the shift in power is taking place, to a world where there are many centers of sovereignty. Blogging is well adapted to two-way dialogue as opposed to one-to-many dialogue, which is also part of the media shift that we are living through. And of course blogging is not only well adapted but organic to the web and is itself one of the artifacts of the Internet.

So that's why these two things are butted up against each other. As Rebecca Blood, a student of the weblog form, puts it, "Blogging and journalism exist in a shared media space." One of the reasons blogging vs. journalism is over is that nobody is leading that space. So you can just forget it. We have to get used to existing in the same media space--by which we mean bloggers and journalists are there competing for the same scarce resource of attention, addressing the same important issues and able to reach users.

The press is separating from this other big institution called the media and is moving about in social space, so that a lot of the press today is not based anymore in the media--especially the commercial media. Increasingly, because of the Internet, because of blogging, some of the press is actually shifting into public hands. So whereas the press and the media once overlapped almost completely, now the press has shifted. The nonprofit world owns a piece of it, activists and people involved in politics own a piece of it and the public owns a piece of it.

One of the biggest challenges for professional journalists today is that they have to live in a shared media space. They have to get used to bloggers and others with an independent voice talking about them, fact-checking them, overlooking them--and they no longer have exclusive title to the press. They have to share the press with the public. Rearranging the ideas of journalism to account for that kind of a world is a big challenge. It's very difficult because the ideas that gave birth to professional journalism, the way we teach it and understand it, were in fact an artifact of a one-to-many world. They were built for the media platform that is slowly disintegrating. They are the products of an era of professionalism in American life and modern life that is also slowly passing.

Journalists have been slow to understand why they owe a debt to bloggers. They owe a debt because the people who are developing the web as a medium for journalism are bloggers and people like them. Those who are discovering its potential--who are developing the tools and the protocols, who are pushing forward the ideas and the practices of web journalism--are not for the most part professional journalists. They are independent authors and bloggers and writers on the web.

So if we look, for example, at what Dave Winer once called "the art of linking," the people who are experts at linking are bloggers. If we look at tapping distributed knowledge around the web, the people who know how to do that are bloggers. If we look at news as conversation, which is such an important metaphor today, the people putting that into practice are bloggers. Bloggers are developing this platform that journalists will one day occupy, and that is the reason why people in the mainstream press should pay attention to them.

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