Blogging, Journalism and Credibility (Page 2)

Dave Winer
Blogger for Scripting News (www.scripting.com)

I think I can speak for most, if not all, of the bloggers in the room when I say that we have never woken up thinking about how we can get rid of professional journalists. If anything, we have worked hard to bring them in.

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.

Rather than looking at it as an adversarial relationship, let's look at the ways we can help each other, because God knows we have much bigger problems to solve. Look really, really seriously at how you can adopt practices of blogging in what you do. For example, providing full transcripts of every interview that you do would be something that a lot of your readers would appreciate.

Bob Giles
Curator, Nieman Foundation

I think the news industry's reluctance or inability to embrace new ideas is embedded in the sort of institutional culture of the newspapers and broadcast organizations for which we work. The fact of the matter is that mainstream news media is a stable industry, and it is very slow to effectively graft new ideas onto its main business.

The question is always raised: "How soon will we make money on this venture?" Secondarily in the thinking is, "How can this serve our audiences? How does this help us connect with our communities? How can we better execute our obligation for public service and public trust by finding a way to use a new technology?"

I am delighted that Ed Cone is here, because I think his newspaper in Greensboro [North Carolina] is doing some very innovative work in finding a way to use blogging as an effective, transparent open-sourcing methodology for connecting with its communities. And I hope that one of the results of this meeting will be to inspire more newsrooms to think creatively and go to the purse-holders in their news organizations and make the compelling case for why this helps us and why we need to make the investment for the technology and the newsroom time and resources to make all this work.

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