When bloggers aren't journalists: off-the-record

I think it depends on what kind of outlet you're talking about. In the political or social spheres, yeah, bloggers probably don't really care about being "journalists." In the gaming world, on the other hand, there's a fairly big debate going.

When Kotaku (a game blog) broke the story of Sony's "HOME" unveiling, Sony reacted by sending a stern letter and telling them they'd no longer be invited to press conferences -- keep in mind, here, that the reporter had dug up the story on his own from various bits of information put together to form a conclusion, not just by taking off-record word from Sony and reporting it. There was a backlash from the internet based on the idea that Kotaku was doing their jobs as journalists, so Sony's reaction was too harsh. (In the end, the two kissed and made up).

On the other hand, blogs in the game sphere are more free to report on rumors without fear of damaging credibility. If they get one wrong, no big deal, they were just reporting on a rumor. At 1UP, we report rumors but try to be careful with which ones pass muster. Just yesterday my editor had to post a retraction to a rumor story I wrote, and he commented that he never should have let it through. (Not by fault of me, he says, so whew). Game blogs which had similarly reported the story just updated again later with a "never mind" and an explanation. They didn't think they never should have reported it to begin with.

So I don't buy the "bloggers aren't journalists" argument, but I do think there are different levels and varieties of journalism, and they fulfill a specific niche. We need that niche, so I've got nothing against it.

Another similar issue to "off-the-record" statements is embargoed information. That's something else we deal with in games journalism quite a bit. Companies will let us know bits of announcements so we have fair warning and maybe get a chance to start writing up an article, but we know that it can't go live until after such-and-such date and time. With blogs being so pervasive, though, that raises the question of whether they let them in on those bits of information. On one hand, blogs are a great tool and reach plenty of people. On the other hand, there's tons of them, so leaks are hard to track.

This is only tangentially related, but...

One thing I never understood when i worked for a newspaper company was the blog on a newspaper site. There is this push from newspapers to get their columnists to "blog." Look at any major newspaper site right now, and you'll find "blogs" -- written by professional journalists. I don't quite get this. Structurally, how is a "blog" different from a "column?" (especially when the newspaper in question allows comments on their columns). I'd say it's not. What makes a blog unique, to me, is the amateur nature of it.

Clearly, the only reason newspapers have their columnists "blogging" is to look hip and "with it." Lame.

For me, I'm not having the blogger v. journalist debate, I think it's divisive and unhelpful. Journalists sometimes blog and bloggers sometimes commit acts of journalism. It's not a matter of who's getting paid or even who's doing the paying, since that line was blurred in the last five years. It's not a matter of what tools are being used, since there's a lot of crossover in software and methods. It's not a matter of credibility, since no one should be considered credible unless they've earned that credibility by what they do. In other words, just because you work for, say, ZDNet or CNET doesn't automatically confer credibility on you. It may have been a tradition in mainstream journalism to claim that, but that doesn't mean it's true. It's not a matter of holding a university degree in Journalism either.

"When I got into the news biz, I was a devout believer in what New York University professor and media critic Jay Rosen calls the "high church of journalism," the tenets of which, since I never went to J-school, I absorbed by a kind of osmosis. To me, the journalist was a kind of citizen representative who asked the questions any resident of a democracy would ask if he or she were watching the inner machinations of government. There was a time when the public shared this view. From the 1940s to the 1970s, as Russell Baker notes in the Aug. 16 issue of the New York Review of Books, the image of reporters in the movies remained pretty much the same: "salt-of-the-earth, wise-cracking, sassy, but high-principled types" who stood up for the little guy." -- Tracy Thompson, former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books. She blogs regularly here.