Notes from the Jay Rosen led BloggerCon session:
(See Jay’s post and Rebecca Blood’s for context.)
Rosen–In order for us to figure this out, we have to pull the terms apart, because if we don’t we won’t understand the relationship between them. What is connecting these two? Where are they touching? What are they adding to each other? Two tribes: the bloggers and the journalists. They’re camped near one another, and they’re eying some of the same territory. Possible they will march into the future together in some new way.
What’s happening to blogging as it moves toward journalism and vice versa.
About most of the room are bloggers. Half the room are journalists.
What is pushing blogging toward journalism? Chris Lydon: We can do it with impuntiy now that we have the tools. It makes it cheap and easy to connect with everyone. So much to say, so much inadequacy of coverage. We feel aggreived by journalism. There is good journalism and bad journalism. Clay Shirky is a journalist. Thomas Friedman has ceased being a journalist.
Quest for a voice. Henry Copeland–bloggers are finding they can be partisan and still find an audience.
Dave–I don’t know that blogging is going toward journalism. I don’t need a reporter to contact all the sources and put it into a story, I can go directly to the sources. By eliminating the middleman, we get a better answer.
Jeff Jarvis–It’s a relationship medium, and we haven’t even begun to explore that. This medium allows you to show off.
Dave W.–Writing is a way of caring about your world. Not all blogs are headed in that direction. The ones that are are doing so as a way of helping a world that we share and care about. Journalism is a way of making the world clear to people in ways they care about.
So much going on that is begging to be commented upon. Most bloggers don’t want to do legwork, and everyone has an opinion. Makes it easy to become an op ed columnist.
Blogging doesn’t challenge journalists as much as it challenges editors.
Used to be we could identify journalists by who owned the tools. Now the tools are being democratized, which makes it more difficult to identify what journalism is.
What happens to journalists when they blog? Drop the editor. You can cover what interests you. No longer have a seal of approval. What’s missing is the sensibiity of the editor.
Changes your relationship with the audience. Big increase in freedom and opinion. More risk, and they have to establish a relationship with their audience on a regular basis.
Dan Gillmor–Less than you think is changing, partly because I was a columnist before. Chief advantage was a conversation with readers.
A tremendous amount of lost speech is inherent in making the publishing miracle of daily print happen, but now that’s not necessary.
Rosen–Objecivity was the devoicing of journalism.
Micah Sifry–people are hungry for filters.
So what do we want? We’re not geniuses.
Rosen–Many of the things that used to define journalism don’t anymore. What is coming to define is much more complex: a desired to participate. An individual voice. Journalism is being stripped down to what is essential. Exciting for me…why do I blog? I don’t want to deal with editors, and I don’t think journalism is going to be the same. Teach people how to interacting citizens if they want to be journalists. Being reduced to its human elements. A major challenge to how we teach journalists.
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