In a fit of apparently unintentional irony, Fiona Fox of the Royal Institution's Science Media Centre, has posted a blog on the BBC's journalism blog about how blogging isn't journalism.
I'll get to that in a second, but Richard Littlejohn has also criticized blogs recently, and I can't resist sharing his views with you. Littlejohn is a man with many intelligent and nuanced points to make about new media, as evidenced in his latest column, published on the internet:
"Frankly, I don't hold with blogging, or Twittering. If I've got something to say, it'll be in this column.
Why do people feel it necessary to put their every random thought on the World Wide Web? It's a sort of technological Tourette's. And why does anyone take any notice of it?"
Yes. It's fair to say that irony and self-awareness are, like fact-checking, not among Richard Littlejohn's strong points.
"Journalism vs. Paper:"
Anyway, Fiona's article has attracted a fair bit of heat already, but for me the sentence where it falls apart is this one:
"I think there is a difference between journalism and blogging. And dismissing that distinction when journalism is under threat is not clever."
Blogging isn't a writing style, or an alternative to journalism; it is a verb denoting the use of a technological medium. To understand just how wrong Fox's statement is, let's substitute 'blogging' for an equivalent:
"I think there is a difference between journalism and printing. And dismissing that distinction when journalism is under threat is not clever."
Wait, wha...? Journalism is a form of writing, and blogging is just one possible medium on which journalism can be carried. It makes no sense, just like the following:
"We should simply accept that there is the blogosphere, and there is journalism..."
Which again we can rewrite:
"We should simply accept that there is printing, and there is journalism..."
Well yes. In other semantic news, we should also simply accept that there is porn, and there is the internet, and there are mammals, and there are rabbits, and... oh you get the point.
Repeat after me Fiona: journalism is a form of communication, blogging and printing are uses of media. This is a distinction that I would have expected a professional science communicator to be aware of.
Some people might of course say that writing takes on a different character in the blogosphere, that we can make a distinction between the blogosphere, and the mainstream media, but this world view is years out of date. Let's take a few examples.
Journalists are Bloggers are Journalists:
Take me. I’m a blogger. I’m also a freelance journalist. I write for blogs, for mainstream media like The Guardian, and for blogs run by mainstream media. I'm genuinely curious to know whether Fiona Fox thinks I'm a blogger, or a journalist, or (as I would say) both.
Take Mark Henderson or Ian Sample, managers of the Times and Guardian science blogs respectively. They blog, and commission blogs, as and from journalists, hosted on mainstream media websites. Often those blogs and articles link heavily to investigative journalism conducted by members of the blogosphere. They also make heavy use of the micro-blogging service Twitter, and indeed reported events from the RI on Twitter the other night. These are professional journalists, who are using the medium of blogging.
Take Peter Hitchens, or Melanie Phillips, or Richard Littlejohn. Take them far, far, away, in fact, but before you do consider that Peter Hitchens' column for the Daily Mail is branded as a blog, and appears in the top hundred or so of the Wikio political blog rankings. Fiona talks about blogs being a playground for opinion, but then what exactly are newspaper columns or editorials? A column is basically just a regular blog, as far as I can see.
Science Bloggers Mostly Write for Mainstream Media:
These are all mainstream media examples, and no doubt some readers are preparing to write some sharp comment or Tweet about how actually most science bloggers operate independently of mainstream media, in some sort of distinct 'blogosphere'. Except that if they are, they’re completely wrong.
The reason why can be summed up in three words: Nature; Discover; Seed. Something like 250 of the most highly trafficked, active blogs are run on the platforms provided by these three mainstream media companies. Even among the top independent bloggers, many have published books or are heavily involved in mainstream media (think Ben Goldacre, Richard Wilson, Vaughan Bell, Petra Boynton).
So it’s not an exaggeration then to say that the majority of the top few hundred (impact/audience-wise) science bloggers write for mainstream media in one form or another. Many of them receive money for their blogging too – people like Ben Goldacre are obviously paid for their columns, but equally the guys on ScienceBlogs are paid by Seed, often quite generously. Ditto, I believe, Discover. Yes, they're not directly employed by MSM, but then neither are freelancers.
The point here is this: the idea of a distinction between 'blogging' and 'mainstream media' is increasingly out-of-date. The two have steadily merged.
Bloggers may be Journalists...:
So what about the actual journalism? Well plenty of mainstream media journalists are writing opinion pieces. Many of them are writing blogs, and the science sections of The Guardian and The Times have essentially been rebranded around the blog model, with regular guest bloggers. Columnists like Hitchens or Littlejohn write pure opinion, rarely presenting original (or indeed any) facts or reporting.
Meanwhile, bloggers like Gimpy, Richard Wilson, Ben Goldacre, Petra Boynton, Alan Henness, Simon Perry, Jack of Kent et al are heavily involved in investigative journalism, and bloggers like Brian Switek and Ed Yong provide in-depth explorations of current research rarely matched by mainstream media journalists.
...and Journalists Often Aren't Journalists
Fox is equally blind at times to the realities of modern journalism, painting a strangely rosy picture of 'proper journalism'.
"[the job of journalism is] to select, verify, correct, edit, analyse, balance and all those old-fashioned things that journalists are trained to do."
Except that this rarely happens. The BBC tend to regurgitate press releases, articles in newspapers written by named writers are often completely biased or sensationalist (see the Express front pages recently on climate, for example). Where is this glorious enclave of science journalism? And why is it the preserve of professional MSM journalists and not bloggers (including MSM bloggers)?
Obsolete Bollocks:
So this difference between science blogging and science journalism isn't the pay, it’s not the involvement of mainstream media, it’s not the use of social media, nor is it the primacy of opinion over reporting (or vice versa) or the topics covered or the manner in which they’re covered.
It is, in fact, bollocks, and people who talk about journalism vs. blogging in some sort of us-and-them way are spectacularly missing the point, just like the pigs in some famous book about a farm:
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
I defy Fiona Fox – or any readers here – to come up with any meaningful way of partitioning bloggers from journalists. I don’t think you can, for two reasons:
- Increasingly the distinction between the blogosphere and the mainstream media is becoming fainter and fainter, such that it has already reached the point of irrelevance.
- Blogging is simply a writing platform, just like the printing press, and arguments about blogging vs. journalism are as daft as talk of journalism vs. paper.
So when Fiona Fox talks about the distinction between bloggers and journalists, her argument is already obsolete. And statements like this...
"We should simply accept that there is
bloggingpaper, and there is journalism..."
...suggest that the person speaking is in serious need of some PR training.
There is a need for good journalism and for full-time journalists. But for journalism to prosper in an age of Tweets and iPads, it needs to make full use of new technology, not try to construct artificial barriers, or claim that somehow writing your article on a computer monitor rather than a piece of paper somehow stops it from being real journalism. That's just silly.
The only distinction I can think of is that there are unpaid bloggers where there aren't unpaid journalists. But that's a semantic difference, and meaningless. They're both writers.
I am curious to know if bloggers are covered by the same legal rights and privileges as journalists though.
There are of course differences in types of bloggers: there are bloggers who have a recognised editorial platform as you outline above (such as the Discover bloggers) and there are those who self-publish. But those under the former heading many had started as the latter. If an independent blog is good, it might get picked up by the mainstream media.
And of course we're only dealing here with science bloggers. There are also bloggers who just put stuff about their cat online. But there are newspaper columnists who write about their cat too. So again, no meaningful difference.
In fact, having just submitted that last comment, I think that might be what irks Fiona - the fact that anyone can start a blog but not anyone can be a published journalist (you have to be given a job by a newspaper for that).
So perhaps she's using that as her measure of quality. Seems like simple snobbery.
Two major differences.
Murdoch & Editors
Both controlling and constraining.
But I agree with the thrust of your piece.
Bruce
Excellent piece.
Really interesting post, and in particular agree with your point about newspaper columns and editorials. Tony Blair, with whom I disagree about pretty much everything else, hit the nail on the head when he said newspapers were becoming "viewspapers".
Having said this, I have followed a few of these "blogging vs journalism" discussions and they almost never talk about the perspective of users or readers. I read blogs to get information that MSM don't provide, and to get a different perspective on media stories. And I pick and choose. I think the debates can be a bit patronising if they don't look at this angle.
How very sad, when the world is changing around them all they can do is bleat, instead of embracing the new media and profiting from it.
Newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur, it's a case of adapt or die, and it looks as though Ms Fox is on the critical list.
Where blogging wins out it the ability of the readers to respond, the blogger or online journalist can learn from responses, other readers can have the spoon fed misconceptions erased, unlike the printed media. One of the reasons why I don't buy newspapers any longer is because at least two stories, where I had an indirect involvement, were riddled with inaccuracies and piss poor guess work.
I no longer feel I can trust journalists to tell me the facts so that I can form my own opinion, not in an age when journalists rarely leave the editorial office, and appear to make little effort to search out the facts. All to often we read of an expert opinion, whose educated guesswork often falls short of the mark.
What concerned me were those stories, where I didn't know the background, and I believed all that I read, then the realisation that factual errors occurred made me think that I was being fed masculine bovine excrement, without realising it, in those stories with which I had no connection.
The Daily Fail gets found out on a daily basis, and even the Times online had the alter a column recently, when the error was pointed out in the comments. I rather like the ability to comment, whether it is to praise or criticise a report, and I like reading the comments of others, that's something the printed media cannot compete with.
We live in a 'now' world, where food and column/blog responses are served fast, sometimes with a side order of fries, sometimes with a side order of vitriol. I'll leave you to figure out which is served with what!
@Bruce: I agree that editing is the biggest difference generally, although I reckon that may change over time. I'd happily get more involved in editing here if I had the time, and I know several guest bloggers here wouldn't mind being edited either, as a second, critical pair of eyes can be very useful for writers.
@Matt: Yes, you're right that there's the issue of what users want. There's a whole other post in how bloggers generally struggle to engage with their readership, largely because 99% of readers are silent ghosts in the night. That said, wouldn't it be fair to say that while the likes of you and I browse a variety of good sources, those can be MSM websites or personal blogs, and so really it just makes the same point - that the content exists now independently of the platform?
Martin is the editor of layscience.net.
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Good article. I pretty much agree, but wanted to offer another way of looking at the same issue.
I think that it's just as useful to split things the other way: rather than paper vs. journalism, we can say it's writing vs. journalism. As you rightly point out, not everything that is written either in newspapers or blogs is journalism. Even then, not everything that is journalism is good journalism.
This applies equally to blogging and journalism, and should really be where a differentiation happens. Good writing, regardless of medium, should be what we look for.
I think journalism as a form of communication and journalists as a profession need to be separated. Journalism as a form of communication involves representing the facts as accurately as possible in their proper context (even if you then come to a different conclusion about their meaning or significance).
So there are bloggers who practice journalism, absolutely. And there are bloggers who don't. There are journalists (i.e. people paid to write for the mass media) who practice journalism, and journalists who don't.
To just say 'journalists good, bloggers bad' as Fiona Fox does is simplistic, elitist, and completely anachronistic.
Martin, yes fair enough. I suppose I just think that if "journalists" looked at the facts - that people read blogs, and do so for many reasons - it might help them get over themselves a little. Otherwise it just looks like they are trying to decide what's good for readers. One of the beauties of the proliferation of platforms is that they give us more power!
Another characteristic of blogs from the user perspective is that they can facilitate more in-depth - and nuanced - discussions of issues that MSM only cover superficially. They help to link up people with similar interests, for a range of purposes - including activism - but also stuff as simple as helping us do our jobs better.
I think you are arguing a different point to Fox, and I think she is bad at wording what she means. I also think you both have completely the right idea.
Whilst there is a huge grey area, the idea most people have, including Fox, of what a blogger and a journalist are is simple. A journalist is your All The President's Men, white shirted, investigative and balanced sort. Whilst a blogger is your mid 20s guy sat in his bedroom just writing whatever he wants with no filter.
It's my experience that this is the case for the extremes, but there is something of a hypothetical scale between the two. The grey area in the middle (where the kid in his bedroom does investigative journalism, or the Daily Mail writer misquotes a source for sensationalist headlines, for example) is where the two of you disagree, though I think it's more semantics, as you admit.
The establishment need to realise that the net is changing everything, and that's a good thing. I'll stop there before I end up writing some horrible 1200 word meta essay.
The claim that blogging and journalism cannot be separated is predicated on a logical fallacy: specifically, this is an example of the converse fallcy of argument - I am a journalist who blogs, therefore everyone who blogs is a journalist. This is not true: other bloggers may not be journalists. The reasoning from the specific case of blogging journalists to all bloggers is nonsense
This issue cropped last year when it was proposed that the Press Complaints Commission should be given a remit for blogs as well as other forms of news media.
Like last time the argument is false: some journalists blog, but not everyone who blogs is a journalist. I blog - like many others I know - as an academic, and what I write is not journalism. Ergo, what I publish on my blog should be subject to the whims of the PCC (and it would be very dangerous for freedom of thought and research if it were).
A very sloppy piece based on very sloppy thinking.
QED
Excellent article, Martin.
Indeed, 'journalism' is the writer's commitment to journalistic values. The distinction lies in the writer's intent and ability to carry this out, not in how the article is disseminated.
The fact that blogging gives me a voice is something many journalistic types may indeed find distressing and, dare I say, threatening, in the same way that pianos being on sale in every piano shop in the land threatens my livelihood as a pianist. The insecurity and out and out snobbery shown by Fiona Fox could surely be excused as she clearly does not understand the semantics, Littlejohn seems to be more ego bruised and upset that proletarians have a voice that is more or less instantly available and not forced upon a readership as his is. The fact remains, you need to be good at it to have people regularly read what you write or they just click onwards, or turn the page and find something else. Imagine all those people buying pianos and releasing a single after the first day playing with it. Who's gonna listen to that!!
Well done Martin for a great piece.
I wish I could think of something productive to add but I've spent the afternoon fighting about undergrads citing blogs in their essays (I'm for it) and I'm done. So instead I'll just play to the sterotype of the social media user and simply say OMG AWESOME!!!
(ta for this, mean it)
Nick: You can QED as much as you like, but you're missing the point that blogging is a medium, not a particular style of writing.
What you're trying - but failing - to do is to distinguish between journalism and other forms of writing, like opinion writing, or whatever. That's fine, but then you need to be clear what you're arguing, and you need to understand that the medium is largely irrelevant to that argument. Journalism, like diaries or opinion-writing, is something that happens across a variety of media.
Martin is the editor of layscience.net.
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It's obvious to me that what we have here is an example of the "No True Journalist" fallacy.
I couldn't agree more, Martin - at the recent debate at City I made the exact point to Fiona in the debate. Journalism is a way of writing, an attitude, a mindset.
I strongly resent the suggestion that when I'm blogging about science as part of my job (for Cancer Research UK: http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/) that I'm not behaving as a journalist (albeit, one who is employed by a charity, rather than "independent" news media) - I think the work that we do on our blog is a damn sight more journalistic in attitude than the science churnalism that afflicts "proper" science journalism.
I think this is one area where Fiona has got it very wrong, and it will come back to bite her.
K
There are plenty of people who write for magazines and newspapers who do not get paid, so that criteria is out, as I have been doing it for years. For example few left-wing magazines pay for articles not least because they are skint, and I am sure this happens across the spectrum
Myself I feel a lack of editing is the one thing which hits blogs hard, firstly it excludes or makes it that much harder for people like me who had a very poor education or who suffer from dyslexia to get our point across.
I would love a program which acted not only as a spell checker but also adequately dealt with grammar etc.Is there one out their, I use a mac.
People like Littlejohn carp about blogs for one reason and one reason alone, they know they will be found out if blogging gets a mainstream foothold. After all the average golf club is full of bigoted arseholes like Richard, it is just they are to busy playing golf or groaning and moaning in the 19th hole to set up a blog, give them time Dickie boy, and your out of a job.
The lady is right, there is no difference between journalism and blogging, not least 99% of what we allwrite is totally pointless.
Jamie -
Not all journalism is factual. Feature-writing is often subjective and personal, reviews are entirely subjective and much magazine writing is descriptive rather than analytical.
I've been a (paid) journalist and I'm currently a blogger (unpaid). I sometimes write news stories as part of my current job although I'm not specifically paid to do that. Am I only a journalist when I'm being paid? Does the fact that I was trained as a journalist make a difference?
According to Wikipedia:
Ah, so it's whether someone thinks of you as a journalist...
Not all journalism is factual. Feature-writing is often subjective and personal, reviews are entirely subjective and much magazine writing is descriptive rather than analytical.
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