Can Reporters and Journalists Be Bloggers, Too?

Leave it to Mark Cuban to start an argument over weblogs. The feisty owner of the Dallas Mavericks recently decided not to allow bloggers in the Mav’s locker room after games, and in a recent post on his Blog Maverick he chastises The New York Times for jumping on the blogging bandwagon. “Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under five minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business,” he writes.

Cuban says that, to most readers, the idea of blogging means something not vetted, edited or sourced, and therefore, questionable and perhaps unreliable. So calling reporters bloggers cheapens them. Newspaper blogging should be called “real-time reporting,” or almost anything except blogs.

It’s an interesting thought. Saul Hansell, who writes a weblog for The New York Times, not surprisingly disagreed with Cuban’s assessment. He says nomenclature isn’t that important. “First of all, blogs are part of a conversation. We link liberally to others, even our direct competitors. Readers comment. And so do sources and participants,” Hansell writes.

He makes a good point. As a longtime reader of the Times, I look forward to many of their blogs (especially the ones by Dick Cavett and Errol Morris) for their opinions, background and other stuff that doesn’t work in news stories. Reporter blogs can add elements that don’t fit in the traditional sense of news journalism, and are able to update stories quickly – in real time.

Cuban and Hansell aren’t the only ones thinking about what blogs really are. Mark Glaser, whose Mediashift weblog comments on journalism, writes that the distinction between bloggers and journalists is becoming more blurred all the time. But he doesn't see that as a bad thing, and he offers a quote from Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtopost.com, that sums things up pretty well. “I think the argument about bloggers vs. journalists has been over for years. We’ve all co-existed just fine for a while now, and the truth is, the distinction is less relevant every day. There are thousands of journalists who now blog, and there are lots of bloggers who are trained journalists.”

Comments

[djysrv]

As a "trained journalist" who blogs, I thought this post did a good job of covering the spectrum of opinions about bloggers and journalists. Regretably, I still find the Mark Cuban school of thought prevails. I'm encouraged by the emerging views of the mainstream media that coexistgence is more likely to emerge as the conventional wisdom on the subject.