Newspaper Blogs Make Journalists More Human

I posted last week about the squawk put up by Mark Cuban because The New York Times has its reporters doing blogs. Call them anything but blogs, Cuban warns the paper, or you risk cheapening your brand.

But I often find the weblogs written by Times writers to be the best part of the paper, at least in its online version, which is now the only version I know. Today Bob Harris, for instance, in the Paper Cuts blog, which, we are informed on the page, is “about books and other forms of printed matter, written by the editors of The Book Review,” Harris writes about the seven deadly words of book reviewing: poignant, compelling, intriguing, eschew, craft, muse and lyrical.

I write occasional book reviews, so I went to my most recent to see how many of the deadly words were included. I got lucky; "unique" was the only one of the seven I used – this time.

Reporter blogs offer me, a former journalist, something beyond the day-to-day monotony of writing news. They help explain why reporters do things they way they do. A really good example is Dot Earth, a blog about climate change written by Times science reporter Andrew Revkin. He describes the difficulties that media face in covering big-picture stories like global warming.

To make his point, he discusses how reporters cover science research, and how easy it is to get it wrong. “Frogs entered the climate discourse in 2006, after a paper published in Nature and widely reported in the media (Including a story by me) concluded that global warming was a ‘key factor’ in such amphibian declines,” he writes.

Trouble is, it wasn’t true. “Now, it turns out that the mix of forces that caused these colorful residents of cloud forests to vanish from misty slopes remains contentious even though they have become an icon in discussions of extinction dangers from rapid climate change.”

Revkin leaves open a huge question mark: "What’s a journalist (or citizen) to do? The more definitive a statement, the more effort should go into testing its basis. Somehow, we need to figure out a better way to deal with complexity and uncertainty. That goes for scientists, journal publishers, and definitely journalists and readers.”

Even a cynic like Cuban should be able to see the merit in posing questions and prompting discussions like this.