Real Journalists vs. Bloggers: Which Journalism Will Prevail?

C.W. Anderson — @chanders on Twitter — has an update to his recent post at Nieman Journalism Lab, which tried to go beyond the binary “real journalists vs. bloggers” equation to look at online and traditional journalism entities on an axis related to how institutional/open they are and how fact-oriented / commentary-oriented they are.

The future of news in 4 dimensions

By C.W. Anderson / Sept. 8 / 2:27 p.m.

In my last post, I spent a lot of time laying out a fairly abstract framework for how we can think intelligently about future kinds of news organizations. I argued they could be usefully evaluated and charted on four factors: the type of work they do, how institutionalized they are, how many resources they have, and how open they are to outsiders.

But the value of any model lies not in its elegance, but in the degree to which it can help us think about the world in a useful way — the way it can give us “tools to think with,” as the saying goes — and can help us solve practical problems.

Note that by “solve practical problems” I don’t simply mean “figure out a business model for journalism.” Business models are important — but questions like “what kind of journalism best integrates with the nature of 21st-century democracy and society?” are also practical problems. So in this post I want to apply the model to a few real new organizations, describe what problems I think it might help us solve, and answer a few questions raised by my previous post.

Comments

[nic:]

Being a journalist for over 37 years I see journalist "telling" use how it is and bloggers "teaching" us on how it is....withe bloggers going into much more detail as to why and how something is done...Too be a good journalist now days you must be active in both fact finding and blogging....my 2 cents

Sep 10 09:48 AM

[Tony Petroski:]

From the article, a partial quote of C.W. Anderson:

"But the value of any model lies not in its elegance, but in the degree to which it can help us think about the world in a useful way..."

His description of the model applies as well to the "real journalists." For a very long time, perhaps since journalism was invented, the goal of "real journalists" hasn't been "fact gathering" although they do a lot of "fact filtering." It's actually a job of seeking out "facts" that fit a (predominently) left-wing morality tale to help us "think about the world in a useful way." In the old days they called it "socialist reality."

While it's human nature that some bias will show through once in a while, I'm convinced that the pervasive and increasingly biased reporting by real reporters has damaged "real journalism." It may be too late, but if it is to be repaired, it will take fact gathering and less public-opinion shaping.

I agree that the bloggers are primarily opinion givers and reactors rather than fact gatherers, but their sheer numbers often result in more facts and truth assembled than all the efforts of the establishment media.

Sep 10 02:06 PM

[BigOlDave:]

nic,

As a journalist, you had to have heard of "Spell Check". When you post, just click "ABC Check Spelling" and your post will more closely resemble that of someone who uses words for a living.

Dave

Sep 11 04:31 PM