Amateur Professionals

Online Journalism Review conducted interviews with several online journalists to see what they thought about newspapers integrating blogs into their journalism. Results were mixed:

Lisa Stone, BlogHer.org: “Of course they can… Newspaper blogs that work are carefully planned, openly executed exercises in public conversation about news and information. These blogs allow comments and turn into 24/7 townhall meetings about everything from the headlines to how well the paper is doing to deliver and discuss the news. Newspapers that blog well embrace the community and use the blogs as an extension of their op-ed pages.”

Nick Denton, Gawker Media: “Reporters, trained to put aside opinion, make uninteresting bloggers. And it's notoriously hard to manage, in parallel, a daily news cycle and regular updates for breaking news.”

Bob Cauthorn, CityTools.net: “I think it's going to be difficult for newspapers to do blogs right because their DNA continues to be trapped in the "we talk, you listen" mode… if newspapers blogs are not *really* about interacting with the community -- and I challenge anyone to demonstrate they've been successful at that goal -- what makes them different? They just offer the same voices you read all the time.”

All three make good points. Starting with Cauthorn, journalists should not keep blogs; they do not have the time to respond to their public.

Journalists need to be out gathering information, talking to people involved in their stories and putting what they find together in a comprehensible manner. It’s not that they ignore their public or that they wouldn’t like to converse with it; it’s that newsgathering takes a lot of time for which journalists get paid.

When papers ask their journalists to write on the tool of an amateur for no extra compensation they are undermining their own quality because they steal time away from their act of journalism. For example, the Washington Post recently felt the backlash from annoyed staffers.

And moving beyond journalists, not even bloggers have time to blog. Poynter notes that the “pre-blog” of an upcoming conference isn’t as lively as it should be due mostly to the fact that the bloggers on the site are busy organizing the conference. And Frank Barnako at MarketWatch notes that some of the biggest names in the blogosphere are getting fed up with the constant updating and taking some time off.

Nick Denton alludes to the journalistic principle of objectivity. Objectivity is another reason why journalists should not keep blogs. Blogs are meant to take a position, to have a voice. Professional journalists traditionally are not. They would compromise their position as journalist by letting their reader know where they stand on a blog and then reporting objectively.  

But this doesn’t mean that newspapers can’t integrate blogs into their everyday function. In doing this, Stone has the right idea.

Op-ed pages should be transformed into blogs because opinion is essentially what blogs are. The only thing that distinguishes them from blogs is their lack of interactivity, something that newspapers seriously need to integrate in order to reconnect with their readers. Op-ed columnists should react with their pubic just like bloggers do to create a conversation.

But if the beat journalists don’t have the time to respond to readers, who will?

This is where newspapers need an intermediary; not just traditional ombudsmen like those that have popped up in the past few years but staffers whose job is to filter comments, alert journalists to a few that deserve personal responses and respond to others themselves.  They would effectively act as "reverse editors;" whereas traditional editors filter down to the public, "reverse editors" would filter up to journalists.

With such positions doled out by section or competence, all articles could be opened up to reader comments and readers would be happy to hear that their paper cares enough to answer their concerns. These intermediaries should also scan the blogosphere to see what their readers are saying about their paper and linking to relevant posts. 

At the end of the day, professional journalists need not worry that amateurs are going to steal their jobs, nor should they worry that their ability to do their jobs will be compromised by new interactive tasks.

But both professionals and amateurs should be worried about something else. If you noticed, much of the two parts of this essay revolved around time and money: amateurs don't get paid to do journalism and thus can't find the time; professionals get paid for journalism and thus can't find the time to blog. Well, time and money, according to this prediction, may be running out for the medium on which they both depend; newspapers.

Let's hope that professionals and amateurs soon find a lucrative way to work together to make newspaper journalism thrive for centuries to come.

Sources: Online Journalism Review, MarketWatch, Poynter, Digital Deliverance (prediction)