News organizations experiment with blogs

Posted by Dana Goldstein on June 1, 2004 at 4:25 PM

Here's an interesting, well-researched article from the new issue of American Journalism Review: News websites are hiring big-name political bloggers from the independent blogosphere, Rachel Smolkin reports, and big-name U.S. political reporters and editors are increasingly tuned into blogs, although they debate what influence the medium will have on traditional journalism. An interesting question comes out at the end of the article: given blogs' reputation as direct sources of information between writer and reader, how will newspapers resolve double-standards between the editing of their news articles and their affiliated blogs? The article describes how the lack of blog editing caused problems at the Sacramento Bee...

But some of the most interesting revelations in this article come from the mainstream journalists Smolkin interviews, most of whom readily admit to reading blogs. In an especially juicy segment, Smolkin talks to Jodi Wilgoren, the New York Times reporter and Chicago Bureau Chief whose coverage of Howard Dean's bid for the White House earned her the ire of angry Dean supporters, one of whom responded by creating what can only be called an attack-blog - Wilgoren Watch. I was struck by the friendly attitude a lot of these mainstream reporters had toward bloggers, and also by Smolkin's astute analysis that blogs, unlike most newspaper and television coverage, offer a more nuanced take on what it means to be "liberal" or "conservative" in George W. Bush's America. A good read, check it out.

Source: American Journalism Review

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