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Sunday, April 25, 2010
Are Bloggers Journalists?
A new poll says that bloggers consider themselves journalists, but is it the truth or ignorance on their part? A bit of both.
With 1,568 traditional and non-traditional media polled, 52 percent of bloggers consider themselves journalists, according to a survey sponsored by PR Newswire.
And that's a scary concept. But before we go into that, let’s first find out what a blog is in the journalistic sense.
A blog can be either a news story or an opinionated piece, with the length of the blog depending on the writer.
Now that’s out of the way, are some bloggers who have never been journalists and have no formal training really journalists? This is where elitism and old-fashion journalistic pioneering clash.
Many bloggers are not journalists and because of that they either intentionally or unintentionally put in their bias when writing about a news story or event. These bloggers don’t realize or care that they need to be objective and either interview or include both sides of the issue that they are writing about.
Another issue is some bloggers and even Citizen Reporters — people with no formal journalism training and write news stories for news Web sites like The Examiner — do not attribute their sources, or their sources are a bit dubious, and even plagiarize from legitimate news stories that appear on CNN or The New York Times.
“While 91 percent of bloggers and 68 percent of online reporters ‘always’ or ‘sometimes’ use blogs for research, only 35 percent of newspaper and 38 percent of print magazine journalists suggested the same,” the survey found.
Talk about the blind leading the blind, in some cases anyway.
And many of these bloggers need to learn how to write in the English language. Writing blogs in the same way as the voice of the people is great and it can really connect the reader with the article beautifully, but too many times slang is used too much and writing something that has intentionally misspelled words is very hard to read.
But do these non-journalistic bloggers need to go to a journalism school before they write a blog? No. Many actually know what they’re doing, but for those who don’t can always take a trip to the local library to check out a book on journalism or even a journalism Web site can teach them the essentials of writing news stories, such as this page from mediacollege.com.
If they’re really lucky and intrepid enough, maybe they can shadow a reporter or news editor of their local newspaper, but that’s assuming that’s still done. While this method was good enough to learn the trade many years ago, some editors would rather have someone with a college degree before he or she walks into their newsroom.
While it’s nice to see that these bloggers have the pioneering spirit that makes great journalists, they do need to learn the important basics, not only to help their readers but to help in their credibility.
Because no one should take a news blog seriously when the first sentence starts off, “OMG, u won’t believe wat happen.”
Read related column, “Is Social Media Good For Journalism?” here.
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