Joho the Blog
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June 09, 2003
Dave is keynoting. He takes his usual expansive view of what is a blog. And, he gently chides Michael Gartenberg for saying that you should keep your business blog free of personal opinion. Dave says that by including personal stuff you give your customers, clients and partners a sense of who you are. He sees blogging as part of a much broader social change: speaking in your own voice, admitting that you're not perfect. (At one point Dave used "We make shitty software" as a disclaimer for his company.) He ties blogs to The Cluetrain Manifesto. Dave has an equally expansive view of journalism: if you disclose your conflicts of interest and you don't lie, you're a journalist. That allows for a lot of overlap. Dave takes a question: Doesn't journalism have to be edited? Dave says that editing doesn't always improve the article. Doc says that all of his stuff is edited: some gets edited by an editor and some gets edited by his readers. Now there's an audience free-for-all about the differences between blogging and journalism. Few hold out for a strong distinction. (Jeff Jarvis argues for a difference between having a trained journalist reporting from a site and a blogger commenting on it.) Very interactive for a keynote. And his last line: "Idealism: Don't knock it until you've tried it." Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 9, 2003 10:31 AM
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Comments
There's Dave again on journalism. Journalism isn't monolithic, just like blogging isn't monolithic, and much of the debate over what's journalism is about defining some things as it and some as not, even when the definitions are blurry.
Journalism is mostly first-hand objective, fact-based interpretation of events regardless of forum, editing, etc. Blogging is, most expansively, a description of an event mostly second or third hand.
That is, a journalist typically is at an event or talks to people who made up an event, and writes about it in a way that tries to conform to what really occurred. A blogger typically writes about reports of events.
When bloggers writes about events first-hand, it's very clear that they're engaging in journalist; when journalists rely on second and third hand sources, they're not doing anything very interesting because of the objective mode in which they usually have to write. That's why blogs have a voice and journalists often don't.
On the editing front, editing is a challenge: editors can be collaborators, mentors, or adversaries, but they typically ensure that a journalist more closely adheres to what reality is rather than a journalist's possibly too-close reading of it. An editor stands more above the fray. This sometimes results in beating the life out of words to conform to a house style or tone. But it often means making sure articles are structured in a way that speaks to readers.
When you reach a certain point as a journalist, you have your own internal editor, like a superego, and editors remain important but you find your stuff is hardly touched any more after it hits their desk.
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