The Lurker

Journalism in weblogs

Dave Winer's blog is often an interesting read. But he gets a little carried away with it all sometimes. Journalism and Blogging is a pretty unconvincing argument.

Someone says that weblogs aren't journalism. OK, suppose a journalist has a weblog. When that journalist writes something on the weblog, therefore, it must not be journalism.

Winer either doesn't understand the argument he's trying to refute, or he's intentionally misrepresenting it.

This page is a weblog. I don't think anyone could credibly argue that there's anything remotely resembling journalism here. None of the weblogs I regularly read are about news. So it is fair to say that, in general, weblogs are not journalism. Winer seems to be disputing this point because journalists can write in weblogs.

Suppose I ask my sister, who completed a journalism degree not too long ago (so I guess she has a pretty good idea of what journalism is), to write a few paragraphs for this page about our dog Sandy. It wouldn't be journalism.

He ends with a decent point — that if there is such a thing as journalism, it must be possible to practice it in a weblog. But I don't think anybody would dispute that. The argument is not that a weblog can never be considered journalism, but that they are not, in general, journalism.

Related topics: Mindless Link Propagation