Kirtley, Another Pundit Who Misunderstands Blogging
The American Journalism Review has an article about blogging and journalists, and I was struck by this paragraph, mainly because it is so wrong:
Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota and a former AJR columnist,…adds that reporters, trained to be objective, often struggle to adopt the right tone. “Blogs are not intended to be objective. They are supposed to be opinionated, snarky and in your face – and that’s not the way the mainstream media usually goes about reporting. The whole genre of blogging is very different. It’s not fair for a news organization to say, ‘We want you to blog, but by the way don’t express your real opinions.’”
Kirtley is one of the mainstay media pundits, so it troubles me even more. Here is why I think it is wrong. Blogs to me are a blank piece of paper. They can be anything the writer wants them to be. They can be opinionated, they can be snarky or they could be just a simple journal, a newsletter or an aggregator of facts.
However, once media experts, who should know better, pigeonhole bloggers by saying “they are supposed to be opinionated, snarky and in your face,” they limited the journalistic possibilities. These are tools that can be used anyway you want to use them. It would be much better to say blogs open possibilities for journalists that are still to be imagined and then start to imagine how they might be used.
To understand what I mean, see my next post on a blog to attack avian flu.
The AJR article deals mostly with how news organizations are coming to terms with having their staffs blog, including the legal aspects. Here is Dan Gillmor’s take.
