![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIn his 28 October post "I am not a journalist", Prince Edward Island blogger Peter Rukavina reacts to the admittance and rejection of a blogger to the press gallery at the Legislative Assembly. I'll copy the relevant CBC article in full below.
The Charlottetown Guardian seems to be pretty uniformly hostile to the blogger's entry.
That, well. Perhaps Macdougall thinks of journalism as a zero-sum game, with bloggers inevitably displacing journalists through bloggers' own material (isntead of, say, referring their readers to the source material). Perhaps he shares in the general gloom surrounding the collapse of the newspaper industry in the face of the dispersion of traditional media. Who knows? Rukavina, interestingly enough, agrees with Macdougal about the non-journalistic qualities of bloggers but for different reasons.
Rukavina's hiving off of bloggers from journalists doesn't strike me as sound. From the journalist's perspective, Andrew Sullivan is a journalist of international renown who integrates this with his personality as a blogger, while Toronto Star writer Antonia Zerbisias does the same. From the blogger's perspective, The Huffington Post and its writers have had a huge effect on American journalism over the past couple of years. The boundaries between the two categories are blurred, and the writing and researching skills involved are pretty much comparable.
Moreover, why can't journalists be compared to poets or novel writers or songwriters or graffiti artists or priests? Seriously. The first three professions also involve writing, while I can imagine an arts journalist whose work is informed by street art like graffiti, and let's not forget any number of clerics who've also gained renown as writers. This is a secondary point, granted, since neither graffiti artists nor priests use the same skills sets as journalists or bloggers, but nevertheless.
As for attaching value to our own bits of dialogue, isn't that what every writer does regardless of whether they're bloggers or journalists? Writers in any medium have traditionally not fared very well, or been that likely to achieve stardom.
Um, personal interest stories?
I agree that there are serious differences between blogging taken as a whole and journalism taken as a whole, a relative lack of editing on blogging's part, say, greater spontaneity, greater interactivity. Those are averages, however. Those are not representative of the entire enterprise of blogging, nor are they representative of the entire enterprise of journalism. Blogging can very well be a useful form of journalism because of its more personal and individualistic scale, ferreting out stories that larger and perhaps less nimble journalistic enterprises might not get. Again, bloggers can transition to journalism, just as journalists can transition to blogging, just as people can fulfill the expectations of both activities without undue stress. Bloggers, in turn, depend heavily on traditional media for their information, whether that information is reproduced verbatim or made the subject of commentary.
In the meantime, granted that provincial legislatures don't admit bloggers. Maybe they should. Everything counts in small amounts, after all.
Members of the two-week-old press gallery of the P.E.I. legislature voted a local blogger out of the organization at a public meeting on Monday evening.
In an 11-2 vote, Stephen Pate lost his accreditation to cover the legislature as a member of the media. Pate runs a blog called the NJN Network.
The press gallery will recommend to Legislative Speaker Kathleen Casey that Pate be removed from the list of accredited media.
Gallery president Wayne Thibodeau, who is also the senior political reporter for the Charlottetown Guardian, argued Pate is not a journalist and that other press galleries in the country do not allow bloggers, lobbyists or special interest groups.
Pate described himself as a journalist, satirist and blogger, and said he occasionally advocates for people with disabilities. He argued the effort to vote him out was an attempt to stifle freedom of speech.
The press gallery of the P.E.I. governs media accreditation for the legislature. Non-media members can attend but cannot use the media room or second floor of the building.
The Charlottetown Guardian seems to be pretty uniformly hostile to the blogger's entry.
Guardian Editor Gary Macdougall used the phrase “hobby journalists” to describe what bloggers do, and underlying the CBC panel discussion was the notion that we all need to consume this stuff called “the news” and that there’s a battle between bloggers and journalists to see who’s going to deliver it in the future.
That, well. Perhaps Macdougall thinks of journalism as a zero-sum game, with bloggers inevitably displacing journalists through bloggers' own material (isntead of, say, referring their readers to the source material). Perhaps he shares in the general gloom surrounding the collapse of the newspaper industry in the face of the dispersion of traditional media. Who knows? Rukavina, interestingly enough, agrees with Macdougal about the non-journalistic qualities of bloggers but for different reasons.
Comparing journalists to bloggers is like comparing journalists to poets or novel writers or songwriters or graffiti artists or priests: yes, we all interpret the human condition in our own peculiar ways, but the blogger is no more treading on the domain of a journalist than the poet is.
I’m a committed and passionate blogger: it’s deeply woven into the fabric of how I live. But the exciting thing about blogging for me is not its perceived abilities to “recast the news landscape,” it’s the notion that regular everyday citizens have, in the Internet, a publishing platform the likes of which we’ve never seen: low cost, low barrier to entry, global distribution of words and images.
And what’s exciting about that has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the process.
What happens when, for all intents and purposes, everyone has a printing press and a television studio and is responsible to no entity but their own conscience when using it? How does that change public discourse? How does that change how people think about themselves in relation to society’s institutions? In a world where anyone can publish anything at any time, how do we attach value to our own small bit of the dialogue?
Rukavina's hiving off of bloggers from journalists doesn't strike me as sound. From the journalist's perspective, Andrew Sullivan is a journalist of international renown who integrates this with his personality as a blogger, while Toronto Star writer Antonia Zerbisias does the same. From the blogger's perspective, The Huffington Post and its writers have had a huge effect on American journalism over the past couple of years. The boundaries between the two categories are blurred, and the writing and researching skills involved are pretty much comparable.
Moreover, why can't journalists be compared to poets or novel writers or songwriters or graffiti artists or priests? Seriously. The first three professions also involve writing, while I can imagine an arts journalist whose work is informed by street art like graffiti, and let's not forget any number of clerics who've also gained renown as writers. This is a secondary point, granted, since neither graffiti artists nor priests use the same skills sets as journalists or bloggers, but nevertheless.
As for attaching value to our own bits of dialogue, isn't that what every writer does regardless of whether they're bloggers or journalists? Writers in any medium have traditionally not fared very well, or been that likely to achieve stardom.
If you happen to read what I write here, that’s great, but I’m not writing for you, and while I may be interested in your reaction to what I write, this blog is not about you, or what I’m writing about. It’s about how my life is enhanced by the very fact of writing itself.
That’s not journalism.
Um, personal interest stories?
I agree that there are serious differences between blogging taken as a whole and journalism taken as a whole, a relative lack of editing on blogging's part, say, greater spontaneity, greater interactivity. Those are averages, however. Those are not representative of the entire enterprise of blogging, nor are they representative of the entire enterprise of journalism. Blogging can very well be a useful form of journalism because of its more personal and individualistic scale, ferreting out stories that larger and perhaps less nimble journalistic enterprises might not get. Again, bloggers can transition to journalism, just as journalists can transition to blogging, just as people can fulfill the expectations of both activities without undue stress. Bloggers, in turn, depend heavily on traditional media for their information, whether that information is reproduced verbatim or made the subject of commentary.
In the meantime, granted that provincial legislatures don't admit bloggers. Maybe they should. Everything counts in small amounts, after all.
