bloggers ARE journalist!

"Josh Wolf, the blogger who has spent some six months in prison for refusing to hand over a video he took of a violent July 8, 2005, protest in the Mission District of San Francisco to a federal grand jury, is not a journalist.

He is a blogger with an agenda and a camera, who sold a "selected portion" of the video of the demonstration, which left a San Francisco police officer with a fractured skull, to KRON-TV. The day after the melee, Wolf called himself on his videoblog an "artist, an activist, an anarchist and an archivist." He does not work for a news organization. He does not answer to editors who fact-check. I do not understand why newspapers -- including The San Francisco Chronicle -- refer to him as the "longest-imprisoned journalist" in America.

San Francisco Assemblyman Mark Leno, who has spoken at Wolf fundraisers, told me, "I think he, and those who are doing similar kind of work, is in the process of redefining what a journalist is relative to 21st century technology." In this brave new world, no definition is sacred any more. But a camera and a Website do not a journalist make, any more than shooting a criminal makes a vigilante a cop."

Are bloggers journalists? Look to history. Boston University journalism professor Chris Daly writes that “bloggers stand squarely in a long-standing journalistic tradition. … Their roots go back to the authors of the often-anonymous writings that helped to found America itself by encouraging the rebellion against Britain.” So we today are at the beginning of a revolution in journalism. Isn’t that exciting? (Be sure to check out my post on whether blogging is journalism and the thoughtful comments, including one from Daly about this essay.)

Why you should hire a journalist: Jill Geisler, of the Poynter Institute, has what I think is a great blog post. It explains to hypothetical employers why journalists make good workers. She lists 10 characteristics that make journalists good hires for any job, including writing skills, ability to get answers quickly and speed at meeting deadlines.

My favorite takeaway: Journalists have “been trained that ‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out.’ Journalists know that asking why and why not, looking at multiple perspectives, digging beneath the surface, challenging conventional wisdom, discerning patterns, finding context and thinking about “what’s next” improves any story. Just as it improves job performance in most any field.” That describes most of the journalists I know — both laid off and still on the job.

Print your own newspaper: Martin Langeveld has a provocative post at the Nieman Journalism Lab. He explains that Océ, a Dutch firm, has unveiled a new digital web press that could print full-color individually customizable newspapers fast. The idea is readers would sign up for the news they want, and the newspaper would print and distribute the individual papers to the readers.

Essentially, the Web allows people to do that now, for free. They read the stories or blogs they like. But this idea would give readers insurance of sorts that they got all the stories on a particular topic of interest, and they wouldn’t have to surf for them.

Would it work? Langeveld points out it could pose problems with larger newspapers, although one of the commenters makes a cogent case for using these individual newspapers to support hyperlocal efforts. 


My take: Explore it; can’t hurt