Online Journalism Conditionals

If journalists can post blogs,
and bloggers can post news,
then can bloggers be called journalists?

Thanks to the emergence of online journalism, blogging has developed into a socially conventional form of self-expression and a vehicle for gathering and sharing news. Yet one question still remains. Is blogging really journalism?

This question has no clear answer and therefore continues to spark much debate.

According to a 2002 Business Week article, “Are Bloggers Journalists,” some organizations have begun to “legitimize blogs as a grassroots form of journalism.” The article reported that bloggers have received press passes in the past, have broken major news and continue to compliment traditional media outlets.

In the 2002 edition of USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, Senior Editor J.D. Lasica wrote that the blogging movement may “sow the seeds for new forms of journalism, public discourse, interactivity and online community.”

However, Seattle Times technology columnist Paul Andrews reports that “not everyone who keeps a journal is a journalist…But professional journalists too often dismiss those who don't work for traditional media, when the truth is that the most vital and moral dispatches on the Web are being created by amateurs.” He goes on to say in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review that “it's the role of institutional media to act as gatekeepers… but what you have in print publishing today is a consolidation that's inimical to the diversity that exists in everyday life. With the rise of the Internet, people don't need to be bounded by those traditional filters anymore."

Unlike traditional media outlets, bloggers do not have to answer to gatekeepers. Their views and opinions are free-flowing, unrestrained and immediately accessible to the masses.

Though blogging has become a pioneer of new media, it faces an uncertain future. As First Amendment Center research attorney David L. Hudson, Jr. shares on Cyberjournalist.net, “the regulation of blogging presents many important First Amendment issues. Only time will tell where the legal lines will be drawn on whether bloggers are journalists, when anonymous bloggers can be unmasked and when public employees can be disciplined for the content of their expression made on a blog.”

Anyone can blog, anyone can share their voice. But not everyone can distinguish fact vs. opinion. Therefore, if we continue to closely monitor the progression of online journalism and blogging, then we will be better equipped to pay attention to the voices that can effect and influence us the most.

Check out these interesting links:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc2005037_7877_tc024.htm
http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/003286.php
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1017958873.php