February 25, 2003

Are Weblogs Journalism?

Yes, says Dave Winer, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, and publisher of Scripting News, a weblog about online publishing.

Web logs are journalism. Have they had a big impact? Absolutely. When a big story hits, I don 't necessarily trust the professional journalists to tell me what's going on. If I can get the Web logs from the people who were actually involved, I'll take that. A really remarkable thing came out from the BBC, where they asked amateur photographers to send them pictures. So they're jumping onto the trend that's going to grow and grow and grow. With the Columbia disaster, where did the pictures come from? Not from professional journalists. The typical news article consists of quotes from interviews and a little bit of connective stuff and some facts, or whatever. Mostly it's quotes from people. If I can get the quotes with no middleman in between - what exactly did CNN add to all the pictures? Maybe they earned their salaries a little bit, but web logs have become journalism, and it's much richer. Journalism is a high calling, but it's really no more than points of view on what's taking place. I think the pros are going to use this tech, and they are doing it more and more.

Freelance journalist Glenn Fleishman has some thoughts on the question. So does journalist and blogger Jeff Walsh. Also, the topic comes up from time to time at Corante.com's blog on blogging.

For more on this, read yesterday's post, On Journalism.