Journalism: Form or content?

As I was standing at the head of a classroom yesterday, watching Michael Wesch's Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us for the umpteenth time, I had a minor epiphany.

It was about halfway through, when you see on the screen [Title] does not define the form. It defines the content.










And I thought, you know, it's the same with journalists. It's what you do that makes you a journalist, not who you work for, or where your work is published or broadcast, or how it's distributed.

I'd just been talking about this very issue with my colleague Steve Sloan, a fellow blogger and my co-presenter at yesterday's JACC Norcal conference at SJSU (that's him at left). The night before, we'd both heard veteran broadcaster Sam Donaldson "diss" bloggers as he spoke at the RTVJ 50th Anniversary Reunion dinner.

Blogging is just opinion, Donaldson said, and without editors, how do you know if it's fact or fiction?

But when Donaldson offered his definition of a journalist, he didn't say anything about editors. He said, "We try to present our readers, our viewers, with things we believe to be true." Sometimes you make mistakes, he added, but if you do you correct them.

I didn't hear anything in that definition that would preclude a blogger from being a journalist, Sloan said.

And some of the mainstream media aren't exactly doing a great job of reporting the truth these days, I added. Does this mean they're not really journalists?

So in the middle of our JACC presentation on Podcasting, Blogging and New Journalism, as I listened once again to the Web 2.0 video, it hit me: [Journalism] does not define the form, it defines the content. It's what you do, not who you work for.

Links:

• My JMC blog post on Sam Donaldson's Oct. 12 presentations to JMC students and the RTVJ reunion dinner guests
• Steve Sloan's Technology & Mass Communications powerpoint, posted on his SJSU Tech on a Mission blog
• Michael Wesch's Digital Ethnography blog

How do we feel?

Part art project, part social media...wefeelfine.com tracks the current mood of blog posts.

Organized like a musical piece in a series of "movements," this web site lets you sample the mood of what's currently being blogged. In the first movement, "madness," a swarm of dots, colored bright to dark, represents the varied moods of current blog posts. Click on a dot and you'll get a random, representative sentence or photo from a blog.

The "Mobs" movement displays the most commonly blogged feelings. Creators Jonathan Harris and Dep Kamvar write: "In this movement, the particles self-organize into rows of shared feelings. The rows are sorted by the number of particles they contain, and the particles within each row are sorted by the length of the sentence that each particle contains. The rows are colored to inherit the chosen color of the feeling they represent. Any particle can be clicked to reveal the sentence within."

When you click on a specific word, you get a sample, an excerpt from someone's blog. It's oddly fascinating, and very voyeuristic.

Can bloggers be journalists? PR pros think so.

Remember the recent dust-up over the bloggers hired by the John Edwards campaign? In Salon.com, blogger Lindsay Beyerstein explains "Why I refused to blog for Edwards."

The upshot? Her gut feeling was that any liberal blogger who joined the Edwards campaign would face a full-bore attack by right-wing bloggers and conservative groups...and she didn't want to become that kind of target.

And that's exactly what came to pass after Amanda Marcotte, a well-known feminist blogger, joined the Edwards campaign. Right-wing bloggers combed through her Pandagon blog and attacked some of her more provocative posts. Others joined in, and soon it was pig-pile time. Marcotte eventually resigned.

A better model for political blogging, Beyerstein said, is the 2006 Jim Webb Senate campaign, which put two bloggers on its payroll. These bloggers, Josh Chernila and Lowell Feld from Raising Kaine, are the guys who captured the "macaca" moment...and knew what to do with it. Beyerstein explains:

When Webb's videographer captured George Allen's "'macaca' moment"...all the campaign had to do was upload the video to YouTube and send out some well-targeted e-mails to bloggers and other supporters and wait.

Supporters forwarded the clip to their friends. Bloggers started posting the video on their sites. The "macaca" clip got more than 600,000 views on YouTube alone and exploded into the mainstream media.

The lesson for progressives, Beyerstein says, "is how effective bloggers can be when they're outside the campaign." She concludes:

"I think the candidates who benefit the most from the netroots are the ones who can inspire bloggers to do their work for free.... Every campaign needs a blog, but the most important part of a candidate's netroots operation is the disciplined political operatives who can quietly build relationships with bloggers outside the campaign. And the bomb-throwing surrogates need to be outside, where they can make full use of their gifts without saddling a campaign with their personal political baggage."

What I find interesting is that while academics and journalists waste time debating whether or not bloggers ever can be "real" journalists, PR professionals have decided. They are dealing with influential bloggers the same way they deal with influential reporters...by sending them information and trying to build relationships.

"Campaigns 'work' bloggers more or less the same way they work the mainstream press," Beyerstein says. "They send out e-mails and press releases. They make phone calls. They make their candidate available for interviews. They invite bloggers to campaign events. They network in person at Drinking Liberally or the YearlyKos convention."

Sounds like dealing with the media to me.

Now for something completely different...

Check out this seriously entertaining blog post, Chutzpah, Truffles & Alain Ducasse, or this one, My New Favorite Restaurant, on Adam Roberts ' Amateur Gourmet blog.

These posts are kind of like a cross between a restaurant review and a comic book, and they really hit the spot. Delicious fun!

(I found this link on Guy Kawasaki's blog, How to Change the World: A Practical Blog for Impractical People, after clicking over to read a post I saw mentioned on Micro Persuasion...no wonder I'm not getting caught up on my grading.)