Doc Searls on the "are bloggers journalists" thing
Over in the Forum we had a brief conversation about citizen journalism. Not that he's reading our stuff, but Doc Searls weighs-in on the subject. A snippet:
Look. Blogs are personal journals, written by millions of people, on zillions of topics. Whether or not those journals practice "journalism" is a useless question at this point. Besides, it's been done to death.
Generalizing about bloggers is about the same as generalizing about telephone callers or photographers or baseball players. You don't say all phone callers are rude, all photographers take nasty pictures or all baseball players spit. So stop saying all bloggers (that third person plural "They") are ... anything. Because it just ain't true. There's too damn many of them. All individuals. With nobody in charge.
The real challenge isn't for bloggers to bootstrap themselves into Serious Journalism, but for Serious Journals to take advantage of a growing population of self-starting stringers. Who happen to already have their own journals.
Posted by jackhodgson at March 1, 2005 05:41 PM