Category: Journalism

Every single time I get asked by someone for my opinion on the whole “weblogs as journalism” thing, I give pretty much the same response. First things first – there are differences. That should be pretty obvious. One clear difference is that working for an established organisation or brand gives you access to the newsgathering machinery. By that I mean from the low-grade, cost-dependent things like being able to afford to get Reuters newsfeeds all the way up to the stuff that’s all about being ‘in the club’ – ie. everything from being invited to movie review screenings before the film is released through to being able to be present in the press room of the White House. These latter things work on the principle that it’s not possible to let all the world in to ask all the questions they might like, so there are representatives from the newspapers who ask those questions for them. Fair enough – to an extent that kind of thing is unlikely to be heavily democratised, and quite rightly so.

The other difference between weblogs and established mainstream journalism is in terms of the brand – and more importantly the mechanisms that are supposed to lie behind that brand. The trusted brand is supposed to reflect an organisation that makes sure its journalism conforms to good standards of fact-checking, that it is guaranteed to be professional, that it asks the questions that its readers want answered and that if it is not there is a space and a process whereby redress that can be made. This is what I normally argue when asked – that although there is a lot of overlap between mainstream journalism and weblogs (particularly around opinion pieces, editorials, reviews and … less fortunately … regurgitated press releases), there are some things that – for the most part – are done better by the professionals. Webloggery – as yet – cannot even think of competing with the professional newsgatherers.

Well that’s what I normally say anyway – despite the fact that absolutely anyone who’s ever been featured in a news story (or ever seen a news story about anything they actually know about) knows full well that journalists routinely seem to get quite important and easy-to-check facts wrong. Here’s today’s example in a piece about (what else) weblogging by Bill Thompson from the BBC: “All over for blogs?”. And the typically offending line?

“The earliest bloggers have been at it for two years now – how many days can someone keep on posting to their LiveJournal site, or visiting Blogger to add more details about their cat’s mysterious illness? ” [my emphasis]

Decent journalists, according to my training, when they put a date or a figure in their work are either supposed to check that figure and mark it as checked, or their sub-editors are supposed to check it for them, grudgingly and with a certain amount of irrtation. I don’t know where the gap in professionalism was that allowed this ‘two year’ figure to go to print, but I do know that it started with the person who wrote the damn article and should have checked in the first place.

The earliest webloggers have been going for two years, then? That should make me positively primordial, since I’ve been posting regularly since November 1999. Meg Meish in the UK was also posting around then, I believe. Cal Henderson and Matt Webb were both definitely posting regularly over three years ago. There were loads of other people across the UK and the US who started posting around or shortly after that time. And we’re all children compared to the long-haul people…

And what’s this? If you do a basic Google search for History of Weblogs you get seven articles about the origins of weblogs on the first page? And what do they say? That, “In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of ‘other sites like his’ as he found them in his travels around the web.” [Rebecca Blood] So that’s five years for certain – five and a half for certain if we include kottke.org (one of the most linked-to and visited weblogs on the internet). If we look further back, then Dave Winer started Scripting News in April 1997, a few months before the term ‘weblog’ was invented by John Barger of Robot Wisdom. So now we’re nicely over the six year mark – and with what? Thirty seconds worth of research?

So where does that leave us with weblogs vs. journalism? Well I still stand by my word – for the most part proper news gathering is better done by paid professionals with the budgets, access and accountability. There’s still space for professionalism. And as soon as I find that professionalism evidencing itself in the opinion section of the BBC News Technology supplement, I’ll let you know…

The last couple of days have seen a Daypop and Blogdex Top 40s that are totally overwhelmed by political articles from the States. If it wasn’t for the fact that many of these articles are concerned with the war in Iraq, you could be excused for thinking that nothing else was happening in the world at at all – even perhaps that there was no world outside the US.

Three years ago – back in the days of Beebo.org’s metalog – it was quickly observed that the various aggregation sites on the internet had a reinforcing effect on people’s browsing – that when they started, the popular links were getting two or three links a day, but that a month later they were getting up to ten or twelve. People linked to good things that they were exposed to – and they decided that aggregators represented an efficient way of finding those good things, prefiltered on the basis of popularity by the community at large. The effect? Sites that appeared on these sites got a significant extra amount of trafic, links, exposure. There’s significant value in this mechanism – it produces a manageable amount of links each day that an individual has a chance of being able to read. It also provides a sense of the overall community of webloggia and what they care about.

The problem comes when these aggregators don’t have enough granularity. Let me put it this way – Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati and the like are no longer simple reflectors of a community’s activities – they are also one of our community’s best mechanisms for news discovery. To some extent they’re gradually becoming one of the most significant ways we find out what’s going on in the world around us.

Unfortunately it also means that the country with the most weblogs sets the international community’s agenda. There are only two obvious results of this – (i) that these aggregators will (or have) become less interesting or useful to people who don’t live in America or (ii) that the international community becomes used to the hideous unrepresentation of their own local news and debate. It used to be said that America had no idea of what happened outside its own borders. Can we really be working towards a new way of distributing and discovering media that means the rest of the world has no idea what happens outside America’s boundaries either?

There are a couple of ways that we could address this problem. Firstly there’s sampling – we could create a version of Blogdex that doesn’t work purely on the basis of popularity, but samples geo-coded weblogs from across the world in such a way that we are presented with a balanced world-wide view of what’s important. It’s a nice idea, but I think it’s impractical – for a start the linguistic barriers would make it less useful for many of us, but also because there would an infinity of ways of determining sampling rates across the world, none of which would likely be ‘fair’ or ‘clear’ to people.

No – the most practical way of approaching this problem is to find mechanisms which allow us to balkanise our aggregators – slice their responses – on the basis of metadata. There are many ways of geocoding weblogs in such a way that aggregators could have a sense of your nationality, location, language, time-zone and the like. And above and beyond such meta-tagging there are dozens of directories that include information based around clumping weblogs around interest groups and/or site locations. So I’m putting out a call now for someone to balkanise Blogdex. I want to be able to see the most popular links generated by people in my country – wherever the links themselves are based. I want to be able to slice these links in different ways, to see popular links mentioned on all English language sites (for example) or just those within the European Union. In fact I’d like to be able to see what gay webloggers are reading too. And people within my age group. All of this stuff should be possible, one way or another. I’d build it myself, if I had the expertise required… Can’t someone help me out?

The main problem I have with the weblog-related positions of professional writers like Bill Thompson and professional trolls like Andrew Orlowski is that we’ve had all these debates so many times before. Debate around A-list cliques has existed for years – as have comments that weblogs are ultimately trivial. It was over three years ago now that A List Apart published Fame Fatale – and that wasn’t the first article along those lines. Some of the pieces had more justification than others. Some had little or no justification at all. Mostly, in time, people just changed their minds. We’ve walked around these particular avenues and alleyways several times now, each time accompanied by a new group of people who consider themselves slightly higher up the food chain.

It would be different if they accomplished anything. If Orlowski was working to improve weblog culture or pull it in a positive direction, then there would be value in that. If Bill’s work was trying to rectify inappropriate imbalances in the social system that has emerged, then we might actually be getting somewhere. I don’t think there’s a single weblogger who thinks that there’s absolutely no scope for improvement. But instead what happens is that legitimate concerns get pushed aside by florid rhetoric and high dudgeon, debate gets polarised, until eventually everyone gets bored and weblogging continues pretty much as it did before. Only this time with permalinks! Or comments! Or automated blog-rolling!

And the steady take-up of weblogging seems undeterred by these debates. People still continue to start weblogs faster than people stop writing them – there are now (by conservative estimates) hundreds of thousands of regularly updated sites. And with AOL and Microsoft rumoured to be getting in on the act, along with new ventures by Blogger, Movable Type, 20six (etc.) it looks like there’s going to be a hell of a lot more weblogs started in the next few years.

I think it’s now time that people started to face this fact. That whether or not they like it (whether or not any of us like it), weblogging is not something that’s going away in the next couple of years. Having an ‘anti-weblogging position’ is no longer even vaguely a ‘real-world antidote’ to unfathomable and unwarranted ‘weblog hysteria’. It’s just really unhelpful. It doesn’t accomplish anything. So you want my advice? Work to make it better or sod off. If you think there’s really a legitimate problem in the way that weblogs operate between each other then try and suggest a solution, try and suggest some things that are likely to be taken up and worked with by the extended community. Or think of something better than weblogs! That’s got to be a more creative, positive and useful way of interacting with the world than sitting on the sidelines and bitching… Surely?

This piece was grumpily forged in the comments of the iSociety‘s weblog.

So a mainstream news site is often comprised of many hundreds – thousands – of individual news stories. These stories are mostly designed to fit into a pretty clear taxonomy which reflects “what the news site is for”. This taxonomy is normally pretty clearly defined and normally has a pretty wide top level (the items that deal with the news alone are divided up into anything from seven to twelve sections – world, business, science, politics etc). Articles may be faceted or sit under several headings (heterarchical organisation), but the taxonomies concerned are fairly clear (often inherited from org-charts derived from parallel print products – but never mind, eh?). This kind of taxonomy results in the need for left-hand navigation (it’s simply difficult to put large lists horizontally on a page). This kind of navigation, in turn, is well-suited to the kind of readers that a news site tends to get – people who have an ongoing relationship with the publication in question (ie. they knew of the site before they went there) and are therefore prepared to browse the site because they came to it as a specific first port of call for a kind of information or to answer a specific question.

Weblogs are very different beasts – particularly those weblogs which are based around single-entry archives. Firstly, they don’t tend to have clearly definable taxonomies. Some may – but they are the exception, and tend to be the more professionally oriented. So there’s no need for large navigational structures or organised heterarchies. Weblogs are also not first port of call sites when you’re trying to answer a question or get a specific kind of information. They are specifically designed to be feeding out information as and when the publisher wishes, and not in direct response to anything going on in the world outside. You cannot guarantee that Jason’s site – on any given day – will provide you with all the news you need to know about any subject. Nor is the site organised to make the finding of entries on a specific subject matter as simple as possible. This is not a flaw in Jason’s site – nor is it a flaw in weblogging in general. It’s simply the way the form is structured.

In fact, while news sites are a coherent whole into which individuals dip themselves, weblogs have two very different types of readers with two very different forms of interaction. Firstly, there are those with a long-term association or relationship with the person / site in question. Secondly, there are those who are directed to a specific internal page by a link from another weblog or via an unfortunate (or inspired) search request. These extremes are more radical than a news site. On a weblog, it’s entirely possible that someone might find themselves on a specific internal page without having the slightest idea of the context of a post whatsoever – or anything about the site in question. This will be still more true about a site that allows people to publish individual entries to individual pages – like Movable Type.

Essentially, while a substantial group of readers are treating your site as an ongoing narrative centred around the presence of a singular human author, many other people are seeing nothing more than an infinitesimal slice of your content. For all they care, your weblogging application might not be producing one coherent site at all – in fact to any individual member of this second audience, your weblog will consist of just one of dozens / hundreds / thousands of bespoke self-contained and only loosely connected one-page sites that all happen to share a design. One of them might see “What Tom Coates did at the pub last night”, one might see “Niels Bohr and the War in Iraq”, another “Extreme Readers and Weblogging”. This group further breaks down into two groups – the group that might be persuaded to hang around for longer and those who came for information and information alone.

Most weblogs are designed for the weblog-literate – who you might want to lure across the rest of the content on your site by supplying them with previous / next links or calendars ,or by illuminating your (probably fairly haphazard) taxonomies through displaying lists of categories. But the average member of the general public will understand the page that they find themselves upon only if you supply context – above and beyond that supplied by a standard news or article based website. They need to be able to assess your trustworthiness, they need to be able to estimate the value of your writing. They also need to be able to figure out precisely what kind of writing it is.

So here are a few recommendations to webloggers who wish to be comprehensible to these readers:

• Place a small piece of explanatory text on your individual archives explaining the structure of your site.
• Elucidate or link clearly to information about you – the author of said weblog – including any pertinent details that make you qualified to talk about what you’re talking about (if it is a personal site, then that’s qualification enough).
• For this audience it’s important to recognise that you’re not necessarily going to want to promote your own personal ‘brand’, so leave your navigational links simple, clean and self-explanatory.

God what a stupid article. What a profoundly stupid article. I mean let’s not even start with the condemnation of Google as the closest thing to an online Superpower, because while there may be some truth to it, at the moment it’s pretty much just unsubstantiated scare-mongering. But reopening the ‘weblogs as journalism’ debate again? Now that really is stupid. Particularly if you’re not going to make any effort to look past the obvious towards a slightly more nuanced and intelligent reaction. For god’s sake, internet expert, push it a little further.

“Blogging is not journalism. Often it is as far from journalism as it is possible to get, with unsubstantiated rumour, prejudice and gossip masquerading as informed opinion. Without editors to correct syntax, tidy up the story structure or check facts, it is generally impossible to rely on anything one finds in a blog without verifying it somewhere else – often the much-maligned mainstream media.

Now I have no interest in getting involved in this “are they” / “aren’t they” debate – except to repeat my scandalous assertion that in fact news journalism is etymologically a subset of “journalism” – ie. journal writing – making news journalism in many ways a ‘special case’ / subset of weblogging. But I have to be honest, the idea that the limit of this whole debate could be ‘are weblogs going to replace journalism’ – well it pisses the crap out of me. Because while some journalists are sitting around complaining about about how you can’t trust anything you read unless it’s had an editor to correct the grammar, the actually interesting and significant debates are being totally ignored.

These are the debates about what effect an empowered and vocally reactive readership might have on journalism, or the debates about the implications of the huge traffic peaks that can happen when all of webloggia turns your way. These are the debates about how incredibly useful and important it would be to gauge statistically which news stories actually do matter to people, and what it means when hundreds of thousands of people decide to take the news they’ve been given and do something with it – push it further, do their own research – on occasion refusing or challenging the initial piece. How would that change the job of a journalist? What effect would that have, will that have, in two / five / twenty years?

In fact while these journalists are busy shoring up their own defences neurotically against the unlikely threat of freelance weirdos like myself putting them out of a job, they’re studiously resisiting every opportunity to actually interact with this huge distributed community.

This kind of facile superficial reaction would be totally acceptable if it came from well-established print journalists unfamiliar with what’s emerging online. But from technology journalists it smacks of disgruntlement, paranoia and a profound refusal to think past the most obvious conclusion they come to. These are individuals who have been told by some idiot at a dinner party once that their industry is under attack and have decided it’s time to put these “upstarts” in their place.

The whole thing is based on a really simple misconception – they keep viewing each individual weblog as if it was competing with the New York Times. But instead of doing that, they should be looking at how hundreds of thousands of (proper media) readers have completely shifted from passive reception of news to repurposing it, commenting upon it and – on occasion – challenging it… If they don’t do that, if they don’t shift from building defences to looking for the opportunities, then they really are going to be put out of a job – not because they’ve been squeezed out by other webloggers, but because some other companies (maybe even that tiny Google start-up everyone’s talking about) will find some way to do it first and do it better…