February
2007
Reporters are just Bloggers with a Salary
I’ve talked with a few reporters (print and radio) since starting Watchdog Milwaukee and when we’ve talked about blogs they consistently talk down about bloggers.
But what’s really the difference?
There are reporters whose stories I don’t trust because they’ve reported on stories I know to be untrue. There are bloggers who have done the same thing. I know of reporters who have buried stories because of their own bias. Bloggers have also. There are reporters who premise a story with factual inaccuracy’s and bias; bloggers have done the same thing. Reporters have reported stories which are little more than gossip. Bloggers sometimes do the same thing.
And then there are the reporters who do their research, fact check, find sources and write compelling stories. There are bloggers who do the same.
There are news publications which bury stories because they are critical of their advertisers or sponsors. This is not so with bloggers.
In that respect, a blogger has the opportunity to be a superior journalist. Even when bloggers advertise, they advertise through 3rd party advertisers and seldom do they have any say in who advertise on their blogs so who could they worry about offending? Which sponsor could recall their ads from a bloggers website?
In my experience, journalists can be condescending to bloggers without even realizing it. A recent comment I heard was “bloggers just cover gossip”. When I explained the premise of Watchdog Milwaukee to him and how we fact check our news stories his reaction was surprise and he commented that it sounded like we were more like journalists. “Well yeah” was my matter of fact reaction. Do I comment on the news? Yes. Do I follow up on edgy stories that the mainstream media is afraid of? Yes. Am I worried about getting a call from “corporate” telling me to tone down a story or to kill a report? No — not at all.
And then I’ve had less than pleasant comments from reporters who will for now remain nameless. Suffice to say that a sneering air of superiority from someone who has the title “Reporter” doesn’t impress me. What does impress me is quality, well-written investigative journalism.
Would it be nice to get a salary for writing? Yes, I don’t dispute that. Could I afford the pay cut? I guess that depends on the cut. But it would be fun to write and investigate for a living.
When I consider how much time goes into a well written blog, I think about how much time I put into it which, if you just count the typing of the column, is about 30 minutes a day. What do reporters do with all of their extra time? Let’s say that the average reporter makes $45,000 per year — why can’t that reporter write a column every single day? Is there not any news that’s worthy to be covered? Have our local reporters become so lazy that they can’t pick up the phone, make a few calls and do some research to do some fact checks?
I’ve seen many quality bloggers over the past few years. One is even a former reporter. But one thing has become clear — you don’t need a salary or a position with a mainstream media source to make sure your voice is heard. As a friend of mine told me a few months ago, good blogs become addictive because they publish information you can’t find anywhere else. Interestingly enough, even the mainstream media is starting to get it. They’re understanding that they’re losing the trust of the public. To minimize those losses they’re reaching out to bloggers. I was recently invited to blog for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel where I now have a regular column in blog format.
But in the end, if you boil down the differences of what a good reporter does and what a good blogger does, you’re left with only one major difference — the reporter gets paid for what the blogger does for free.
Jim McGuigan
Jim McGuigan, Watchdogging Unions
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For purposes of full disclosure, my degree is in journalism, though it has gone unused, and my wife is a reporter (those that can’t do, marry — right?).
“But what’s really the difference?”
How about a minimum of a college degree in the field. Many professional reporters have masters degrees in journalism or the field on which they report, and a few have doctorates. To say that because they too write, bloggers are on par with professional journalists would be akin my suggesting that because I can change my own oil, I should be given the status of auto mechanic. I don’t think so.
Though many or most readers of the following comments would probably take issue, there is also a very real, and standard, code of ethics adhered to by the vast majority of journalists; it is drummed in from day one of Newswriting 101 (I haven’t been able to plant a political sign in my front yard since my wedding, and I’m sure to take some flack for these comments, I’m sure).
Of course individual reporters have political leanings, but in my experience (mostly limited to the print media), that is secondary to the neutrality imposed by the code. Any journalist who would disregard the mandate would immediately lose all respect from his or her peers.
I think your comments would be more on target if limited to comparisons with op/ed writing.
Don’t get me wrong, I see a very real role emerging for bloggers. The mainstream media could learn much from the blogosphere. But I’m sure there will be more than a few chuckles around newsroom watercoolers tomorrow.
Jim Spice
Milwaukee
Jim,
I think your wife is a pretty cool chick but is she more qualified than some bloggers to write a story? I don’t think so.
There’s actually a little irony here since it’s coming from you — the big story, the one that stayed in the headlines for over 6 months (the one that you know about) was completely missed by her. But here’s one of the things that separates an exceptional journalist (or blogger) from the pack; was there follow up to find out what was missed by the political figures and was there follow up to figure out why the reporter (your spouse) didn’t catch it?
I still hear whining about it so why shouldn’t you? Had she caught what the mainstream media claimed political leaders should have caught, could the whole thing have been avoided between the committee cycle and the full board meeting?
If there is a code of ethics among journalists, why were the condemning words which all 25 Supervisors missed not printed? Why? It was because they were not there. Your wife didn’t miss them but she also didn’t run to the editors to tell them they weren’t there. Your wife didn’t run to the guys printing the damning headlines to tell them there wasn’t any proof. If this is an ethical matter, should she not, as an ethical journalist, have stepped in to tell the mob that the lynching they were doing was wrong and they were stringing up the wrong people?
Not putting a political yard sign in your front yard doesn’t make you any less biased — what it does is it just hides your leanings to the rest of the world. I respect that privacy but my point is that it doesn’t matter if others know your bias. The state of Wisconsin doesn’t make voters declare a party preference. Does that mean they don’t have leanings?
Will there be chuckles around watercoolers? I’m sure there will. But that same arrogance is what makes people less likely to look to mainstream media sources.
Snarky comments come from journalists all the time and that’s one of the reasons why people are circulation is down.
And the comment about the college degree in journalism — I don’t buy that the degree qualifies reporters any more than some bloggers. A good liberal arts degree, an ability to write well, and some modest investigative skills can be better than the journalism degree. To argue otherwise would be to say that someone who graduates with a business degree qualifies them to be a CEO of a major corporation. We both know that it takes experience — not just a degree to run a big corporation.
So let’s not pretend that a journalist is any more qualified than bloggers. There are good bloggers just like there are good reporters, but there are also bad bloggers and bad reporters.
How naive of me. I honestly thought you would not make the leap from “attack on journalism” to “attack on my wife”. I should have gone the fake name and no-disclosure route, as many blog commenters are want to do.
That aside, you illustrate my point. You didn’t doublecheck your timeline, and as a result, have repeated Br***ce M***rphy’s inaccurate bloggings which have, for 5 years, remained uncorrected yet published. I must compliment myself in exercising an undue amount of restraint on our subsequent meetings — the whole “boy out of the country thing”, you know?
I won’t tip you off as to the details’ inaccuracies, as that may provide a lesson in why it takes more than 1/2 an hour to produce an solid piece, that is, if you would chose to dig a little deeper.
Though I’m not sure the “chick” label is apropos, I certainly hope the “cool” comes through when my wife learns I opened my big yap.
Jim “Will Change Oil for Food” Spice
Thank you - this is great, and exactly what I’ve been pushing here in Michigan.
Consider a cross-post to dKos and My DD?
I think you make a good point that getting paid for something doesn’t make you good at it. Neither does not getting paid for it.
As a former journalist and current blogger, I have to say that print was a much more difficult arena because of the pressure of not having that handy “edit” feature. Except for columns where you can just freewheel. A blogger can make a factual error and fix it. For a reporter, it’s a much more arduous and consequential matter.
Jim,
You missed my point and it wasn’t an attack on your wife.
BM screwed up and if you have been following this blog you would know we’ve taken him to task on issues. I’ll also point out that I don’t think a sum of a reporter should rest entirely on a poor job done on a single story. What I will say is that he had an opportunity to correct the inaccuracies but he traded the in for a little fame. It’s worked out quite well for him now hasn’t it?
Perhaps you would be willing to share your opinion on what the accurate time line was?
By the way, I would be interested in hearing what your take on the time line was. There’s a column on how the whole thing went down here on Watchdog Milwaukee.
As for the investigative qualities of a blogger, I’ve got a story in the hopper I’ve been working on for a week that requires me to track down a couple different sources. I hope to publish it by next week. But that doesn’t mean that every story has to take a couple of hours and it doesn’t mean I’m locked to the keyboard the whole time I’m gathering background on the story. I know that many of those with journalism degrees would like to think us simple folk in the blogosphere care only about rumors, but there are those of us who have a very loyal and growing following because we spend the time to do the investigative journalism.
Since I recently read that John Edwards hired two bloggers for his campaign staff, I must conclude that your premise is incorrect. I would suggest the difference between bloggers and reporters is that reporters don’t get to ignore all the other stories out there to report on the one story they are interested in.
What would you consider your “beat” as a blogger? Milwaukee? Milwaukee County? southeast Wisconsin? Politics? Ethics? The Legislature? Any reporter who’s been on the job for a while covering any one of those beats has done a lot more stories than you have put on your blog.
What do reporters do with all their time? Well, in order to truly write a news story about many of the subjects included in any one of the above “beats” you have to cover them, ie. go to the school board meeting, go to the county board meeting, sit in on the advisory task force meeting, be at the rally, interview picketers as they are picketing, etc. You’ve been in enough meetings to know that they are rarely short if something important is being discussed.
And here’s another thought: Reporters can do their jobs without bloggers, but bloggers can’t do their jobs without reporters. Where do you get your baseline information from? Yes, I know bloggers can make phone calls and ask people stuff that reporters haven’t thought to ask.
But how do you know who to call? My guess is you’re using newspapers and tv reporters to know that the Legislature is going to be holding a hearing, or the council is going to vote on a building project, or the school superintendent is going to call a snow day. Granted, it’s not as interesting to write a story that says the county board will discuss putting sidewalks in, but that is something reporters do. I have yet to see a blogger who posts that kind of information. But should that meeting result in a 25% surcharge on senior citizens, you can bet the bloggers will be all over it.
Very few bloggers are good journalists. The vast majority simply post stuff that has already appeared in the MSM, comment upon it and allow readers to compose further comments. The rest might be described as ranting idealogues.
Just my .02 worth.
Heidi,
You’re partially wrong. Yes, some bloggers simply comment on MSM stories. We do some of that, but we also do some investigative journalism.
I’ve had journalists call me to find out where I got my facts and who were my sources so they can turn around and essentially publish my work as theirs.
Sometimes the spirit moves me to pick up the phone to call legislators. Sometimes those legislators badmouth other legislators and I’ve then called the legislators who were badmouthed to get their comments. Because of that fact, I’ve found myself canning some stories because something just didn’t seem right.
Jim,
You missed my point. Bloggers let reporters do all the groundwork, then pick a particular story to try and one-up a reporter on. Reporters have to cover a beat on a deadline whether it amounts to a front page story or not.
And one more thing, reporters are never allowed to get the last word in. (They are never allowed to answer letters to the editor that criticize their work.) Bloggers always control who gets the last word.
I write a blog in AZ (mostly local and state politics-focused) and have few if any illusions that I’m a “journalist” on par with a daily beat reporter, but also have to say that blogging is what you make of it.
Yes, I post items that have been published by the MSM, and comment on them;
Yes, I even post press releases from candidates and elected officials, sometimes commenting on them (but always identify the source);
However, I also attend rallies, press conferences, candidate and issue forums, city council and board meetings, interview candidates and officials, spend hours researching public records (especially campaign finance reports). I’ve visited the address of a politician’s private business just to verify something that I’d been told - it *was* a mail drop. I’ve covered stories that the MSM didn’t touch (nothing major yet, just a candidate changing his position on a minimum wage hike), broken a story about a forum that the MSM didn’t touch for 4 days, and then buried deep in a Saturday edition. (The fun part of that one - a columnist from the local paper was the freakin’ MODERATOR of the forum where one of the candidates’ surrogates had a rhetorical meltdown.)
And spent a horrendous amount of time watching C-SPAN.
In short, I’ve put in a lot of work at this and will continue to do so, and I’m not the only blogger to do so.
BTW - while I don’t consider myself the equal of a professional beat journalist, during the last campaign cycle I ran into a few TV news reporters while volunteering for a local congressional campaign.
Let’s just say that there is a big difference between “reporter” and “journalist,” and not every reporter is a journalist.
How about a different take on this topic. I like to think of bloggers as reporters NOT under the editorial thumb of paid off editors. IE: the sheriff’s election- the usually biased Urninal printed only pro-Clarke articles. Yet, I know for a fact, they were supplied many, many stories and data of the contrary. Story has it a higher up is pro Clarke and may have made it known no anti Clarke articles will make print. THAT’s media at it best right? I’d pay to read a blogger over the Urinal ANYDAY.
Deputy Insider,
You make good points. I know a reporter who used to write multiple stories that were hard news but her editors canned them.
As for paying, I’m running a free service here which I would someday like to break even on. The problem is that my click though rate on the ads I have here isn’t very high so I’m running this blog at a loss. I know others use a service like blogger but I like the ability to control the look and feel of the blog which is why I use wordpress.
But I think you’re right — there had to be a pro-Clarke bias at the Journal-Sentinel. We broke a lot of the stories the JS knew about but were never willing to touch. Their affiliate radio station, WTMJ, runs Republican talk radio rants constantly and came out in support of Clarke. The JS may claim they’re a separate entity but they both have the same parent company.
I think we need to broaden the concept away from strictly political blogs. I run a community blog that covers cultural events, environmental news, government (usually a reaction to MSM articles, but we have good baseline coverage of that locally), calendar, and personal stories from residents. It is all progressive, but it presents a whole package that is readable and interesting to a wide variety of people. Really all these political blogs have limited appeal and in the end lack the power of persuasion. I use some of the material from political blogs on KickTime, but most people don’t find reading these blogs a sustaining diet.
The past few weeks we posted personal stories/video of a few people in the area who went to the DC march. You won’t find that in our MSM and I think it is important work to lift out this other reality.