The biggest news affecting the newspaper business today is about a blog — the Huffington Post, to be precise. The popular political blog is gearing up to offer original reporting, hiring print journalist Melinda Henneberger to head up the newsgathering efforts.
Flush with $5 million in venture capital from Softbank Capital, the Huffington Post will hire journalists “with attitude” and make them do all the things that journalists do — travel, meet deadlines…and receive paychecks. So far as I can see, a lot of bloggers already do the work of journalists (of course, many, if not most, top-notch bloggers once were or currently are journalists), albeit most set their own deadlines and typically get paid squat.
Which raises an interesting question about the difference between blogs staffed by top-notch journalists and newspapers staffed by top-notch journalists. The question is: what’s the distinction between those two?
The Huffington Post’s decision to hire “real” journalists only further blurs the boundaries between newspapers and blogs, but there are plenty of other ongoing developments, such as the recent departure of two high-profile Washington Post reporters to an online start-up, that cumulatively make it difficult to decide what’s a blog, what’s a newspaper.
As the prolific journalist/blogger Mathew Ingram writes “In my view, newspapers had better get their running shoes on, because online media like Huffington Post and PaidContent [Rafat Ali’s PaidContent.org] are already halfway down the track.”
Although newspapers are clearly facing all kinds of challenges (the rise of blogs being only one of the growing mound of problematic new competitive developments), traditional newspaper reporters are, perhaps, under even more pressure, and the advent of blogging doesn’t help. As blogger and former journalist Mark Evans writes:
The typical reporter, for example, writes one or two stories a day over a nine-hour shift, which gives them time to think, interview, have a coffee, and talk with their editors. But the Web means reporters have to dramatically change how they work. They’ll have to write stores in minutes rather than hours; they’ll have to do blogs, podcasts and videoblogs at a time when changing economics means they’ll have to work harder than ever because the size of newsrooms are shrinking. To really get reporters to buy in, it may take another generation that is more comfortable to multi-task.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:56 AM|Comments(1)
As a blogger and former journalist, I agree with Mark Evans. But that is happening already in newsrooms; newspaper reporters are being told to throw what they've got up on the web right away and assemble the full story later. That hurts string-gathering and leads to more superficial reporting, but I don't see any way to reverse the trend given the drive people have for instant information.
From a First Amendment standpoint I don't wish to distinguish between "real journalists" and bloggers, because I love that in America you don't have to register with someone to report; if you have a pen (or a laptop) you're good to go. But I wouldn't want a world where the Huffington Post REPLACED the Washington Post, because most any blog addressing politics has a political slant, and that slant would obviously be part of the news coverage. Others may disagree, but I believe there is still some balance in the mainstream media, at least a semblance of balance, and I don't want the nation divided such that one consumes all its media from one point of view and the other half consumes all its meadia from another point of view. Discourse, if this is possible, would degrade even further.
Posted by: Patrick Ross at December 1, 2006 3:07 PM
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