I love Doug Thompson's Capitol Hill Blue, the world's oldest Internet News Site. CHB pulls no punches and shows no favoritism to the left,right or nutjobs inbetween..I also enjoy Doug's personal blog, Blue Ridge Muse. Doug had a huge meltdown of his servers last week and all posts from both sites were lost for a week. There had been several great posts on blogging that were lost from his personal blog. I had linked to one of them, doing my own post about Bloggers and Disinformation here. Doug had also done a post about Blogging and Journalism which was lost. I was in the middle of doing my own post after heavy thought about his when the meltdown occured. Doug has graciously reconstructed the latter post..THANKS DOUG!!! You can read Doug's post that forced me to think long and hard about blogs and journalism here.
In Doug's post, he takes issue with Bloggers that fancy themselves as Journalists. Doug has a right to state his beliefs, he's been a Journalist forever..a good, balanced one in my humble opinion. A quote from Doug's post: "In today's Internet-driven world, people too often confuse bloggers with journalists. Some bloggers consider themselves journalists. Most, even those who aspire to be journalists, are not. They confuse opinion with facts, perception with truth and bias with objectivity."
I understand his point, and since reading it last week, I find myself examining posts from other blogs that seem to feel they are contributing members of the news media. I sometimes think I am providing quality information on breaking news, or items which I deem news-worthy. What most bloggers do is analyze the news..not gather it. I am guilty of this as I have figured out thanks to Doug and his post. Opinion pieces are not news, but they are a small part of the whole process of reporting the news. There are a few bloggers like Doug, that are journalists..but the list is very very short. 99% 0f us are ranters,commenters or researchers. We need to remember that, and our place in the blog eco chain.
