Journalists & Bloggers: Mutual Incomprehension

CCJ Traveling Curriculum [1] trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson [2] is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression [3] and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression [4]. She blogs regularly here [5].

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On my first day of my first job as a newspaper reporter, at a small weekly newspaper in suburban Atlanta, I showed up for work and was given an assignment to go interview somebody. I got in my car and drove away, and as I did so I was struck by a momentous insight: I was now a journalist. It was magical. Only 24 hours before, I’d been an unemployed English major; now I was suddenly a bona-fide seeker of truth, defender of the First Amendment and exposer of wrongdoing. Who knew it was so easy?

Actually, as I soon found out, it was a little more complicated than that – but these days, the blogging universe seems to be full of people having similarly magical transformations. One minute they’re blogging; the next minute they’re slapping their foreheads like the guy who coulda had a V-8: “Hey!” they exclaim. “I am a journalist!”

As a professional journalist myself (meaning … what? “A person who regularly gets paid by media organizations for converting observations into words” is the best definition I can come up with), I agree wholeheartedly that blogging can be journalism. In fact, it can be first-rate, ahead-of-the-pack journalism; some of the best journalism we’ve seen in recent years has come from bloggers. But defining where blogging becomes journalism is tricky, as two examples from the past month show.

Heather Armstrong is a Salt Lake City Web designer and mother who is known to millions of women around the world as Dooce [6] – which is the title of the blog she and her husband, Jon, have published since 2001. Armstrong has become the goddess of mommybloggers; her profane, occasionally moving and often caustically funny observations about life as the mother of a 4-year-old daughter have won her a devoted following. She’s also earned a minor place in history as the inadvertent creator of a new word in the English language: When she was fired six years ago from her job at a Los Angeles-based Web design firm for posting some, shall we say, irreverent comments about her co-workers, “dooced” instantly became the new term for “getting canned for blogging about the office.” (Her advice to bloggers still drawing a paycheck: “Be ye not so stupid” – but for anybody who wants to go out in a blaze of glory, I recommend “The Proper Way to Hate A Job,” posted on Dooce shortly before Armstrong’s former boss invited her to tour the company’s Executive Departure Lounge.)

“Mommyblogger,” you would think, is the antithesis of “journalist.” As labels go, it is patronizing and dismissive – an indirect reflection, in my view, of the fact that in this culture, the tough work of raising children gets lots of lip service but very little actual respect. When “The Today Show” did a segment on mommybloggers on May 13, co-anchor Hoda Kotb made little air quotes as she said the word, as if to telegraph, “Isn’t that cute?”

Also read Tracy Thompson on the nature of blogging at Jay Rosen's PressThink [7].

Armstrong is articulate and Web-savvy, and the subject of mommyblogging – while it’s not the “new” phenomenon “The Today Show” breathlessly made it out to be – is a fascinating example of what happens when technology intersects with the genetically encoded female need to network. There’s a business angle too: Mommyblogging promises to become a hugely profitable venue for connecting advertisers with consumers. But Armstrong could hardly get a word in edgewise, thanks to the steady stream of inane questions from Kotb and Gifford, who seemed to be having trouble wrapping their minds around the whole “blogging” concept. “Why do you want it all out there?” [8] “Is it all moms out there in your blogosphere?" “Are you concerned that it will live on forever?” From the look on her face, Armstrong seemed to be trying to decide if she was being made the victim of some kind of nationally televised practical joke, or if Kotb and Gifford were refugees from “The Lawrence Welk Show.”

By conventional standards, the two pieces of highly priced NBC talent were the journalists on the set that day – well, okay, Kotb was; Gifford is an entertainer – but in my book Armstrong holds the stronger claim to the label. Dooce has a distinctive voice and irreverent wit; it’s also, thanks to Armstrong’s design background, a good place to keep abreast of the latest thing in what’s cheap and cool, from water bottles to sticky notes. As William Safire once said, “The house of journalism has many rooms,” and I would classify Armstrong as a lifestyle columnist. Dooce is not a place you’d go to learn about global warming or the latest crisis in the Mideast, but nobody ever said we all had to be Seymour Hersh. As for Kotb and Gifford – well, the No. 1 job of a journalist is to find news. The mere existence of mommyblogs is not news, and whatever interesting insights anyone might have had on this phenomenon never saw the light of day, thanks to Kotb’s and Gifford’s weird unfamiliarity with the subject. Gifford even announced that she didn’t like computers. As Armstrong later commented, “Probably not a good idea to have someone afraid of computers interviewing someone about their job using computers.” Yeah. I’d say so.

Example No. 2 came on May 18, when BlogHer [9], a Web site devoted to blogs written by women, scored a coup by snagging an interview with Barack Obama [10]. The interview was conducted by Erin Kotecki Vest, a former Los Angeles radio station reporter, who managed to get a whole 10 minutes of camera time with the candidate.

The interview generated a ton of rave reviews from loyal BlogHer readers and contributors, and when I talked to Kotecki Vest later, she told me that she was “very pleased with the outcome.” And to an extent, it was an achievement just for a blogger to have gotten her foot in the door. Mainstream political reporters don’t give bloggers a lot of respect. Kotecki Vest said that she sometimes has to borrow a press pass from a friendly credentialed reporter to get into news conferences, and at first BlogHer’s request for an interview from Obama and McCain were countered by offers to make the candidates’ wives available, perhaps on the erroneous assumption that the ladies would enjoy an old-fashioned recipe swap. “We had to do some education,” Kotecki Vest said. (McCain has since agreed to an interview, she added; the Clinton campaign has not.)

Still, the interview itself left me distinctly underwhelmed. It consisted of Kotecki-Vest reading a list of prepared questions submitted by members of the BlogHer community – a textbook example of why interview questions should never be entrusted to a committee. They ranged from the Softball Lob (“What are you going to do to help soldiers in need?”) to the nonsensical (“Will you work to end the Iraq war before the election, and if so, how?” – as if that were not a logistical and political impossibility). There were no follow-ups. There was nothing even remotely capable of eliciting a word from the candidate that was not already on the campaign Web site or engraved in boilerplate campaign rhetoric.

Kotecki Vest’s girlish giggle and body language, moreover, telegraphed that this encounter was what political operatives would call “low threat.” And Obama knew it  because he was clearly phoning it in. He never even bothered to sit up straight.

Afterward, Kotecki Vest offered her reaction to the interview on her personal blog, QueenofSpain: “Inside the car we shut the doors, turned to look at each-other, and screamed our ever-loving heads off like teenagers. … I love that after I interviewed the man who very well could make history I could tell you this story, and scream and cry. Years ago I could never have done that.”

“Years ago,” it turns out, referred to Kotecki Vest’s former identity as a radio reporter, a job she gave up when she had her first child five years ago. So, I asked her, did you conduct the Obama interview as a journalist or as a blogger? The latter, she answered – but on her blog she referred to what she was doing as “citizen journalism.” In her former life, Kotecki Vest told me, her idea of a journalist was a person who reported the news, without bias. Today, she said, citizen journalism “is about throwing off old traditional journalist chains and being able to say all the things you could never in a million years say before. It’s very freeing.”

But that’s not a function of new media versus old media, is it? I asked. I mean, newspapers have always had columnists; surely journalism with a dose of opinion is not a ground-breaking concept. “That, to me, was never journalism,” she replied. Op-ed writing and columns? “It was not reporting. It was not being unbiased reporter. That was never an option even when I was a traditional journalist… I was always more of the school of thought that once your opinion entered in it, you were done.”

That’s going to come as a shock to the Pulitzer folks, who award a prize each year for a category called “commentary” to people who certainly think of themselves as journalists – but aside from that, it betrays a basic failure to understand that “unbiased” is not synonymous with “neutral.” And while there are certainly a slew of irresponsible columnists out there, I never knew of a first-rate columnist who didn’t do as much reporting as a “regular” reporter, if not more. Opinion journalism does not confer a free pass to cherrypick facts and bloviate at will; it’s a form of persuasive writing that, to be truly effective, owes its ultimate devotion to the facts, especially the inconvenient ones. If what I saw in the BlogHer interview is “citizen journalism,” then this term is an oxymoron. As a veteran journalist I know once said, anybody can be a journalist, but not everybody is one.

A journalist would have prepared for an interview with a presidential candidate by doing a whole lot of reading – days of it, maybe weeks of it. She would not have limited herself to a list of questions created by a committee months earlier, a formula that practically guarantees you won’t break any news. Most importantly, she would not, as Kotecki Vest did, endorse the candidate she was interviewing before the interview (or react like a teenybopper with her first crush). I’m all for transparency in political reporting in terms of revealing the influences that shape one’s view of the world and the issues that matter most to you, but there’s no way you can pledge your support to a specific candidate and cover that person at the same time. Some things in life come down to either-or, and this is one: Either the reader comes first, or the candidate. Period.

The line where blogging and journalism meet is interesting and unmapped terrain, and those who traverse it are going where no man (or woman) has ever gone before. This is a useful metaphor because history tells us that explorers tend to get into trouble when they think they know more than they do, or when they stop learning anything new. When professional journalists get all weirded out by this Internet thing-y called a “blog,” and when bloggers anoint themselves as journalists without even a rudimentary grasp of what it is journalists do all day, the resulting mutual incomprehension can be a rich subject for comedy.

But the ultimate result is sad: an increasingly misinformed and hyper-partisan public.