KEEPING A JOURNAL

"But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate."
Bob Schieffer

Increasingly events and stories are being led by and uncovered by bloggers rather than traditional journalists. Stories either ignored or unknown by the legacy media are covered by bloggers and eventually gain so much traction that the media cannot ignore them. A few quick examples leap to mind:

• Dan Rather's 60 minutes memo forgery (aka Ra^thergate)
• Jeff Gannon is paid to write news for the White House
• Climaquiddick (the memos and emails from Hadley CRU)

At TechNewsWorld, Walaika Haskins writes:

"Just a few years ago, blogs were looked down upon by many media professionals and even bloggers themselves. However, it's not unheard of for a blogger to be the one breaking the news on a big story. Blogs such as Perez Hilton, the Wonkette, the Daily Kos and others have changed the way people get their news and the way the media covers news."

I'm not sure when bloggers looked down on blogging, and it is amusing she only seems to be aware of left-leaning sites, but the fact is,increasingly big stories are being broken by some guy "in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks" as CBS executive Jonathan Klein grumbled. As this happens, the question being increasingly asked is whether or not bloggers are journalists. Not long ago, police raided the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen following an article he wrote about the new I-Phone before it had been released.

Chen had found the prototype lying in a bar, left there by a hapless Apple worker, and wrote an expose on the phone's new features. His computer was confiscated, he was taken to court, and the controversy heated up. As AOL News writer Steve Pendlebury puts it:

Gizmodo, a Gawker Media blog, claims Chen is protected by a California law that says a "publisher, editor, reporter or any other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication" can't be forced to reveal sources or turn over unpublished information.

Pendlebury also brings up a previous court case in California, also brought by Apple, in which the court ruled:

"We can think of no reason to doubt that the operator of a public Web site is a 'publisher' for purposes of this language. ... News-oriented Web sites ... are surely 'like' a newspaper or magazine for these purposes."

"Chen qualifies as a member of the media and is protected under Amendment I of the United States Constitution," O'Grady wrote on the ZDNet blog The Apple Core. He added that the 2006 ruling in his case "upheld the rights of online journalists to protect their confidential sources and put them on par with traditional journalists."

Apple's lawyers argue differently, saying bloggers are just people stating opinions and are not reporters at all. Some brought up the idea of requiring journalists to answer to a board of officials like lawyers do, and Michigan state legislator Bruce Patterson (Republican) called for state licensing of journalists to control the flow of information, saying “We have to be able to rely on the source and to understand the credentials of the source.” Patterson was shocked to learn that no college degree was required for the job.

That there is any controversy about this at all suggests to me a lack of historical understanding. For example, the pamphleteers of the American Revolutionary War wrote under pseudonyms, stating opinions and writing about events without the structure of any news organization. They had no "rigorous system of editorial control," only their own interest and efforts to say what they thought had to be said. Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense was written anonymously, spreading to influence hundreds of thousands with its arguments on liberty. Most blogging follows this pattern of opinion or analysis rather than fresh news or breaking stories. Yet there are bloggers out pounding the streets reporting news and events as they happen, and most do so at least once in a while when they learn of something others have not mentioned.

The typical understanding of journalists is the image of someone working in a city office, with legal protection and a paid job to collect news and find out what's happening. The reporter drives to events, interviews public figures, and checks news releases to write stories. Yet history shows that the origins of this profession were a lot more open ended and wild than the image now shown. Even putting aside rough stories of frontier papers and virulently partisan newspapers pushing one political party or another, reporting has been more humble in the past.

In the book The Air-Raid Warden Was A Spy by historian William Breuer, he tells this fascinating story:

Edmond Scott, a reporter for a New York City newspaper, PM, was assigned to a curious investigation. He was to masquerade as a longshoreman and look into repeated reports that the waterfront was wide open to sabotage. It was mid-January 1942.

Dressed in work clothes, Scott got a job with a crew hired to lug furniture aboard the French ocean liner Normandie at Pier 88 on the Hudson River. Taken over by the US Navy and rechristened the Lafayette, the huge vessel was being converted into a badly needed transport, and some fifteen hundred civilian workers were swarming about on her.

Scott was appalled by the almost total lack of security for this highly valuable ship. A private firm had been hired to guard the vessel, and anyone who had fifty dollars for a union initiation fee could become a stevedore and board the Normandie.

Alone and unchallenged, the disguised Scott prowled all over the ship and he was truck by how simple it would be to set fire to the vessel. A pocket-full of incendiary pencils, he visualized, could be used with devastating impact.

Eight hours after "longshoreman" Scott had boarded the Normandie, he had learned her destination, when she would leave New York, how many guns she would mount, and the thickness of armor being put over portholes -- secret information obtained from loose-tongued workers and foremen.

Back at his newspaper, Sctott handed his blockbuster story to editors. They were flabbergasted, calling the account a "blueprint for sabotage," one that could advise enemy saboteurs how to destroy the world's third largest ship (only a few feet shorter than the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth). So publication was held up.

However, alarmed editors did report Scott's amazing adventure to Captain Charles H. Zearfoss, the US Maritime Commission's antisabotage chief. He angrily denied the findings (the editors would say) and ordered: "Get your reporter of there before he gets shot!"

On February 9 of that year, fire broke out on the Normandie/Lafayette and it was destroyed at the dock. Reporters in the older days were a lot more active and less formal than they generally are perceived today. Those were the days of Ernie Pyle, not the days of relaxing in a hotel and listening to enemy informants - or partying in Manhattan while writing breathless dispatches allegedly from Baghdad as Jayson Blair did. Blogging has more in common with Ernie Pyle and Edmond Scott than today's reporting.

Reporting for too many has become about the profession more than the job of telling the news. Losing sight of the basics of simply reporting "the facts, ma'am." What impact this has on the world, who benefits and who is hurt politically, what this will look like to one's peers, how this impacts personal career advancement, and so on are all more important than delivering the information factually, accurately, and impassively. Instead of a passion or a job, it has become a career and a calling, a higher duty to "change the world" and make it a better place.

Instead of reporters, they are now called "journalists" a more wholesome and important sounding name. Yet look at that word: journalist. One who keeps a journal. What's a blogger? A web-logger, someone who keeps a regular account of personal thoughts and events on the internet. The names are so similar in original meaning that it is fascinating to me that there's any conflict here.

Not everything a blogger writes is journalism - often it is not. Not everything a reporter writes is journalism either, sometimes they write opinion pieces and editorials. Sometimes they do so in the guise of reporting. The fact is, reporting isn't a profession at all, it is being an accurate witness and telling others about what you learned. You can be paid as a reporter and be a professional, or an amateur. You can work in a big news conglomerate or work solo like Michael Totten. But any way you do it, you are engaging in an activity that is defined not by the person paying or your job description but what you do while on that job.

Bloggers can be reporters, and so can anyone else. Its just sad that reporting has become so filled with self-importance and the job of "journalism" has become so elitist that anyone daring to attempt so without leaping through the approved hoops is considered with such contempt. Surely the content of their work is how a blogger - or a journalist - ought to be judged, not their relative employment status or degree from Columbia.