Are Bloggers Journalists?

Everyone’s a writer. Apparently. I’m going to go ahead and give myself a headache by going on record and declaring that bloggers are not journalists. Nor are “citizen journalists” journalists, either. You know what a “citizen journalist” is? An eyewitness – a valuable but singular part of the reporting process.

A new study out from PR Newswire found 52 percent of bloggers view themselves as journalists. Perhaps a handful of them are reporters who also blog but my questions for these “journalists” are:

1. Are you objective?
2. Is your work balanced?
3. Is your work transparent?
4. Is opinion or bias ever inserted into blog posts?
5. To what extent do you use documents, statistics and FOIA requests?

The study also looked at the extent to which reporters and bloggers use social media for research. It found 91 percent of bloggers and 68 percent of online reporters “always” or “sometimes” use blogs for research, compared to 35 percent of newspaper and 38 percent of magazine reporters. Twitter was also used as a research tool. I question what constitutes research for the purposes of the studys. Is Twitter a tip sheet, a way to know when there is an earthquake or shooting? Or is it a way to conduct “man on the street” interviews? Are bloggers pulling facts from Twitter?

For me, the issue of bloggers as journalists comes down to this: who is doing the legwork? Are bloggers sitting through hours-long committee hearings and reading 100 page-reports? Are they listening to police scanners and following up with late-night calls to the watch commander? That is really the nuts and bolts of journalism. Reporters take pride in their work; they do not quote other reporters’ work unless the other guy has an exclusive and you’re under deadline pressure. And even then, your editor will probably scream through the phone and tell you to figure out a way to get into the story. That’s the reality of the field.