Shaw: Journalists rule, regular people drool!

As bloggers start taking on weightier issues, and do real reporting instead of regurgitating the day's headlines with commentary, the question, “What is a journalist?” grows ever more important. David Shaw at the Los Angeles Times rants extensively on this issue, desperately claiming that bloggers are not in fact journalists, because they do not have the training, the experience, or the editors.

I would like to hear Shaw simply say out loud, "Journalists are better than regular people," because I believe that is what he is really saying here. Maybe I'm overstating this point, maybe this is a little stump speech, but I think Shaw insensitively dismisses other styles of journalism in a snobbish manner. Journalism has no bar system; we do not get knighted when we sign on with the Associated Press. We are merely individuals - flawed individuals - seeking out information and publishing it for the world to see.

I believe journalists - hell, just about anyone - should go with the assumption at any given moment that they only know, at their very best, 10 percent of the story. The second part of this assumption is that the collective of people involved in the story know the whole. This means, in fact, that no one individual knows the whole of a story.

Dan Gilmore, author of We The Media makes a similar point. He says that the readers, the sources, the people really involved in the story know far more than he does. They, not he, are the experts. Admitting this, and relinquishing control to those people is frightening, Gilmore concedes, but ultimately liberating.

Bloggers help fill in, though not completely, the hole that reporters cannot tackle on their own.

Shaw overlooks, sadly, that journalism was not built on experienced writers. Jack Shafer, Editor at large for Slate, makes this point clearly in his article Don't Fear the Blogger when he says:

No aspiring journalist has any journalistic experience before he reports and writes his first story. All he needs to gain entry to the profession is access to a keyboard, a desire to be published, and an editor willing to publish his work. Upon that day he becomes a journalist—maybe not a good journalist, but a journalist just the same.

In the scenario in which the willing publisher is an online platform, free to all people, this expands the opportunity for journalism exponentially.

Shaw reveals, zealously and selfishly, reveals that he believes that the constitutional rights of the press come with restrictions as to who can use them.

Philip Meyer, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, wrote his own take on this an article titled "What is a 'journalist'?" in USA Today.

There is neither sound moral nor legal justification for claiming that those who work for major news organizations have stronger First Amendment rights than the rest of us.

I believe that the reason we have so many laws and legalities surrounding journalism is because the action of researching, writing and reporting is so fundamentally important, not the individual reporter.

Shaw's initial concern is not unfounded. As bloggers start reporting and scooping traditional publications, the questions of law become all the more important. The easiest answer I see to Shaw's problem, however, is a compromise: the understanding that with rights come responsibilities.

Shaw, I think, assumes that somehow bloggers will get the freedom of the press without the associated risk. In fact, I believe that bloggers are at more risk, without the backing of a publisher to go to court for them.

Shaw says that he must send his articles to four editors before publication. But when he offends someone or makes a mistake to the point of a lawsuit, he has a team of people to defend him. He has four editors who approved his writing, and thus four people with whom he can share the blame.

Bloggers in contrast have no editors, and complete freedom to write whatever they please. But when the millions of readers see the unfiltered information and take offense, or even legal action, the individual blogger stands alone in his or her defense.

I think Shaw’s rant is defensive, fearing what blogging might to journalism. He fears that it will produce fact errors, biases and controversy. Does Shaw not realize that these things are why so many people despise traditional journalists?

Over time I’m not concerned with blogs. The vast Internet is a self fact-checking machine. Like Wikipedia, the users are the editors, and there are billions of them. What bloggers will soon come to realize is that they do have the freedom to report information, but with that will come the responsibility to defend that freedom.

Dan Gilmore's book We The Media is worth a look, and available in its entirety for free online. Go to O'Reilly.com's We The Media site to read the pdf files.