Search Engines Level the Playing Field for Bloggers - The Professional's View of Journalism
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The Professional’s View of Journalism
From the point of view of the professional journalist, though, putting blogs side by side with news is a flat-out insult.
A media studies professor at Syracuse University, Robert Thompson, said it was “important to preserve the distinctions between professional journalism and personal commentary.”
His definition of professional journalism is “reporting which adheres to standards of accuracy and writing subjected to an editorial process, and all done with an eye to journalistic ethics.” He then added that journalism often falls short of these goals.
"There is a distinction between something that has gone through an editorial process as opposed to something put up by someone that has been through none of those processes," Thompson said. Perhaps, then, it the issue of accountability that Thompson feels distinguishes true journalism from someone’s blog opinions.
Professional media people that support Thompson’s view aren’t simply being prudish, but in their opinion, why should the bloggers receive just as much credit for their fact-or-fiction opinion, as those that have worked hard in the industry to make a name for themselves, and use a set of standards and ethics to do so? Should the long hours of study, education, blood, sweat, and tears fly out the window with this approach to journalism made by the blogosphere, only to become deprecated or diluted because anyone can report on the news? I can understand their frustration in a way. Why should someone and their opinions (whether fact or speculation), without the same qualifications in the field, be given possibly more weight with the community than the opinion of someone who has to be accountable for their factuality?
It’s the same frustration I felt when I found out that a good friend of mine, who barely knew how to turn on a computer, announced she was going to start building websites. Because she was able to make an investment in an out-of-the-box developing program, she suddenly became a web developer? After all, it was I that attended the classes and worked hard to understand web languages, yet here she is, completely unqualified, and now making a nice living at it. And even though she still doesn’t even know what HTML stands for, it makes no difference to her. It feels like she cheated, in a way. And that’s how these professional journalists feel about bloggers. The mere fact that someone has an opinion on something and writes about it, in no way makes them a journalist; but to categorize them all in with the actual journalists is a very upsetting idea.
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