Category: Media

At the J-School, we’ve been exploring the question of whether bloggers are journalists for a couple of years, in both classroom experiments and in conferences that have drawn fascinated/scared journalists and the blogging elite. The question might be boiled down like this: Journalists can argue that “if it’s not edited, it’s not journalism” — credibility comes down to trained research, trained writing, and trained editing. Bloggers, on the other hand, may argue that “if it’s edited, it’s not blogging” — spontaneity has been widely regarded as a signature trait of blogging.

But more and more mainstream publications are letting their journalists run blogs on the side (with or without the pub’s imprimatur), both with and without editorial oversight. And more and more bloggers are breaking news stories wide open, finding angles that mainstream journalists have missed (Trent Lott’s hateful past, Dan Rather’s slip, etc.)

The area gets even more gray when you consider that many blogs are multi-person efforts, and may have unofficial editorial bodies at work behind the scenes. There is nothing inherently unjournalistic about blogging – the blog is just a publishing platform. Whether “real” journalism is being done has no necessary connection to the content management system in use.

With the Apple law suit against ThinkSecret making front page, coming to grips with this gray area has itself become news. Traditionally, journalists have been able to use California’s Shield Law to prevent having to reveal their sources. At issue is whether the Shield Law also applies to bloggers. That is, what kinds of writing activity count as journalism, and which don’t? Because it would be almost impossible to come up with a satisfactory definition that wouldn’t exclude either A) thorough research/writing by bloggers or B) spontaneous reporting by journalists, we’re probably going to end up with an all-or-nothing situation: Everyone gets to lean on the Shield Law, or no one does.

My supervisor Paul Grabowicz, quoted in the SF Chronicle:

“Under the First Amendment of the Constitution, I would be hard-pressed to find any distinction between bloggers and journalists … There are some potentially really bad things that could come without any distinction. Principal among them is, if there is no distinction, things like shield laws that protect journalists go away, because they apply to everybody else.”

Chris Nolan of The Chronicle:

This is a big deal. The people who work in newsrooms trade lousy conditions and pay for power and influence. The people online who are now coming along are stealing the power and influence that people in newsrooms used to have. The newsroom has left the building.

Yesterday birdhouse once again had all server CPU cycles consumed for a while by a comment spam blitzkrieg. A dozen customers with MT installations, some of them very high-profile, all getting hit by 100 or more simultaneous CGI requests, all of which are trying to do database lookups to check for moderation or spamminess status… resource madness. Now looking into apache-level protections against this kind of mass marketing denial-of-service attack, but meanwhile, I decided it was time to implement something I’ve been threatening to do for a while — hacked out a little shell script that stores paths to files commonly hit by the comment and trackback spambots. When run, it renames those files out from under the bots. When the flood is over, run it in reverse and it names them back. Yes, this means that legit comments and trackbacks are also disabled during that period, but at least the server stays responsive. When the spambots’ requests return 404s, they shoot their wads quickly and go away. Related discussion in the MT forums.

Somebody had to think of it: Print-on-demand gaining a bit more traction? Qoop (currently in soft-launch) will let weblog publishers offer their blog archives as nicely printed and bound books. Birdhouse customer John Battelle is giving it a shot, offering up his Searchblog in print form.

Interesting discussion on why the charge model that so many major newspapers have been using for years is backwards: Providing free access to the last 30 days’ worth of material, then charging you to access the archives. We normally regard old news as being of limited value. “Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.” Or bird cage lining. A charge model in line with our normal view of the value of old vs. new news would turn that around.

The problem with the NYT’s system is that it ensures that the Times can’t be the paper of record any longer, because even if a thousand bloggers point to a great article on the day it comes out, thirty days later it will be invisible to the 99.999 percent of the Web who won’t pay for access to fishwrap, no matter how interesting.

Wired suggests the reason for the inversion is to protect the value of Lexis-Nexis, but I’m not sure I buy that. I think newspapers are just doing their best to find a workable business model for the web (still!), but not quite getting it.

Personally, I’m still fond of the multi-tiered Salon model: Give part of the article away for free, let people set up a temporary one-day free membership to gulp all the content they want, and offer two levels of yearly subscription (with or without ads). For the past couple of years, I’ve been motivated enough by Salon’s content to pay the yearly sub (with ads). And their freebies are nice too.

I don’t think publishers need to tear down the paywalls — they just need to figure out the real culture of the web audience, deliver content that’s more compelling than repackaged print copy, and find subscription models that actually motivate.

So the rumors are true: SixApart (creators of Movable Type) have just purchased Danga, creators of LiveJournal.

It’s a strange pairing, in a way, although I can also see how this makes sense from a strategic POV. While MT is considered more “grown-up” (both grown-up technology and a more grown-up userbase), LJ has a much larger userbase: compare MT’s approximately 1 million to LJ’s 5.6 million (eWeek). On whole that puts SA in position to keep a strong head of steam against Google and Microsoft as those companies’ blogging systems gain more traction.

According to the FAQ, it’s the userbase and the LJ product they’re after (different types of platforms for different types of users), not the technology — no intention of integrating code between one platform and the other (although I’m sure eventual cross-pollination is inevitable). The idea of one company owning/running two radically different publishing systems without trying to integrate them seems odd. Then again, maybe it’s not that much different from Conde’ Nast publishing both Wired and Modern Bride.

Shrug. We’ll see…