Back into the breach it seems, this time to defend blogging against the charge that it’s “dangerous.” Not that I think what we do here doesn’t have the capacity to do great harm, I just take exception to the particular stones that mainstream media is casting at us. Here is an excerpt as captured by Mashable.

No, but I do think it is kind of sad when everybody who owns a laptop thinks they’re a journalist and doesn’t understand the ethics. We do have to have some sense of what’s right and wrong in this job. Of how far we can go. We don’t make accusations without absolute proof. We’re not prosecutors. We don’t assume. –Helen Thomas (in an interview with the Huffington Post)

Lets assume for a moment than Miss Thomas is correct, which as a member of the White House Press Corp she is certainly sharp enough to understand that she simply isn’t. Even assuming that she was right, her flat denial of blogging as “dangerous” (in an answer to a follow up question) leads me to question her understanding of the medium.

A Brief History Of Journalism

1. Mainstream media as it stands is the direct result of an economic scarcity. It takes a lot of resources to put together a print publication, thus the keys to the kingdom have always been in the hands of those who could afford the infrastructure.

2. Well before Journalism was a major in campus’ across the country, “reporting” was done. In fact, for most of history information was disseminated by those without the credentials that people like Helen would have every blogger strive for.

3. The fact that bloggers are often incorrect, rarely fact check, and have a tendency to hit the publishing button before their brain catches up with their finger tips does not, in and of itself, make blogging dangerous.

The proof for 3 can be found in 1.

A Case For Blogging

Hundreds of thousands of blogs exist, hundreds of these blogs exist in the sense that they publish frequently and have a meaningful audience. What blogging has done is that it has given the capacity to publish to anyone with the will to build their own soapbox.

You can think of a blog then as a student newspaper. It has a small, usually loyal audience who takes the information in it with a grain of salt. Why? Because these particular students also subscribe to every other college newspaper in the country and read them regularly.

Blogging then exists in a self-correcting ecosystem. Just as quickly as we will pile on to spread the latest rumor, we are equally likely to throw in a snide refutation once that rumor is proven false. Most people who read blogs understand that this is just a part of the information cycle, and they are willing to put up with inaccuracies for the sake of getting some information as quickly as we do.

Even when you consider the largest publications that have huge (by any standards) readerships and built in trust, these publishers are still put in check by the fact that they have comments. Anyone who feels strongly about the subject can chime in their opinion. These publishers are held personally accountable for every scrap of information that they put to print.

This does not stop the conflicts of interest, advertorials, rumor mongering and piling on but it might do a little better than stopping it, it allows consumers of media to expose those who produce media, in real time. When reporters make questionable decisions, it is very easy to sweep them under the carpet. Bloggers, as a combination of publisher, editor and reporter constantly have the spotlight turned on them — making it much harder to get away with chicanery.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Bloggers should try to hold themselves to some standards of publishing. People should stop considering blogging Journalism with a capital J. Mainstream media should really stop making sweeping statements about a medium that they barely understand, especially considering that they should know better. If all of these things happened, Media would be a much nicer place. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting on it though.

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