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Last week I asked whether you all believed that bloggers were journalists, the overwhelming response was “occasionally.” Which might be as close to the truth as we are going to get about a question like that. As a blogger, I think it would be incorrect to try to pigeonhole us into the category of “journalist,” as some of my peers are apt to do.

What is a blogger then? Well, I would say we are an amalgam of parts.

Publisher

If you run a sufficiently large blog, it’s hard not to call yourself a publisher. You take content from authors (yourself and often others) and put it to print. You also handle the business side of the enterprise, courting advertisers and making certain that content keeps getting churned out on the presses. The only thing that separates most professional bloggers from traditional publishers is scale, and more and more even that is beginning to change.

Editor

Especially for those of you who have ever dealt with a multi-author blog, you will understand the bloggers role as editor. You often have tons of stories that are crying out for ink, and you have to choose the best of them for publication. Even if you are the only author on your blog, you sill spend time selecting which stories you are going to write up and which ones you are going to skip.

Bloggers are also king of the “editorial.” When we aren’t breaking news, we are adding our opinions to the pool of stories already out there.

Journalist

Yes, we do occasionally act as journalists. Bloggers are increasingly breaking stories as much as just reporting them. As we grow our list of contacts and increase our bases of support, quite often we find ourselves with scoops that more traditional outlets envy us for.

The best of us fact check this information as best as we can, and try to separate the wheat from the chaff. Even if we don’t do everything by the book, we manage to spend quite a bit of time doing legwork traditionally reserved for reporters.

Tabloid Writers

Our publishing cycles are much faster than traditional media. As a result, we often don’t have “time” to do the fact checking that is required to ensure that everything we say is true. As a result, we spend a fair share of time spinning rumors and “sort of” rumors, hoping that someone will be kind enough to correct us if we are totally off base.

Forum Moderators

Blogging is often a two way conversation. We don’t just write to the void, we have feedback from our users. A part of our job is to try to deal with this feedback as best as we can. A blogger that doesn’t know how to handle his commenters is just asking for trouble.

A blogger who can really get the most out of his or her readers, and spur discussions can add huge amounts of value to anything he or she writes.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Of course I am speaking mostly of professional and semi-professional bloggers here. People who blog for more than just the sport of it all. My question to all of you is what do you think a blogger is? Is it all of the things that I mentioned above or something else entirely?

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