Blogging: Is It Journalism?

From Time Magazine's Lev Grossman:

Sunday, Jun. 13, 2004
Meet Joe Blog
By Lev Grossman

A few years ago, Mathew Gross, 32, was a free-lance writer living in tiny Moab, Utah. Rob Malda, 28, was an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan. Denis Dutton, 60, was a professor of philosophy in faraway Christchurch, New Zealand. Today they are some of the most influential media personalities in the world. You can be one too.

Gross, Malda and Dutton aren't rich or famous or even conspicuously good-looking. What they have in common is that they all edit blogs: amateur websites that provide news, information and, above all, opinions to rapidly growing and devoted audiences drawn by nothing more than a shared interest or two and the sheer magnetism of the editor's personality. Over the past five years, blogs have gone from an obscure and, frankly, somewhat nerdy fad to a genuine alternative to mainstream news outlets, a shadow media empire that is rivaling networks and newspapers in power and influence. Which raises the question: Who are these folks anyway? And what exactly are they doing to the established pantheon of American media?

Not that long ago, blogs were one of those annoying buzz words that you could safely get away with ignoring. The word blog — it works as both noun and verb — is short for Web log. It was coined in 1997 to describe a website where you could post daily scribblings, journal-style, about whatever you like — mostly critiquing and linking to other articles online that may have sparked your thinking. Unlike a big media outlet, bloggers focus their efforts on narrow topics, often rising to become de facto watchdogs and self-proclaimed experts. Blogs can be about anything: politics, sex, baseball, haiku, car repair. There are blogs about blogs.

Big whoop, right? But it turns out some people actually have interesting thoughts on a regular basis, and a few of the better blogs began drawing sizable audiences. Blogs multiplied and evolved, slowly becoming conduits for legitimate news and serious thought. In 1999 a few companies began offering free make-your-own-blog software, which turbocharged the phenomenon. By 2002, Pyra Labs, which makes software for creating blogs, claimed 970,000 users.

Most of America couldn't have cared less. Until December 2002, that is, when bloggers staged a dramatic show of force. The occasion was Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, during which Trent Lott made what sounded like a nostalgic reference to Thurmond's past segregationist leanings. The mainstream press largely glossed over the incident, but when regular journalists bury the lead, bloggers dig it right back up. "That story got ignored for three, four, five days by big papers and the TV networks while blogs kept it alive," says Joshua Micah Marshall, creator of talkingpointsmemo.com, one of a handful of blogs that stuck with the Lott story.

Mainstream America wasn't listening, but Washington insiders and media honchos read blogs. Three days after the party, the story was on Meet the Press. Four days afterward, Lott made an official apology. After two weeks, Lott was out as Senate majority leader, and blogs had drawn their first blood. Web journalists like Matt Drudge (drudgereport.com) had already demonstrated a certain crude effectiveness — witness l'affaire Lewinsky — but this was something different: bloggers were offering reasoned, forceful arguments that carried weight with the powers that be.

Blogs act like a lens, focusing attention on an issue until it catches fire, but they can also break stories. On April 21, a 34-year-old blogger and writer from Arizona named Russ Kick posted photographs of coffins containing the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Columbia astronauts. The military zealously guards images of service members in coffins, but Kick pried the photos free with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. "I read the news constantly," says Kick, "and when I see a story about the government refusing to release public documents, I automatically file an FOIA request for them." By April 23 the images had gone from Kick's blog, thememoryhole.org, to the front page of newspapers across the country. Kick was soon getting upwards of 4 million hits a day.

What makes blogs so effective? They're free. They catch people at work, at their desks, when they're alert and thinking and making decisions. Blogs are fresh and often seem to be miles ahead of the mainstream news. Bloggers put up new stuff every day, all day, and there are thousands of them. How are you going to keep anything secret from a thousand Russ Kicks? Blogs have voice and personality. They're human. They come to us not from some mediagenic anchorbot on an air-conditioned sound stage, but from an individual. They represent — no, they are — the voice of the little guy.

And the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think. Blogs showcase some of the smartest, sharpest writing being published. Bloggers are unconstrained by such journalistic conventions as good taste, accountability and objectivity — and that can be a good thing. Accusations of media bias are thick on the ground these days, and Americans are tired of it. Blogs don't pretend to be neutral: they're gleefully, unabashedly biased, and that makes them a lot more fun. "Because we're not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers," says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. "I don't have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It's incredibly liberating."

Some bloggers earn their bias the hard way — in the trenches. Military bloggers, or milbloggers in Net patois, post vivid accounts of their tours of Baghdad, in prose covered in fresh flop sweat and powder burns, illustrated with digital photos. "Jason," a National Guardsman whose blog is called justanothersoldier.com, wrote about wandering through one of Saddam Hussein's empty palaces. And Iraqis have blogs: a Baghdad blogger who goes by Salam Pax ( dear_raed.blogspot.com) has parlayed his blog into a book and a movie deal. Vietnam was the first war to be televised; blogs bring Iraq another scary step closer to our living rooms.

But blogs are about much more than war and politics. In 1997 Malda went looking for a "site that mixed the latest word about a new sci-fi movie with news about open-source software. I was looking for a site that didn't exist," Malda says, "so I built it." Malda and a handful of co-editors run slashdot.org full time, and he estimates that 300,000 to 500,000 people read the site daily. Six years ago, a philosophy professor in New Zealand named Denis Dutton started the blog Arts & Letters Daily artsandlettersdaily.com) to create a website "where people could go daily for a dose of intellectual stimulation." Now the site draws more than 100,000 readers a month. Compare that with, say, the New York Review of Books, which has a circulation of 115,000. The tail is beginning to wag the blog.

Blogs are inverting the cozy media hierarchies of yore. Some bloggers are getting press credentials for this summer's Republican Convention. Three years ago, a 25-year-old Chicagoan named Jessa Crispin started a blog for serious readers called bookslut.com. "We give books a better chance," she says. "The New York Times Book Review is so boring. We take each book at face value. There's no politics behind it." Crispin's apartment is overflowing with free books from publishers desperate for a mention. As for the Times, it's scrutinizing the blogging phenomenon for its own purposes. In January the Gray Lady started up Times on the Trail, a campaign-news website with some decidedly bloglike features; it takes the bold step of linking to articles by competing newspapers, for example. "The Times cannot ignore this. I don't think any big media can ignore this," says Len Apcar, editor in chief of the New York Times on the Web.

In a way, blogs represent everything the Web was always supposed to be: a mass medium controlled by the masses, in which getting heard depends solely on having something to say and the moxie to say it.

Unfortunately, there's a downside to this populist sentiment — that is, innocent casualties bloodied by a medium that trades in rumor, gossip and speculation without accountability. Case in point: Alexandra Polier, better known as the Kerry intern. Rumors of Polier's alleged affair with presidential candidate Senator John Kerry eventually spilled into the blogosphere earlier this year. After Drudge headlined it in February, the blabbing bloggers soon had the attention of tabloid journalists, radio talk-show hosts and cable news anchors. Trouble is, the case was exceedingly thin, and both Kerry and Polier vehemently deny it. Yet the Internet smolders with it to this day.

Some wonder if the backbiting tide won't recede as blogs grow up. The trend now is for more prominent sites to be commercialized. A Manhattan entrepreneur named Nick Denton runs a small stable of bloggers as a business by selling advertising on their sites. So far they aren't showing detectible signs of editorial corruption by their corporate masters — two of Denton's blogs, gawker.com and wonkette.com, are among the most corrosively witty sites on the Web — but they've lost their amateur status forever.

We may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. It will be interesting to see what role blogs play in the upcoming election. Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with.

Howard Dean's campaign blog, run by Mathew Gross, may be the perfect example of both the potential and the pitfalls of high-profile blogging. At its peak, blogforamerica.com drew 100,000 visitors a day, yet the candidate was beaten badly in the primaries. Still, the Dean model isn't going away. When another political blogger, who goes by the nom de blog Atrios, set up a fund-raising link on his site for Kerry, he raised $25,000 in five days.

You can't blog your way into the White House, at least not yet, but blogs are America thinking out loud, talking to itself, and heaven help the candidate who isn't listening.

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From Poynter's Steve Outing:

What Journalists Can Learn From Bloggers
By Steve Outing

Bloggers and journalists do not need be the Red States vs. the Blue States -- though in some quarters both sides have acted that way lately. We're heading into a period, I hope, where each group takes tips from the other to enhance their own craft.

Bloggers and mainstream journalists likely won't end up as twins, but perhaps cordial cousins.
What's a blog?

At this point, I probably don't need to explain what a blog is to most people. But it's worth defining the type of blogs I refer to in this article: those written and published by independents, rather than blogs produced by journalists under the brand name of their employers. It's not that journalists who blog aren't bloggers; they are. Yet it's the independents who are doing most of the innovation -- and thus have the most to teach traditional journalists.

Are bloggers journalists? That's a loaded question, and not one I mean to take up in this article. Suffice it to say that among the millions of people now publishing blogs -- and among the relatively small number who blog professionally and/or have built up huge audiences -- some act as journalists, some do not. Some bloggers see themselves as journalists; some do not.
No-restraint journalism

If there's a leading complaint that traditional journalists often make about bloggers, it's this: Some bloggers are too quick to publish anything that falls into their laps -- without bothering to vet the material to determine if it's accurate, or to consider the consequences of publishing it. In some cases, such "careless" publishing can have far-reaching results. Even bloggers, the traditionalists say, have a responsibility to the public not to trade in unsubstantiated and possibly dangerous rumors.

The poster child for just-about-anything-goes is Ana Marie Cox, otherwise known as Wonkette, who does a popular daily news and gossip blog covering the Washington, D.C., political scene. Cox insists she's not acting as a "journalist" with Wonkette, though she is a journalist by background.

On November 2, Cox was one of the bloggers who received leaked early results from exit polls in the U.S. presidential election -- the ones that led many to believe early in the day that John Kerry was on his way to victory. Cox's popularity has left her with a big group of sources -- people who feed her interesting tidbits and sometimes leaked material. People with access to exit-poll numbers sent her leaked numbers; she posted them quickly, with cautionary words to the effect of, "don't take this too seriously."

Cox acknowledged during an interview that she didn't think much about the ethics of it all that day, though she's well aware of the controversy surrounding exit polls affecting voting in states where the polls haven't yet closed. "Exit polls are like crack," she quips, and just like curbing drug use, no one is likely to stop early publication of them by bloggers as long as there are people with access willing to leak the results.

"It's impossible to maintain privileged information" in an environment where anyone can instantly publish leaked information to a potential worldwide audience on the Web, she says.

But there's more to Wonkette's method than "I publish anything because I can." Cox points out how she also posted pre-election reports sent to her of rumors that presidential candidate John Kerry had an affair with a young woman. "I posted the Kerry affair stuff and said it's stupid," she says. (The affair rumor turned out to go nowhere.)

Cox's point of view reflects a libertarian notion that it's fine in a democratic society for people to receive most any information. This line of thinking suggests that the publisher's responsibility lies in being clear about what's been confirmed and what hasn't been, acknowledging that the information, depending on circumstances, could be accurate or could be groundless. Let readers decide for themselves whether it's useful information, in other words, but be transparent in explaining where you got it and how much of it you've confirmed. Respect the intelligence of the audience, this argument goes, and don't try to play nanny by deciding what you will and will not publish without audience input.

The key word in the paragraph above is "transparency." Many bloggers feel that it's OK to publish just about anything if they make it clear where it came from, what they know about it, and that it may or may not be accurate.
The news, faster

Could such an approach be taken by mainstream news organizations? Let me suggest that current trends are pushing them toward a new way of doing journalism that is a bit more blog-like.

The Internet, of course, has speeded up the news publishing cycle. No longer is it easy for a news organization to sit on a big story and publish it at a set time, when all the dust has settled. (Think of how the Monica Lewinsky story played out -- when blogger Matt Drudge published leaked reports of a Bill Clinton affair that Newsweek was investigating but wasn't ready to make public -- to understand what I mean.)

"Newspaper people (especially) still have the mindset of putting out the edition and then they're done with it," complains Glenn Reynolds, a law professor best known as the blogger behind Instapundit, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet today.

What Mainstream Journalists Can Learn from Bloggers
In an interview, Reynolds explained that the way he approaches information that comes his way is profoundly different than how a traditional journalist would. For instance, he says, if the infamous "Rathergate" documents about George W. Bush's military record ended up in the hands of a blogger like him rather than CBS News, the approach likely would have been to publish them immediately. Rather than find an expert or two to review the documents, a blogger would recognize that among members of his audience would be people capable of doing credible analysis. Imagine the ensuing conversation as the story started in one blog, quickly spread to others, and people far and wide started discussing the credibility of the documents.

It's not hard to imagine a different outcome than what actually happened: CBS News got dragged through the mud when it became obvious that the Bush documents were faked and CBS messed up.

Yes, it is hard to imagine the New York Times or Washington Post taking this approach, I admit. Yet it might make sense in some cases.

Imagine, say, the coverage of Watergate being treated in part this way. Rather than Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward being the sole storytellers, blog-influenced journalism would have had them in part leading a conversation about the scandal -- and probably turning up new sources in the process. What if Woodward and Bernstein had accompanied their Watergate investigative pieces with a blog that facilitated public conversation and brought in tips from government insiders? I suspect that a Watergate investigation in the blog era would have come to a conclusion faster.
News is a conversation

"Big media has to learn to be more honest," says Jeff Jarvis, a media executive who moonlights as a blogger, "that is, to level with its public, to reveal its prejudices, and process as citizen journalists (bloggers) do."

The popularity of bloggers is leading to a new way of thinking about news. Jarvis said in an e-mail interview that the most profound thing he learned when he started blogging is this: News is a conversation, not just a lecture. The story doesn't end when it's published, but rather just gets started as the public begins to do its part -- discussing the story, adding to it, and correcting it.

Jarvis is by day president of Advance Internet, the new-media arm of Advance Communications; by night he is the popular independent blogger behind BuzzMachine. As a 50-something media executive with a lengthy print-journalism background (including as a reviewer for TV Guide) and a new-found enthusiasm for blogging, he's well suited to advise the profession on striking a middle ground between traditional journalism and blogging.

"The news isn't done when we print it," he says. "That's when the public can add questions, corrections, perspective. That will improve news. And it also will change our relationship with the public."

Bloggers have adopted this credo, and mainstream news organizations would be well advised to do so, too, at least to some extent.

"We have owned the printing press for centuries; now the people have the power of the press" through blogs, Jarvis says. "They are speaking and it's our turn to listen and engage them in conversation."

To do that represents a profound shift in the type of journalism practiced in the U.S. and most Western countries with a free press. Engaging the public at the level Jarvis suggests would likely mean inviting readers to contribute to the end product, either in the form of published reaction to articles written by professional journalists or by reader-produced content in such forms as blogs or "citizen journalism" entries.
Personality journalism

Most blogs are highly personal, usually reflecting their authors' personalities. If you have favorite bloggers, you probably know their political views and even a fair bit about their personal lives.

With the exception of columnists, you probably know next to nothing about a newspaper's staff journalists. Reporters keep their opinions to themselves, for the most part, to comply with newsroom policy and longstanding journalistic convention.

But what if reporters were allowed to reveal more about themselves? Would the journalistic world end? Many bloggers doubt it; indeed, the refusal of mainstream news organizations to allow their journalists to reveal their opinions and personal perspective is a leading criticism leveled at news companies by bloggers.

Perhaps Slate, the successful Microsoft-owned webzine (and not a blog), suggests a coming tidal shift. Before this last U.S. election, Slate announced that 45 of its 49 editorial employees planned to vote for John Kerry. Can you imagine the New York Times announcing a breakdown of how its employees planned to vote? That would represent quite a departure from the traditional candidate endorsements the paper publishes, without bylines, on its editorial page.

Some bloggers would say that kind of opening up is a good idea, and maybe mainstream news organizations would be smart to acknowledge the obvious -- that their staffs of professional journalists do have opinions. How surprising was it that Slate's staff leaned heavily to Kerry? Would it surprise anyone, say, if Fox News employees overwhelmingly supported President Bush? As I said, this probably wouldn't cause the media world to collapse.

Indeed, you can view this loosening of the grip on editorial employees' personal lives as a way to better connect journalist and reader -- to forge a stronger relationship between them and in theory support greater loyalty by readers.
'We were wrong'

One significant difference between mainstream journalism and blogging is the way each handles its mistakes. On this one, the bloggers seem to have an edge.

Although the working styles of bloggers varies considerably, some of today's leading bloggers take a similar approach to mistakes: They prominently post corrections to errors, publishing them quickly. Reynolds typically posts a correction of an earlier item as a new item at the top of the blog if the item in error has scrolled down the page, so his readers are sure to see it.

And because most bloggers embrace interactivity with their audiences, they hear about it when a mistake is made (via the comments areas on their own blogs, and from other bloggers noting and publicizing the error if it's significant) -- and so do all the other readers.

Contrast that with how the typical old-media news organization handles mistakes. It's a rare day when a TV news program announces a mistake in the previous day's coverage; newspaper corrections typically are relegated to an inside page in a special corrections area, unseen by many readers.

Perhaps bloggers rank higher when it comes to corrections because they are in more direct touch with their readers. When a blogger makes a mistake, his or her readers make it known; there can be no ignoring it. As mainstream news organizations evolve to have more direct interaction with their readers and viewers, they'll have to change how they acknowledge and handle mistakes.
A different reporting style

While reporting styles among bloggers of course vary wildly, you do often see (among those bloggers who do reporting, not just commentary) a different approach than what's typical in mainstream reporting. After all, many bloggers are not journalists and have not had training in traditional reporting techniques. Perhaps there's something to be learned from this fresh perspective on reporting.

In covering a technical story, you sometimes see bloggers go far down the corporate ladder; perhaps it's partly not having the access to or experience at reaching people at the top for comment. The conventional journalist will seek out company executives or go through the PR department. But bloggers sometimes get their information from people further inside an organization -- the programmers. It makes for a different type of storytelling, as new and different voices are heard.

Again, it leads back to the theme that bloggers often get closer to the people than do mainstream journalists.

Of course, in many instances it's the people "down the corporate ladder" doing the blogging themselves. Take, for example, the blog Call Centre Confidential, written by the anonymous team leader of an unidentified phone marketing call center.
Other lessons

What else can mainstream journalists learn from bloggers? Perhaps …

* That publishing unpolished thoughts (written by smart people) can be valuable -- that in the lightning-fast Internet era, unrefined commentary and analysis has a place. And the polishing process sometimes takes place after the Publish button has been pushed -- as the audience adds its knowledge and perspective to keep a story alive well past the point when it is first published.
* That fast-to-publish content like that on blogs doesn't have to go through a rigorous editing process -- that there's value in the speed of blogging that can be applied to mainstream journalism. (If that sounds scary to editors, remember than when reporters go on live radio and TV programs, there's no editing there either. It's a matter of trust in the journalist to be given such freedom and responsibility.)

Meeting of the media

From an old-media perspective, the ideas presented above may sound unreasonable. Indeed, presented in 1990, they would have seemed outlandish. Yet in today's world, they represent possibilities that traditional news organizations should be considering.

I'm not suggesting that newspapers and TV news operations mimic blogs, only that they experiment with some of the ideas that blogs present.

Choire Sicha, editorial director of Gawker Media, one of the leading publishers of independent blogs (including Wonkette), said in an e-mail interview of the difference between mainstream journalists and blogs: "I think there's really not that much to distinguish between journalists and bloggers except for a formalized edit process before print.

"Nearly all journalists traffic privately in gossip, anonymous sources, and thinly veiled juicy items -- they just don't usually get to throw those things into print, and so they IM these tidbits to us bloggers," he says. "Bloggers are really just the id of the journalism world."

Put another way, by Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox, "On blogs, it's all chocolate cake and no potatoes."

And if you really want to get a sense of how blogs and mainstream journalists are coming together, Sicha offers this: "Here's a little peek behind the curtain over here at Gawker Media HQ: I just had a two-hour meeting with a blogger who edits one of our sites. We discussed new staffing assignments and rotations, some feature ideas, and six-month goals. Sound familiar, print people? Sound boring, bloggers?"

With much in common as well as many differences, bloggers and mainstream journalists should be looking to one another for ideas on how to navigate our newly revised media world.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the blog Call Centre Confidential.

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Also from Poynter's Steve Outing:

hat Bloggers Can Learn From Journalists
By Steve Outing (More articles by this author)

More in this series

Blogging can be not only influential, but also great fun. As Wonkette.com's Ana Marie Cox has said, "It's all chocolate cake and no potatoes."

Of course, as blogging has grown up -- from exclusively the domain of hobbyists typing for the world from their spare bedrooms to the addition of top-flight bloggers making careers of it and bringing in professional salaries -- the diet has become a bit more balanced, at least for some.

THE FLIP SIDE

What Journalists Can Learn From Bloggers
Bloggers need to eat their vegetables, too, if they expect to grow up and win the respect of larger audiences and survive the rigors of long-term publishing.

So, while mainstream journalists have much that they can learn from the experiences of bloggers (as this article explains), bloggers could learn a thing or two from traditional journalists.

Let us count the ways.
Checks & balances (a.k.a., the editor)

The principal difference between traditional journalists and the vast majority of bloggers is: an editor. The lack of one is one of the charms of blogging, of course. The blogger ponders, perhaps reports, analyzes, types, and publishes. It's fast; it's creative; it's different from mainstream journalism.

Even when there is an editor involved with a blogger, it's often after publication.

But having an editor involved -- even if it's immediately after hitting the Publish button, a.k.a. back-editing -- is a brilliant idea, even for solo bloggers. An extra pair of eyes can certainly help to catch spelling, grammar, and factual errors, but more importantly they can catch really dangerous issues -- such as when you're about to libel someone.

With so many new people involved in blogging, most of them having no training in journalism practices, ethics, and media law, personal legal liability is a big deal. Bloggers publishing without the protection of an employer to pay for their libel defense are on their own should they make a mistake. In the years ahead, I expect to see some solo bloggers get in trouble -- and some get driven to personal ruin when they lose libel lawsuits. It's a wonder it hasn't happened yet.

Ah, but some bloggers say, audience members are our editors. Mistakes are pointed out quickly and bloggers readily acknowledge and correct their errors in plain sight. Good point, but a blog item that libels someone will remain on the record, likely archived for a good long time, and a libelous statement left online for even a day puts a blogger at tremendous risk. So bloggers, take a tip from traditional journalists and find yourself some form of editing safety net.
Reporting isn't a dirty word

Let's face it, the majority of bloggers don't do original reporting. They comment on the work of others, or write about personal experiences. But more and more, we are seeing bloggers who do reporting. The only real difference between what they do and the work of professional journalists is that most bloggers lack the credentials to gain access to sources as easily as their journalist cousins. That's become less of a problem for top bloggers lately. Quite a few of them got credentialed to cover the U.S. national political conventions this year, for example.

But solid reporting can help any blogger. Learn the value of journalistic legwork. Talk to multiple sources, and check out the credibility of those sources. Double-source information that seems suspect. Seek out the aid of public- and media-relations professionals for corporations and public institutions; today, many of them are accustomed and willing to work with bloggers as well as traditional journalists. Don't be afraid to go to the top of an organization for comment, but also know the value of seeking information from those much further down the organizational ladder.

Avoid anonymous sources when you can, for just as in traditional journalism, bloggers can lose credibility when quoting from them, unless there's a darn good reason.

Speaking of anonymous sources, there's talk in the U.S. about the idea that bloggers should be entitled to the same protection against revealing sources that traditional journalists get. First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams has suggested that bloggers acting as journalists should get that protection -- but that bloggers who confine their writing to personal opinions and reflections should not get any special protection.
The blogger's toolbox

Bloggers have much in common with journalists, of course; ergo, they have the same rights to gather information. And that includes using resources long available to traditional journalists to help get the right information.

The U.S. Freedom of Information Act is a journalist's best friend, and a blogger's, too. Anyone has the right to access public records (at least here in the U.S.), and sometimes FOIA is the tool necessary to get the job done. It's not just for professional journalists.

Bloggers also would be wise to frequent resources designed for journalists. Poynter Online, publisher of this article, can be a useful site for bloggers. And there are so many more journalistic and reporting organizations whose resources will help bloggers produce better, more accurate work. Poynter Online maintains lists of them here and here.

Bloggers may not get chosen to participate in in-person seminars at the Poynter Institute or other journalistic training organizations, but increasingly such institutions are offering online learning programs that allow bloggers to join in -- sometimes for free. At Poynter, NewsU is the institute's e-learning program, offering a variety of online courses. Bloggers wishing to get better at their craft, just as with journalists, should consider taking advantage of these opportunities.

Let's think about ethics

If there's one area about blogging that raises the most concern, it's ethics. With most mainstream news organizations, you can pretty much be assured that a reporter isn't taking money for writing about someone or some company.

But guess what: That's not the case with blogging. A hot controversy in the blogging world right now is a company that's paying bloggers a monthly fee to write about its clients. While some of those participating bloggers are being up front and acknowledging when they do this, there's nothing stopping other bloggers from doing this surreptitiously.

Part of the problem is lack of any community blogging standards that might discourage unseemly behavior. Perhaps a current effort to establish a blogging ethics committee, as suggested by Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, will lead to a blogging model that at least articulates ideal blogger behavior. While still in the planning stages, such a committee might provide member bloggers with a sort of "seal of approval" that suggests adherence to reasonable ethical standards.

Bloggers need only to look at the ethical standards developed by various journalism groups to get ideas on important issues to be included in a bloggers' guide. Cyberjournalist.net's Jon Dube also wrote a Blogger's Code of Ethics in 2003 that's worth reviewing.
Ask before you attack

Here's something you frequently see with bloggers that trained journalists usually avoid: Making accusations or strong criticisms without asking the target for reaction. For the sake of balance, it just makes sense to be fair and to seek the other sides of the story.
Get to the point quickly

In journalism, one of the first things you learn is the importance of the inverted-pyramid style of news writing. Putting the most important information in a story up top makes much sense online, where attention spans are short and you can't count on readers looking beyond the first sentence or paragraph.

Write those headlines with care, too. Strong, intuitive wording is important in getting readers to go beyond the first words. Professional journalists have long been refining the craft of headline writing, and bloggers should pay equal attention to it. Ignore this aspect of traditional journalism and bloggers risk not engaging their audience.

That's not to say that bloggers can't be creative -- I'm not suggesting that they copy the styles of mainstream journalists -- but I do advise that bloggers take traditional news writing theory into account.

Some of those journalism resources cited above can lead you to advice on better headline writing .
Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy
Finally, bloggers can learn a thing or two about accuracy from traditional journalists. No, I'm certainly not implying that journalists reporting for mainstream news organizations don't make mistakes -- they make plenty of them. But there's an institutional ethic in professional journalism to try to always get it right.

With blogging, it's up to the individual blogger. With no institution or organization watching over them and guiding their behavior, we can only hope that most bloggers adhere to a mission of accuracy and accountability.

When done without proper care and thought, blogging can be dangerous -- not only to the blogger's reputation, but to the community at large. Inaccurate blogging can damage personal reputations and worse, just as can sloppy journalism. So bloggers, please make accuracy a guiding principle, just as it is in all successful journalism.

Journalists, as members of the "Fourth Estate," have long held power. Now bloggers are positioned to share some of that. Take care, please.