Man bites dog: A journalist says something nice about blogging!

I listened in part to an interesting interview this morning on the Sirota show out of Denver. His guest was Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University.

One snippet sticks with me. He said something kind about bloggers. Most journalists hold us in low regard. And I don’t hold blogging to be anything important, but I guess there are national blogs that do command attention.

But what he said was more local in color – he said that there had always been bright and thoughtful people who saw through journalism and its pretensions. But they were never organized – just a voice here and there, and we all know what the lone voice who speaks out of turn more than once is: a crackpot. So critics of journalism were always demeaned. In their tight circle, journalists could self-gratify. They looked on us with some mild amusement.

The Internet and blogging has allowed us to band together, and now all the cacophony is sounding more like a chorus of complaints about journalists, who can no longer hide behind the green curtain. They are getting called out daily, and the voices, distant in the beginning, get louder every day.

I recognize the shortcomings of blogging – we don’t report on events, but rather comment on them. We don’t do primary research. We are, in short, not journalists. I cannot argue with those points, as they are simply true.

But who is there to talk about the shortcomings of journalism? When they get together, it is invariably to hand out awards to one another and talk about how precious they are to our republic. Do they talk about their own failure to report on events or do primary research? Do they talk of sycophancy? The replacement of hard-nosed reporting with detached (and safe) neutrality?

In the past, it was an occasional letter to the editor, and we all know, snark snark, that LTE’s are not to be taken with the gravitas of true journalistic endeavors. Blogs are the new LTE’s I guess, with one exception – we do not need approval to appear in print.

The world is changing. Newspapers are changing. Time magazine is edging towards People, the best news reporting is done on comedy shows. True journalists – those who work their trade, investigate powerful people and report back to us – the current model does not support them. What will we do for news?

A new model will form. The glimmerings out there – Huffington and foundations financing investigative journalism – it has potential. Like health care, journalism and profit don’t mix well. Investigative reporting never did threaten paycheck-signers or advertisers.

For the time being, how nice it must be to run a government or corporation without having to answer to the news media.