blogging

Now that Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo political blog has won a George Polk Award for legal reporting, can we please officially bury the tired old nonsense about blogging not being real journalism? Editor and Publisher quotes the announcement: "His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding."

Mark Potts criticizes breathless misreporting by journalist-bloggers:

We hold bloggers to somewhat different standards than journalists, because the vast majority of them aren't, well, journalists. But is it too much to ask that journalist-bloggers retain a modicum of professional ethics about what they post and how they post it? Everybody who's been involved in stories that get caught up in the media blogosphere vortex seems to have a horror tale about a journalist-blogger posting something without checking facts or asking for comment—or jumping to conclusions based on personal biases. It happens way too often, and it's just sloppy. And when it comes from a journalist-blogger writing under the imprimatur of a journalism site, it's inexcusable.

There's a great line from All the President's Men that applies perfectly here, as it does to all journalism: "If you're going to hype it, hype it with the facts."

In my book Andrew Keen is a pompous fraud and I wouldn't cross the street to put him out if he were on fire, so I particularly enjoyed seeing Markos Moulitsas expose Keen's sloppy "professionalism."

Moulitsas (aka Kos) quotes Keen's book...

It is not surprising then that these prominent bloggers have no professional training in the collection of news. After all, who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a Web site? Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, for example, the founder of Daily Kos, a left-leaning site, came to political blogging via the technology industry and the military.

... and then points out that he (Kos) has a degree in journalism (as well as several others), served as editor of his college newspaper, freelanced several years for the Chicago Tribune and has written for the Guardian. (Thanks to Martin Stabe.)

Keen is not a journalist but rather a professional self-promoter. Nevertheless, his straw-man dismissal of blogging is a position still held by too many in journalism.

Across the pond in the UK, there's a bit of a revolt against the National Union of Journalists over luddite positions being taken by the union. Suw and Kevin take a swing, and Neil McIntosh offers some suggestions as to how the NUJ could make itself useful.

The blogs are abuzz this morning with the news that CNN has decided to allow unrestricted reuse of the televised New Hampshire presidential primary debates. It's the right thing to do for all sorts of reasons. Much of the commentary repeats the claim that CNN is releasing the video under a Creative Commons license, but the announcement makes no such claim, rather using the language "without restrictions."

Both John Edwards and Barack Obama previously had asked that future debates be licensed under a Creative Commons license, apparently reacting to (MS)NBC's hoarding of video from the South Carolina debate of Democratic contenders.

The problem with Creative Commons is that it isn't a license, but rather a confusing family of related licenses, some of which have ill-defined restrictions -- notably "noncommercial." In this world in which everyone can be a publisher, and everyone can paste ad-network code into a website template, what is commercial and what is not? "No restrictions" is much a better policy for the debate video.