How to Tell a Journalist from a Blogger | Hacker News Reader

How to Tell a Journalist from a Blogger

jolieodell.wordpress.com

51 pointsraganwald45 comments

"9. A journalist isn’t a spy or a snitch. It’s true that some of the wildest, most dramatic stories in the annals of this trade have revolved around the divulging of secrets. Watergate, for example — that required some first-class leaking and espionage. But the workaday journalist gets maybe a few of those stories in his lifetime. Journalism is not an exciting merry-go-round of overheard deals and eavesdropping in antechambers — or, to put a more modern spin on it, hacked accounts and leaked documents. If it were, journalists would be universally mistrusted and would never get invited to any parties, which make up a significant portion of our food-and-drink budgets as journalists’ salaries are generally low. This is where bloggers have fucked over journalists more colossally than I can comfortably express. A couple bloggers posing as journalists spied, snitched — and did so in a way that benefited almost no one except the bloggers themselves — and now all producers of media are painted as untrustworthy vultures. The true journalist relies on deep knowledge of his beat, close relationships with industry experts, and dedication to his craft. He has the kind of skill that makes for a 20-year career in reporting, not the kind of childish sneakiness that makes for a one-time pageview blockbuster."

I couldn't disagree more. Journalists are supposed to be hated. The fact that journalists want to be liked and invited to parties is how we get the country's most prominent "journalists" playing with squirt guns at Biden's house, buying into lies that lead to wars, and ignoring torture. What objectivity can we expect to see when the press merely wants to be close to the powerful. The press needs to be adversarial. If you aren't an "untrustworthy vulture", then you're not all that interested in sharing the truth. If you trade access for stories, you're a pretty poor excuse for a journalist (no matter how much you need the free meal).

"1. A journalist is trained in journalism. Whether in the hallowed halls of higher learning or in the less-hallowed halls of a professional newsroom, the journalist has been trained as such. The journalist’s work has been pruned mercilessly by the red pens of professors, peers, and editors. A bachelor’s degree in journalism, media studies, mass communication, or some similarly named program along with at least a few years under the tutelage of editors is the best preparation for calling oneself a journalist. A blogger might have a ton of general writing experience and even a degree in English or something along those lines, but — and this is a critical distinction — a writer per se is not a journalist. Not any more than a keyboardist is a concert pianist or a mechanic is a nuclear submarine technician. A journalist belongs to a specialized, technical subset of the writing professions that requires specific training. As one who has edited many a writer who attempts journalism, I can tell you the differences are vast — not simply niceties and nuances."

Again I have to disagree. I say that professional journalism training does more harm than good. We have armies of people out there who know "how to write a story" and almost no one who knows anything at all about what they're supposed to be writing about. I'll take a historian writing about modern politics over a person who knows how to write for a large audience. I'll take a startup founder writing about business over someone who merely was assigned a story. I just prefer a scientist writing about science (That's why we have so many poorly researched "Cure for AIDS found" stories). Without knowledge and the ability to deliver context, you're just a stenographer. And I think that's why many journalists tend to be pretty poor at doing their jobs.

"4. A journalist attributes quotations and cites sources. One of the first lessons you learn in J-school is that “common knowledge” doesn’t count as a source, and everything must have a source. Did it rain 5 inches yesterday? According to whom? Was the city budget cut? According to which documents? At what meeting? By which persons? Is a certain chemical bad for the environment? What experts say so, and what studies prove it? In keeping with the standards of objectivity, no fact can make it into print without having a firm attribution to some source outside the newsroom. Attribution along with objectivity are almost inviolable commandments, and the professional journalist is hard-pressed to cross them. Attribution in the digital age amounts to linking back to the source when a digital source is available. The blogger, on the other hand, can play fast and loose with “everybody knows” logic and refer to the omniscient “They” as a source of statistics or other knowledge. And linking back is seen as optional, since many bloggers would prefer to claim information as their own and silo pageviews and PageRank on their own domain."

We have absolutely rampant anonymous citations from people we'd consider journalists today. We have sources close to an administration, off-the-record conversations, and lax citations. It's why even after prominent scientists said the BP oil spill was leaking upwards of 50,000 barrels of oil every day, prominent news outlets were still reporting company line of 5,000.

I could really go on all day but there's so much wrong with this.

There are real journalists out there. There are people that do really thankless work bringing important stories to light. Then there are people that get degrees in "Media Studies" and like going to parties with powerful people.

>There are real journalists out there. There are people that do really thankless work bringing important stories to light.

This is exactly what she's talking about in #9.

99.9% of all journalism is not "bringing important stories to light" its getting fact checked information to the masses. The people covering the local town flower show, those are real journalists. So are the ones covering post disaster damage, which sounds more glamorous than flower shows, but it's still not bringing things to light, it's conveying important correct information to people who can't go get it themselves.

The idea that REAL JOURNALISM is nothing but breaking scandals and exposing deep secrets is harmful to the gathering of normal work-a-day journalism because people stop talking to you.

And it breeds bullshit sensationalism because if you think it's not worth writing up if it doesn't piss some one off you start ignoring actual news and start printing half false accusations just because it sounds like "real journalism." It's exactly the attitude that leads to the current situation of fatuous screaming heads.

There is an interesting line to be walked between pandering and gaining access. Journalists who are disliked and never invited to parties are also journalists who are unlikely to be breaking many stories, and who will have trouble getting informed comment from insiders on what is happening.

On the other hand the subjects of journalists are aware of this and actively prefer to grant access only to those who are willing to pander.

I won't say that journalists find the right balance. But the ones that I have known have been more aware of the importance of doing so than the vast majority of bloggers out there.

Dude, the "going to parties" part was, I thought quite clearly, a joke.

You can't write about information you can't get. You can't get information by being a dick/informant all the time. It's a delicate ethical balance, but it's a lot more nuanced than gadfly versus vulture.

We've seen several very high profile cases, specifically David Brooks of the New York Times, who wrote an article after Michael Hastings broke the General McChrystal story for Rolling Stone stating:

The most interesting part of my job is that I get to observe powerful people at close quarters. Most people in government, I find, are there because they sincerely want to do good. But they’re also exhausted and frustrated much of the time. And at these moments they can’t help letting you know that things would be much better if only there weren’t so many morons all around.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html?_r=1...

Then we have this example of the Biden Beach Party for journalists where people like Wolf Blitzer, David Sanger, Marc Ambinder, and Ed Henry get to play with waterguns with the White House Chief of Staff:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid42950271001?...

I agree that you can't be a jerk all the time and break big stories. But you've got to acknowledge that at the moment, journalism isn't suffering because it's too adversarial. It's suffering because it's too deferential to powerful interests. Journalists like David Brooks enjoy going to cocktail parties. The most interesting part of his job is observing powerful people at close quarters - not reporting interesting stories.

As for your work-a-day journalist covering flower shows and local sports games, I think we can agree that bad might be good enough. But if you think about it, you don't need a real "journalist" at all to cover these stories. A lower standard "blogger" could probably do just fine.

As for covering a disaster, I would think that there's a huge world of difference. Disaster relief can be covered like the local flower show or it can be done right and it can be followed up on for weeks to make sure that it is being handled correctly by those in power, that corruption isn't rampant, and that those in need are getting the services they require (the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina comes to mind). No one has suggested that we move towards screaming heads and sensationalism. Research and fact-checking are indeed important.

She lost me at

   1. A journalist is trained in journalism

I'm a designer and I'm trained in design, but I would never define a designer as someone who is "trained in design".

There are many ways to learn, and various paths to success. Traditional education is definitely not the only way. I know designers who aren't formally trained who are better designers than I ever will be.

I'm pretty sure the same thing can be said about journalists. We've all seen amateurs blow formally trained journalists out of the water, especially when reporting on highly specialized topics.

Besides, her only motivation for that statement is "a journalist requires specific training."

[edit: got gender of author wrong]

I don't have a huge argument either way, but to back her up a little- I think what she's getting at is a primary split between blogger and journalist. Or, put another way, old media vs. new media. Formal education is by far the easiest way to break them up. You can argue that bloggers are journalists and journalists can be bloggers, but I think for her purposes she's deliberately putting that arbitrary split in between the two to differentiate the two a little better.

The rest of the points she makes are a lot of what's taught in traditional education- impartiality, attribution, things that aren't particularly stressed in the blogosphere. Again, they're not confined to journalism in particular, but if you're trying to argue journalism vs. blogging in particular (like she and everyone else seemingly wants to debate), they're definitely values held higher in journalism than blogging.

I would postulate that more than specific training, there are journalistic (sic?) conventions that you have to adhere to and that you learn during your course of study. I'm not saying that one cannot learn this on their own with some effort, but that most bloggers don't know or don't care to learn it.

To compare it to design/designing/designer wouldn't be accurate. There are certain aspects of design that natural artistic ability and skill covers, while in journalism there are rules (investigation, disclosure, etc.) that must be learned, you're not born with them. I've seen bloggers ignore these (ignorance, refusal to adhere to them, and so on) and some of their end products make me cringe.

Not to say that journalists themselves don't ignore this from time to time, take for example this recent Breitbart brouhaha, but I think it all boils down to the terminology: Bloggers would like to be known as journalists, and journalists would like to keep that distinction to themselves. Each have a case. But I think there is still a need to distinguish one from the other.

(edited to clarify an opinion)

Then you should have read a sentence further where she says, "Whether in the hallowed halls of higher learning or in the less-hallowed halls of a professional newsroom, the journalist has been trained as such." She doesn't say that traditional education is the only way.

In my profession of software, there are many accomplished programmers who do not have a college degree. If you want to be a programmer, a CS program is a great way to get there. If you don't go to college, you'd better be learning through books, pair programming, or through other avenues. Just because you are writing code does not mean you're a programmer.

If you had of kept reading you would have seen them say that it doesn't matter if they were trained in higher education or in the newsroom as long as they were trained.

And then if you read a little more you'd see that this blogger hadn't structured it very well and seemingly contradicts one para with the following one:

A bachelor’s degree in journalism, media studies, mass communication, or some similarly named program along with at least a few years under the tutelage of editors is the best preparation for calling oneself a journalist.

Suggesting that one needs a BA along with years of tutelage.

In any case I'd like to retitle the piece "No true journalist". She sounds like a cabinet maker bemoaning the Ikea-isation of furniture.

Best case not only case. Having the formal education then adding a few years experience. The alternative case she listed was just the experience in the newsroom.

Best case to prepare to call oneself a journalist sounds like it would be essential to actually doing it, rather than being preferential in preparing to do it. But yeah.

She sounds like a cabinet maker bemoaning the Ikea-isation of furniture.

No, she sounds like a hacker bemoaning the rise of learn-to-program-in-24-hours 'app' developers.

A lot of newsroom editors and journalists would be better off if they read this article. It explains how journalism should be, but unfortunately not how it is. There are exceptions of course - the Economist springs to mind.

Unfortunately a lot of journalists don't live by the points set forth in te article. "A journalist is obsessed with the Truth." and "A journalist is a skeptic (and often a critic)." for instance are a joke to anyone who's seen their press releases copied into an article more or less word by word.

I know a few journalists, and they do indeed strive towards high standards. The problem is that since most news corporations, as we all know, aren't doing very well they're under pressure to churn out articles at an ever higher rate. And the journalism suffers. There is just no way they can churn out five well researched, skeptic, truthful articles every day.

Unfortunately for news organisations this is a bad spiral: Worse reporting leads to fewer readers which lead to cutbacks which lead to worse reporting.

I up-voted this because I didn't see why someone down-voted you (to zero).

Is this article a troll or does it just have troll-like powers over me? Journalists care more about the truth than bloggers? A journalist serves the people? What planet is this person living on? The journalists whose work I have occasion to observe, with a few and dwindling number of honorable exceptions, serve power.

The reason journalism is dying is that most journalists -- by which I mean most people making a living under that job title; who on earth is the author referring to? -- long ago discarded these values. Luckily we have the internet and a significant body of courageous bloggers (among, it must be said, a lot of garbagey ones) who actually do care about them, producing real critique, analysis, and even reporting, that for once does not insult the intelligence.

I must be missing something. Surely it's not possible for anyone to have their head that far up. Or maybe this is just what you get when the echo chamber succumbs to denial.

Edit: after surfing around a bit, I think it may be that the author is simply naive. I'd bet money that journalism "training" consists in good part of repeating such self-flattering bromides about journalists, and it sounds to me like the author is just repeating what she was taught. She probably doesn't deserve my rant, but the "journalists" I'm thinking of certainly do, so I'm leaving it.

I broadly disagree; plenty of casual bloggers are excellent journalists (in fact some of those people are easily amongst what I would consider the top echelons of journalism). That said; such people are just natural talents, so I also broadly agree with her critique of bloggers.

But, I think Jolie is muddling Journalists together as a whole, when in my mind there are two very distinct types. One is the type she describes; the meticulously neutral, fact checking, source citing reporter who deals in news and events and "things that happen". This is a very hard job. Then you have the opinion writers; and that is even tougher because you have to be critical but fair, opinionated but balanced - and then you have to write really well to pull it off. A really good blogger can easily fit into this crowd without the training Jolie suggests :)

I can tell you how to tell Bloggers from Journalists; bloggers will write a post in a couple of hours and post it. Journalists will spend a day (or more) writing the same post. And though the subject/conclusion might be identical you can always tell the difference.

I'm going to get into the more nuanced side of being a blogger AND a journalist in the very near future, but you're partially correct.

When I first started news blogging, I was directly told by my editor (Richard MacManus) that my writing was, while perfectly correct, too dry/boring to get any kind of significant pageviews. He and Marshall Kirkpatrick taught me how to carefully interject analysis and heavily qualified opinion (which was always identified as such) into a blog post to make a kind of news/opinion hybrid.

It's a delicate art, indeed. And a topic for a different post. =)

That's good to hear. I think journalism like your own is likely to become the saviour of the trade, as it were.

Such rigorous writing is never given the time in print media. Hell; I wrote for a monthly that had ample time for fact checking but just didn't want to spend the money :(

Please: name some names. Your description of the ideal journalist is fairly good, but doesn't really tell us anything about the real world.

Naming names amounts to either hero-worship or gossip/slander. I plan to go into more real-world application of these principles for digital media journalists soon, though. I've already started posting in that series, called "Be a Better Journo."

Believe me, I would LOVE to call people out, and I can give a specific example for a good journo/blogger and a bad one for each of these 10 points.

If you're going to downvote at least have to courtesy to explain my error; always happy to hear my mistakes. :)

A problematic dual-loyalty is embedded in this list.

"5. A journalist is obsessed with the Truth."

and

"6. A journalist serves the people." which was expanded on with "In telling all sides of a story for the benefit of the proletariat alone"

Without getting too deeply into it, you can't serve the people and the truth any more than a democratic vote will always arrive at the best public policy. A bias toward "the people with little or no power or influence in this world" is still a bias and will be a diversion from the truth.

Short version: You're a journalist if you've been to j-school and if you pass all of Jolie O'Dell's subjective tests. Too bad there aren't hardly any journalists at all who can pass that test, including most likely Jolie herself.

For fun make the same list about who's a developer and who's not.

(I'm not a blogger--at least not since maybe 4 years back)

So much for all those journalists who got to where they are via cadetships/traineeships - you're nothing according to Jolie O'Dell.

Honestly, this point strikes me as someone trying to justify their own actions as the "correct" actions.

... Whether in the hallowed halls of higher learning _or in the less-hallowed halls of a professional newsroom_, the journalist has been trained as such.

I think the blog post should rather be named "How to tell journalism from blogging". Simply because you can be a journalist without devoting yourself to journalism (just like you can be a programmer without really doing any good programming).

As one that grew up knowing one of Sweden's most prominent journalists I can vouch for some extremely impressive skills that are needed in order to be a good journalist. It's very much about the amount of schooling and _continuous_ preparation you put into a column: a blogger may become successful merely venting his/her thoughts while a "true" journalist reads a book per hundred written words.

I agree that might be a better title. I thought it was interesting that she obviously considers herself a journalist but in that article, she was "ranting" with her blogger hat on.

You have to say she is a journalist and a blogger. But you can also make the distinction between when she is practicing journalism and when she is blogging. As she says, without an "op-ed" section, it is sometimes difficult to tell which is which!

In a way, the word "journalist" is similar to "hacker" - used with pride by members of the profession, and mostly with negative connotations by outsiders.

By this arbitrary criteria I would say there are about 100 times as many blogger-journalists than there are television-news-journalist. Those guys on TV need to stop giving the bloggers a bad name.

I think a similar piece could be written with the title "How to tell a journalist from an anchor"

Excellent rant! However, she sets the standard too high for some mainstream "journalists" to qualify (no, not just MSNBC and FOX stooges.)

Edit: s/he/she/g

My standards are set high on purpose; living up to them is a lifelong quest.

The part about sources and especially linking to them is something I wish bloggers would take to heart. I'm so tired of shitty blogs that go out of their way to link to more of their own garbage or search engine spam "tag pages" instead of companies, products, wikipedia, news sites etc to provide context.

3) and 5) are often contradictory, which is the key problem of "objective" journalism. If you don't use your own opinions/interpretations, whose do you use? Not interjecting opinion in practice means accepting the conventional wisdom, or accepting the framing of the subject of your article. Since both the conventional wisdom and the subjects of an article have a bias away from the truth, you cannot refrain from opinion and seek the truth.

The difference between a professional journalist and an amateur blogger? Professional journalists have the benefit of being paid to lie to you.

If you think about it:

  A journalist works for a news organization.
  A blogger writes via a blog.

Some are both. Most are not. Any good or bad connotations, evolving as they might (not the least because the spheres of connotations do come into contact with each other), can be understood as experiences relating to these two simple facts.

Using this list of criteria, which I have no reason to disagree with, I am forced to conclude that the world needs more writers and fewer journalists.

Congratulations on the strong argument.

How to tell a journalist from a blogger: A journalist is trained in journalism.

(This is a really poor argument)

A great article. Bloggers who fancy themselves New Journalists would do well to read it and learn.

While I would agree that most bloggers should not be called journalists, I think that the author comes dangerously close to "no true Scotsman"-territory. Many, if not most of the people commonly referred to as "journalists" (e.g. people writing professionally for big newspapers) would not fit her definition of a journalist. It is more a description of a romantic ideal than of the people actually working in journalism.

Definitely. I laughed out loud when reading about how "true" journalists always provide attribution. "Real" journalism on anything of interest is cluttered with anonymous quotes and reeks of the journalist's efforts to protect his or her contacts and food budget. It's also true that journalists often suppress actual news (i.e. the insubordination of military commanders, to choose a recent example that one feels from sub-text Jolie actually may have had in mind) in favor of gossip and party line "reporting."

It was equally funny to read about journalists' unflinching devotion to questioning what they're told. A more uncritical type-what-you-hear crowd has seldom been seen. "Real" journalists are rather devoted to he-said-she-said kind of opinions-on-shape-of-earth-differ writing.

Yes, attribution is a funny subject.

Ever seen an article about science that linked to the actual paper that was the reason the article got written in the first place?

Ever seen a blog discussing science put that link in?

"Real" journalism on anything of interest is cluttered with anonymous quotes and reeks of the journalist's efforts to protect his or her contacts and food budget.

I think you watch too many Dateline-esque shows. Whether or not the stock market went down and what that means for the economy according to economist X does not require 'anonymous quotes'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com