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Betsy’s top Bloggercon ten: Journalism

April 17th, 2004 · 2 Comments

Top ten quotes from discussion led by Jay Rosen:

  1. Chris Lydon (responding to Jay’s question, “What is moving blogs
    toward journalism?”): “We’re moving toward journalism for the same
    reason we bombed Baghdad–because we can.”
  2. Henry Copeland: “150 yrs ago, one of the mainsprings of journalism was partisanship. That has been denatured in the big media.”
  3. Dean Landsman: “Look at LiveJournal. Those are journals–but is that journalism?”
  4. Callie Crossley of WGBH:
    “I am a journalist. Journalism is not just the tools. Journalism is a
    set of practices, a framework. It involves the selection of material,
    framed by some ethics about how you get the material.There are people
    on the web who are journalists, and there are bloggers, and the two are
    quite different.”
  5. Dan
    Gillmor
    (responding to Jay’s question, “You had a whole career in
    journalism before you became a blogger. How did it change you?”) : “Not
    as much as you think. I was a columnist. If you write about tech in
    Silicon Valley, you are used to feedback from readers, and you learn
    they know much more than you do.”
  6. Jay Rosen: “Trust is part of the brand in journalism. The reader doesn’t
    have to re-decide, every time a new byline shows up, do I trust this
    person? In a blog you have to re-do that every day.”
  7. Jeff Sharlet: “As journalist, I covered the Christian right. As
    a blogger, I find myself more and more becoming part of the community
    of the Christian right.”
  8. Micah Sifry: “People are hungry for filters they can trust. We
    are awash in information….An expert, somebody who grabs onto
    something and sticks to it, is serving a useful function.”  David
    Weinberger says, “I’d rather have an aggregator than a filter–100
    different viewpoints from all over the world.” Micah responds, “It’s
    not either-or.”
  9. Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor: “I think journalism needs
    an enema–I think blogging is the best thing to happen to journalism.”
  10. Mary Hodder: “Blogging pulls back the curtain. If a campaign reporter has some particular opinion, I want to know it.”

For more: See Jay’s own discussion, blogposts by Jeff Jarvis and Will Richardson, and photographs by Werner Vogels.

Tags: Metablogging

2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Jeff Sharlet @ The Revealer // Apr 18, 2004 at 10:21 am

    Thanks, Betsy (I think) for including my comment at Jay’s journalism session in your top 10. Out of context though, I’m concerned that it’s a profession of a faith I don’t share. I find myself “more and more becoming part of the community of the Christian right” not as believer in that theology, but as a discussant in the conversation they’re holding, simply by virtue of writing about their media daily and then working with them, in a sense, to deconstruct my posts in The Revealer’s comment board. I should have clarified in the session, since I see similar things happening to other bloggers, who get not just immersed but connected to communities about which they write. Can be harmless, can alter the journalism you do.

  • 2 Betsy Devine // Apr 18, 2004 at 10:43 am

    Hi Jeff–Yes, you’re in my top ten because I liked what you said and wanted to give it some broader exposure. Thanks for making your point even better in your comment.