Bloggerism vs Journalism

Bloggers and Journalists are two very distinct persons, two different personalities, two different trains of thought, two different entities altogether. Can a blogger be also defined as a journalist and vice versa? Let me try to answer that question.

Jour.nal.list n. a person who writes stories or articles for a newspaper or magazine or broadcasts them on radio or television.

Blogger n. a person who writes weblogs, a person who keeps and updates a blog.

Journalism

Now a journalist either works for a news corporation, a TV station, radio station or is a freelancer. They report on current events, local news stories ask questions to the people in charge and get answers to what the public wants to know. They seldom portray their own feelings in their reports and their writings are always based on facts, some of which may not be true and some are fed to them to seem true.

Reporting

Most of the time as they report something they try to be the first inline to get the “Breaking Report“. This is usually the case today in terms of material which has made the world more sensitive to certain groups of people simply because of some misinformation flying around and the urge to be the one who got the scoop, even if they didn’t get the other side of the story. On the other hand investigative journalism does do its job and gets the right story. If it weren’t for journalists many bloggers wouldn’t be doing what they are doing today.

The paparazzi is a whole other case altogether.

Remuneration

If you are a freelance journalist you usually get paid per story that you break, write or get the scoop on. Journalists that work for news agencies get paid by them, so they are salaried. Trying to get paid for your freelance stories, I’ve read, can be a quite an uphill task unless you are a seasoned and well known freelance journalist.

Bottom line, journalists need to eat too.

Crossing over

Some journalists blog but again they can be constrained by the corporations they work for and most of all politics. After all if they write something on their own personal space contrary to what they reported they could get fired or their stories could not be published anymore.

It is an open fact that some of the news corporations and journalists are favored by political parties in power than the others. Why? Good question.

Bloggerism

A blogger sets up a weblog to give their own point of view of things happening in the world along with talking about themselves, sharing pictures and many more things.

Reporting

When writing about current events a blogger is not constrained by getting facts as they mostly give their point of view according to what major media sources and other journalists report.

Almost all the major weblogs will quote and refer to a news article and base their train of thought around that. So in a way bloggerism is very much influenced by journalism. For example, blogs that report on the state of the internet are so popular that they get sent information about new and happening products and releases before the mainstream media gets to know about it.

But you will hardly see a newspaper take up a story that a blogger may have gotten an exclusive on. CNN has implemented something called iReport and has time and again showed its viewers what emails they get, but then again I believe those are strictly censored.

Other bloggers that write about whatever fancies them are just that, people writing whatever fancies them. You either read it or you don’t. Are their opinions swayed when being paid for an article? Mine doesn’t. Would a journalist still report if he wasn’t being paid to do so?

Don’t copywriters get paid tens of thousands of dollars to beautify a product with words, don’t graphic designers get paid to make celebrity front page covers look flawless/voluptuous, don’t fashion designers get paid to push a textile because of surplus, even if they know it’s out of style. Yes, they do!

Remuneration

Bloggers are not reporters, they do not get paid salaries to write on their blogs. They do not get a freelance check, unless they work for a network of blogs. They are ordinary people like you and me just writing and trying to make a few extra bucks.

Most are genuine, of course you have the scrapers { liken them to the paparazzi }, and inserting a few PPC ads or taking a sponsored posting doesn’t mean they are evil or “cheap shills”. It just means they need to eat as well.

I do agree that there are some bad apples, but then again I also wish some journalists would also get the other side of story.

Crossing over

Can a blogger become a journalist? Yes, they can. But then you have a different set of codes and ethics to follow. You can’t just write what you think or feel, you have to write FACTS. When you do end up getting the facts make sure you get both sides of the story.

Writing what you think is right, is fine. But is the world of journalism ready to accept an ordinary man or woman to provide information in a journalistic format from somebody who writes more from an emotive point of view?

Are we as readers ready to accept it as well?

Many websites are set up in an editorial format and provide information in a weblog type of way, but in the end are they bloggers? editors? journalists? just somebody writing?

Can be a blogger become a journalist and can a journalist express his own views regardless of what they are supposed to report on the 7′o clock news. The answer lies not with me, not with them, but with you.

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