To blog or not to blog?

Blogs also give Finnish journalists ideas of new trends and interests of public, but they do not count as a source of trustworthy information. Reporters read “citizen journalists” with more than a pinch of salt. However, Finnish editors in big media organisations encourage journalists to write blogs. Therefore, blogging has also become part of the work of journalists. Several big media outlets have blogs on their websites, mostly kept by their own staff writers.

The same goes in Yemen, where there are few occasions that Yemeni media used the materials published in blogs due to the inability to verify the authenticity of their content. In some countries with lower Internet penetration like Yemen and Armenia, blogging cannot pose a threat to journalism at the moment. Therefore, blogs in these two countries remain to be a collection of news from other conventional media, spaces for debates on politics, life, social and economic issues. It is possible though that the popularity of blogs will increase in Armenia with the increased penetration and access to the Internet as well as the increased professionalism of bloggers.

American bloggers, in fact, play a vital role in helping professional journalists perform their avowed civic functions, as blogs have the potential to create new readers for newspapers.

As long as the impact of the rise of bloggers on professional journalism is concerned, some journalists believe that the blogosphere isn’t as big as we think. It could be argued that anybody can start a blog and thus the threshold for the ‘quality’ of opinion leaders has fallen. A great deal of the panic about blogging is fuelled by incredible statistics about the number of new blogs started each hour. While this is true, it is also the case that the majority of blogs in the United States, for example, are never read (except, perhaps by family and friends...if the blogger is lucky). Therefore, many believe that journalists should avoid positioning bloggers against professional journalism in a simple binary opposition.

Perhaps journalists should develop a more nuanced approach to blogging that extends beyond the rather abstract notion of a blogosphere. One approach would be to construct a rudimentary typology of blogs (the activist blog, the journalist’s blog, the accredited expert’s blog, the anonymous blog, the politician’s blog, etc.) and gauge the relative impact of these different sorts of blogs and that of a professional journalist.

But is blogging by journalists really affecting their impartiality?

While some editors openly want the journalist bloggers to follow their newspapers guidelines, which makes the journalists withdraw from active blogging, as is the case in South Korea, participants from other countries (of whom seven admitted to have blogs either carrying their names or borrowed names) disagreed on blogging by journalists. Some journalists think blogging affects the impartiality of a journalist, for when a journalist writes his/her opinions on their blog, then readers might question their impartiality.

Some journalists argue that there is a conflict of interest between blogging and professional journalism as reading a blog of a journalist makes people more critical of his/her professional skills. Other journalists argue that a journalist can be just as opinionated in newspaper articles as in their blogs. In UK, for example, some of the best respected journalists are employed precisely to write opinion pieces. Hence, there is a distinction between newspaper opinion writers and blogs. Others suggest that a journalist might blog under an assumed name to avoid the risk of being seen not top be impartial in their professional journalism. But this cannot guarantee a journalist’s anonymity: “Even if you write under a fake name, readers will know your identity,” one journalist argued.

The discussion was moderated by Dr. David Levy, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Participants: Mohamed El-Sayed, Laura El-Tantawy (Egypt), Amel Al-Ariqi (Yemen), Annikka Mutanen, Salla Nazarenko (Finland), Chris Finlay (U.S), Firas Khatib (Israel), Haiyan Wang (China), Sang-Kil Hwang (South Korea), Suren Musayelyan (Armenia), Toshiya Kaba (Japan), and Thi le Thuy Tran (Vietnam).

This report was written by Mohamed El-Sayed with assistance from Alejandro Ribo Labastida