In the course of reading Christopher Allbritton’s take on US policy towards Iran, I came across his recent post on the truth about blogging-as-journalism:
When I started Back-to-Iraq, almost five years ago, I was hopeful that my brand of online journalism, supported by the public, would take off. That’s not been the case. Why? Because doing journalism is expensive.
Josh [Marshall] has investors. Michael [Yon] freelances and embeds himself where his costs are mainly paid for by the U.S. government. (Food, transportation around Iraq, connection costs, etc.) And as for me, I stopped getting donations long ago — I got kind of bored by the hustle required — and I support myself by freelancing.
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Blogging can be really great. It’s empowering for the individual, you can do some risky stuff (you need to watch your facts, ethics, etc.) and it allows you to get your stuff out there when you can’t get the stuff in a magazine. The culture has moved in such a way that including blog clips is perfectly respectable to include now for a writing assignment. But equating the average blog with journalism done by seasoned pros at the New York Times or the Washington Post is wrong. It cheapens what costs money and time to produce and it reduces the value of the “product.” It helps turn news into a commodity that makes journalism worse because newspapers can’t figure out how to make money off it. And if they can’t do that, they’ll close down or scale back coverage — to the detriment of all. Tragedy of the commons and all.
9 responses to “Roasting chestnuts: the journalist-blogger”
Chris Albritton’s snobbery is matched only by his false assumptions about Mike Yon, and about the mainstream media he is so proudly embedded in.
Mike is 100% reader supported.FULL STOP.
He gets no monies from any other sources. He does not “freelance”.
His dispatches are reprinted in the MSM but he receives no money for that. Nor does he receive money from advertisers, since he has none.
He is a successful journalist for many reasons:
his work is not agenda based
he reports the truth, good, bad and freaking ugly.
his writing is compelling, evocative, raw, powerful and creates a sense of immediacy.
His photojournalism is some of the best around today. He is a one man operation that shoots video, takes still photography and writes all while dodging bullets, and risking being killed by IED’s or kidnapped. He is every bit a journalist as Michael Gordon, John Burns, Dexter Filkins, Tom Ricks, and more so than Chris Allbritton.
Perhaps if Chris had written pieces that were as honest and evocative his initial online endeavor would have proved successful.
As for Chris elitist crap about seasoned pros at that left wing rag the NY Times- with the exception of John Burns, no one has spent more time in Iraq covering this war- than Michael Yon- covering this war. The only other writer of note at the Times is Michael Gordon.
The idea that a writer is a seasoned journalist simply because he/she is employed by the Times or The Post or CNN or NBC is laughable but not nearly as absurd as Chris’ misguided idea that blogging “helps turn the news into a commodity that makes journalism worse because newspapers can’t figure out how to make money off it”.
The seasoned journalists and the organizations they work for have proven to be untrustworthy, biased, and have,at times, been caught twisting the truth if not downright lying.
The MSM IS a commodity – but that happened when CNN introduced 24 hours news, not because of bloggers!
The MSM is losing money and audience because the marketplace now has choices —and we choose our information sources from those we trust.
Quite obviously more people trust Mike Yon, then the “seasoned journalists” of the mainstream media of which Chris is proud to be a member of. He’s right, he isn’t in “our club” — we don’t want him.
Chris is such a “seasoned journalist” yet he can’t even get his facts right about Michael Yon.
Chris’ claims that real journalism is expensive while implying that Michael Yon isn’t a real journalist because Michael “freelances and embeds himself where his costs are mainly paid for by the U.S. government. (Food, transportation around Iraq, connection costs, etc.) is both misleading and false.
ALL JOURNALISTS, from Michael Gordon to John Burns to Brian Williams to small town journalists who embed with the military receive food, transportation, a bed to sleep on,and access to the internet. And their insurance, medical coverage, equipment costs, and transportation to and from Iraq are completely paid for/covered by their employers.
Michael knows only to well how expensive ‘real’ journalism is – has to bear all those costs on his own, and has been able to do so ONLY because his readers trust his online journalism and as such, they support him financially.
If Chris can’t get his facts right about how Mike Yon earns his living as a journalist, and can’t seem to remember that all journalists who embed with the military receive the same considerations when it comes to food, transportation in Iraq, and internet access, then how can anyone trust anything written by Chris.
Maybe that’s why his “brand of online journalism” failed!
Adrian, I think it is interesting that he compares blogging only to the NY Times and Washington Post, two papers that are representative only of themselves in the U.S., as national newspapers. Will the financially struggling metro dailies throughout the rest of the U.S. continue to be sufficiently funded to conduct “journalism?” Has reprinting pooled articles from the AP been journalism? Seems to me that blogs are not the only ones who will need to find a working business model in the next few years. (Steve Boriss, The Future of News)
@huntress – I have negotiated embeds and they certainly do defray some – but not all – of your costs, but Allbritton is not impugning Yon’s work by my reading. He’s just saying that reporting is expensive and the funded blogger model has only produced one Michael Yon – and I’m sure that’s because Yon is willing to accept a level of remuneration and hardship that many of us would not. Yon also has to sell prints of his photos to keep going. But would readers pay his medical bills? I ask because, reporters and journalists do get injured (and killed), and they and their dependents need looking after. This is where big media organizations can actually come in handy…and rotate people through assignments. When Yon is exhausted there’s no one to back him up…
@Steve – McClatchy maintains a presence in Baghdad , but covering foreign stories is expensive and dangerous for those doing it, and largely unpopular with the audiences they serve…
While I respect Chris Albritton, and have interacted with him in the past on issues involving Iraq — I passed him advanced notice from several soldiers I knew of the Fallujah assault, for instance — I think he is guilty of generalization and faulty logic in his article, and that several of his premises are fundamentally flawed.
Chris says:
“I was hopeful that my brand of online journalism, supported by the public, would take off. That’s not been the case. Why? Because doing journalism is expensive.”
It depends upon how you practice journalism, and whether your goal is to blog for profit or not. Mine isn’t, and yet John Pilger once called what I do “first-class investigative work that ought to shame well-paid journalists.” And given his mantelpiece full of awards…. well, who am I to disagree with him? ;-)
The thing is, it’s not that online journalism is impossible. It’s that you can’t expect a blog to pay for your plane ticket to Turkey or Jordan, for the trip into Iraq, for your satellite telephone, for vehicle costs, and for the small private army you might need to keep you safe. If a considerable amount of that gets paid for out of your blog — as once happened for Chris — well, consider yourself lucky.
The thing is though, we all have access to the internet, and to all those who use it. That’s a huge, huge tool for journalism. The caveat is, you need to be able to locate and develop relationships with the people who are close to the story.
I do this as a matter of course, but not because I’m a journalist. I do it because I’m innately curious, and because I prefer my news as unfiltered as possible. And this has, on several occasions, led me to break significant news stories first as a result.
“Equating the average blog with journalism done by seasoned pros at the New York Times or the Washington Post is wrong…”
… and yet entirely misses the point. The blogs I read are not average, and there must be tens of thousands out there that aren’t. Journalists usually aren’t specialists in anything other than journalism, but tens of thousands of bloggers are. Many of them know their stuff far better than the “so-called experts”.
I remember finding Professor Juan Cole’s blog on the Middle East long before practically anyone in the general public knew of him. I even helped him set up his first RSS feed. Today, Professor Cole is a regularly appearing columnist and an expert for major news broadcasts.
There are plenty of people out there with a high degree of expertise in their fields. They aren’t professional journalists, but I have learned more from them more consistantly than from most of the news I read.
Chris also misses the point that *ANY* blog can potentially be journalism, if it’s close to the story. I go out of my way to find blogs that are, and to share their stories. Some of my most compelling moments of blogging have been in telling the stories of orinary people in extraordinary circumstances, such as was the case when I used blog searches and LiveJournal directory searches to track down residents of New Orleans who weren’t evacuating the day before Katrina hit. Some of them would search large sections of New Orleans for working phone lines, and then use car batteries to power their laptops in order to let people know that they were alright, and what was happening inside the city. It was often quite powerful stuff, and more accurate than some of the dangerously false rumors picked up by the press.
Journalism isn’t some sort of professional act of transubstantiation performed by an ordained journalist. It’s people telling other people about what’s going on in the world. Anyone can do it. Most don’t, but quite a few do it pretty well.
America had over 2,000 newspapers between between 1690 and 1820, and the great majority of those were in the original 13 colonies. Fewer than half lasted two years or longer. They rarely had headlines or even illustrations.
Benjamin Franklin’s newspaper was a mere 4 pages long. Franklin sometimes printed six-month-old articles from London when he had no current material from incoming ships.
Well, today pretty much everyone owns a “printing press”, and can deliver the news with far greater immediacy, and with higher-quality content. And while what most bloggers do doesn’t qualify as journalism, a significant minority does.
So, where does that leave professional journalism funded by advertising? It leaves it competing against a wealth of free, non-commercial content, a significant amount of which is compelling journalism.
Is that damaging to their current business model? Sure. But I have yet to see any firm indication that it’s damaging to the field of journalism as a whole. It’s been good for me, and has made multi-millionaires out of a lot of people I know. It’s also been incredibly empowering for hundreds of thousands of people.
Frankly, it’s been very disappointing to see so many journalists use their blogs to attack bloggers who aren’t journalists. It’s like watching horse&buggy salesmen trying to mandate that a horse be in front of every new automobile that’s sold.
The ad-driven ink & paper business model is significantly less viable than it used to be. So change it.
Why aren’t local papers publishing stories, saying that they’ve decided to gradually move away from an ad-driven revenue source towards community-funded journalism? Why aren’t they establishing trusts which wealthy community members could contribute to, asking for assistance from local government, encouraging their readers to set up an endowment for them in their wills… my local public television station is doing this! They even take a few days of airtime a year to auction off goods and services donated by the public, in order to help fund their organization.
Why are so many journalists so afraid of solutions that don’t involve advertising? For a long time now, I’ve heard journalists claim that they want to remove undue corporate influence from their organizations. Good. Here’s your big chance.
And the thing is, nobody says you have to give up advertising revenue entirely… you just have to move towards a future where ad revenue is a smaller piece of the pie, because the ad-driven model is incapable of supporting as many journalists as it once did.
A hundred years from now, there will still be journalists. How, I wonder, will they judge the journalists of today?
Good journalism is expensive, no matter how you slice it. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it on a tight budget, but there are a lot of angles to consider, especially if you want to do investgative journalism properly. There’s the cost of research, the legal stuff, the legwork, what have you.
We are also at an awkward period where old and new media are truly colliding — the old guard are losing their clout and their profit margins, while the new have an audience, but it’s a fickle one that expects something for nothing. The question is what form will the New Journalism take when the dust settles.
The problem right now is that blogging and the Internet in general have a lot more to offer journalism that all the traditional media forms. It’s better than print, TV, and radio, but (A) no one has thought of the way to make it pay and make it a long-term staple rather than a short-term fad, and (B) no one has quite grasped how to use the Internet and blogs in a way that you can take advantage of all of its inherent strengths and beauty.
We are still doing journalism through blogs and the Net the way we have always done it (i.e., by the old paradigms, assumptions, and rules of the game) — and that’s the question to consider.
Plus, there is the question of maintaining high quality content without going into pseudo-celebrity gossip as filler, not to mention how to bring younger audiences into consuming real news, and not poor substitutes such as the Daily Show and the Onion.
So when we in the news business can reconcile all those issues, then maybe we can find a new model that not only is profitable, but better than what we have now.
Evolution is not a bad thing at all.
@Mark – I agree of course that journalism is something you do, not something you get licenced for, but I still don’t want to leave all reporting to adventurous types with independent means.
I think what Chris Allbritton is saying is that his method wasn’t sustainable as a means of covering a conflict.
By all means let’s have journalists starting their own businesses (back in the day, the Independent was founded by journalists), but then what’s freelancing if it isn’t independent content generation!
@Alexandra – I agree. We have to keep looking for new ways to pay for important stuff (and some of the less important stuff too!).
Adrian – it seems to me Mike Yon is making it work. To complain that he has to sell his photos to survive is outlandish. He’s not selling 3x5s on street corners – he’s selling limited edition prints. So his work is subsidized by his art and the Guardian sells washing machines.
But the real issue surely is commitment and talent. How committed do you have to be to pull off a Mike Yon? How talented?
@Peter – I’m not complaining about him selling photos, I’m saying it shows you how tight his funding his. The issue is even Yon isn’t getting enough support to make this a viable model…
agreed – no viable business model. But short term at least it does work for Yon. It might work for others who are exceptionally talented and committed.
Amateur enthusiasts jumping in to report on a war, tsunami, or town parade, and then returning to civilian life. More of this in future?