{"id":610,"date":"2007-09-23T03:03:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-23T09:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=610"},"modified":"2007-09-23T03:03:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-23T09:03:00","slug":"roasting-chestnuts-the-journalist-blogger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/09\/roasting-chestnuts-the-journalist-blogger\/","title":{"rendered":"Roasting chestnuts: the journalist-blogger"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n the course of reading Christopher Allbritton<\/span>\u2019s take<\/a> on US policy towards Iran, I came across his recent post on the truth about blogging-as-journalism<\/a>:
<\/p>\n

When I started Back-to-Iraq<\/span><\/a>, almost five years ago, I was hopeful that my brand of online journalism<\/a>, supported by the public, would take off. That\u2019s not been the case. Why? Because doing journalism is expensive.<\/p>\n

Josh [Marshall<\/a>] has investors. Michael [Yon<\/a>] 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 \u2014 I got kind of bored by the hustle required \u2014 and I support myself by freelancing.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Blogging can be really great. It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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<\/span> or the Washington Post<\/span> is wrong. It cheapens what costs money and time to produce and it reduces the value of the \u201cproduct.\u201d It helps turn news into a commodity that makes journalism worse because newspapers can\u2019t figure out how to make money off it. And if they can\u2019t do that, they\u2019ll close down or scale back coverage \u2014 to the detriment of all. Tragedy of the commons<\/a> and all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the course of reading Christopher Allbritton\u2019s 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\u2019s not been the case. Why? Because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}