So,, thanks to the controversy about Sacramento Bee columnist/blogger Dan Weintraub, there is now a growing discussion about whether blogs appearing as part of a larger journalistic institution’s enterprise should be edited. (For independent blogs, it’s not really an issue — they are generally one-person operations anyway.)
As an editor and a blogger, I find that the perspectives on this tend to fall into two camps talking past each other.
Bloggers and those who view blogging as a genuine new online form decry the notion that blogs should be edited; they prize the un-mediated spontaneity of the unedited blog, and believe that editing is contrary to the very heart of the blogging enterprise. Editing in a true blog happens live, in public, in a continuous dialogue between the blogger and his or her readers (and other bloggers).
Many professional journalists (people who earn their living by reporting, writing or editing) scoff at this. They have been trained in an ethos according to which no one is above editing; even when editors-in-chief writes something, somebody else edits it before it’s published. So when these journalists hear bloggers saying, “We don’t need no stinkin’ editors!,” what they hear is a claim of privilege, and their response is to think, “Buddy, who do you think you are? Everyone gets edited!”
My heart is with both of these perspectives; I think they’re both right. Great editors make for great journalism, and many editors have rescued many writers and many publications. Blogs, however, are something different, and they do benefit from presenting the unfiltered, warts-and-all perspective of an individual.
We are getting into trouble, I think, because blogs have acquired some small amount of buzz and excitement, and media organizations are jumping on the bandwagon, but in the process they are aping the superficial qualities of blogs and failing to embrace their essence. If a blog were just “short items organized in reverse chronological order,” every newsroom has one already — it’s called the wire feed. And that, sadly, is what some media operations are now providing as they try to bring blogs into their universe. (Just compare CNet’s “Wi-Fi Journal” to Glenn Fleishman’s Wi-Fi blog to understand the difference.) Meanwhile, when a newspaper actually puts a real blog in the hands of a writer, as the Sac Bee apparently did with Weintraub, editors freak out and other reporters get jealous. It can be done — Dan Gillmor has been doing it for a long time now — but it’s not easy.
A newspaper or magazine editor considering what to do about blogs can either say, “This is an experiment, go, blog, you don’t need an editor,” and make that clear to the readers, and persuade the newspaper’s lawyers to relax. (That last bit is probably the hardest.) Or she could say, “Look, blogs are great, but they’re not what we do.” If it were me, what I’d probably do is encourage my reporters to keep blogs in their spare time. (The union would probably not be happy with that, however.)
But I wouldn’t waste my time trying to push blogs back into the old template of the newsroom. The world is richer for the existence of well-edited newspapers and unedited blogs. I want them both — they complement each other nicely. And there’s no reason we can’t have both. What we don’t need is the same old news product in new blog-shaped bottles.
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