I don’t think I’ve ever taken Technorati’s annual blogger survey before, but the company’s annual reports have usually been a useful source of information, so when I got an email inviting me to respond I took a few minutes to do so.

I began to think something was off when I saw this question:

WordPress’s hosted service at WordPress.com, which has gazillions of users, is free. I host my own blog using the WordPress.org open-source version. I do pay an ISP for server space, so maybe that’s considered “a paid third-party hosting service,” but boy is this confusing! Meanwhile, it’s 2010 — how many people handcode their own HTML? Isn’t it, like, statistically insignificant?

On to the next head-scratcher:

Um, my Twitter account is linked to my blog. Like a horde of other bloggers I use a widget to display my tweets on my blog. But like so many other bloggers I don’t feed my posts automatically into Twitter, because Twitter works better when you actually speak as a person. So there’s no accurate way to answer this question.

Then there was this:

The question’s wording presupposes that the respondent is blogging anonymously, which is just plain weird, since most bloggers identify themselves.

This question began to suggest where Technorati’s head was at.

It turned out that the survey was heavily focused on the role of “brands” in blogging, which is usually a signal that somebody somewhere has dollar signs in their eyes.

“Has a brand ever approached you…?” How exactly would a brand do that? Have brands grown mouths and legs?

I’m usually courteous but I guess I snapped.

As the beleaguring of traditional news organizations continues, newsrooms are actually growing elsewhere. You may have noticed that places like Yahoo, AOL and the Huffington Post are all hiring these days — and they’re hiring, um, actual journalists.

Yesterday we learned that New York Times economics correspondent Peter Goodman was decamping for HuffPo. “For me it’s a chance to write with a point of view,” Goodman told Howard Kurtz. He described fitting into the Times voice as “almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.”

Jay Rosen commented on Twitter:

You get what this means, right? The View from Nowhere has become a liability in keeping newsroom talent

And again:

It’s not so much that @petersgoodman wants to be a pundit. He wants to report what’s really going on. In his own voice.

Yahoo has been building a bloggy news organization, too. But today we learned from Andrew Golis that one of his high-profile hires, former Gawker writer John Cook, was leaving Yahoo and returning to Gawker. Golis explained: “He decided that he prefers the license Gawker gave him to add his opinions into his reporting to the scale and credibility Yahoo! News could offer.”

So Yahoo, theoretically a “new” news organization, also finds itself losing talent because of its house rules about mixing “opinion” and reporting. The story isn’t as simple as “journalists flee old media for new so they can write in their own voices.”

Consider that the most consistently and determinedly enforced code of neutrality in today’s media world can be found not in an old-school newsroom but on Wikipedia, where “neutral point of view” is a sacred first principle. We need a better framework for talking about these issues than the crude formula of “Traditionalists prefer objectivity, new media goes for personal voice.”

I’m sympathetic to Rosen’s “View from Nowhere” argument, which neatly inverts the “fair and balanced” rhetoric of traditional objectivity to underscore its downside, and proposes “where I’m coming from” as a more tenable basis for trust in media. I think the “sacred cloak of objectivity,” to use the term recently invoked by the Times’ new public editor, is tattered beyond repair. But I also sympathize with the folks at the Times and Yahoo who just lost some talented employees by policing institutional boundaries for individual writers’ voices.

To understand today’s newsroom musical-chairs moves, I’d point you back to my post on the blog-broadcast barrier and the reach-reliability ratio. The stewards of a Yahoo News, with its phenomenal-sized audience, or a New York Times, with its blue-chip reputation, need to perform a balancing act: They can’t pretend that the world isn’t changing around them, and that their readers really do expect and demand less faux objectivity and more transparency and interpretive honesty today. But they also understand that their reach and influence demand extra protocols of responsibility and care. I think they’re right to do so, even if it means that they move a little more cautiously into the future.

The challenge for their managers is a subtle one: How to infuse their coverage with the distinctive human voices of journalistic observers who no longer wish to suppress their personal perspectives, while also insuring that the big megaphones they own do not turn into amplifiers of treacherous rumors, personal vendettas, or partisan lies. (Fox News provides a handy negative exemplar here.)

I think the answer will turn out to have a lot to do with really smart editors who are willing to experiment with new forms — editors who actively encourage writers who show “where I’m coming from” but guide them away from the worst excesses of unfiltered personal journalism.

Editing is a behind-the-scenes role, and it’s threatened by both the bruising economics of the current media biz and by the publish-first-ask-questions-later logic of the digital age. But editorial entrepreneurship is how the most creative institutions will begin to square the circle they face — finding a home for writers who expect to have strong voices while also responsibly serving their mass audiences.

This is a long post describing a phenomenon I’ve been observing for a decade and a half. Here is the summary:

You know the blood-brain barrier? It’s what protects your sensitive brain tissues from harmful substances in your bloodstream.

Our media system has its own version of this: I call it the blog-broadcast barrier. It’s a set of principles, practices and instincts that limits the transfer of unverified and unreliable information from the Internet to high-volume broadcast channels.

When errors, hoaxes and lies get widely transmitted today, it’s almost always thanks to a breakdown in this blog-broadcast barrier. News organizations with large followings will pick up some tantalizing item online, fail to vet it properly, and broadcast it to millions.

Once you notice this pattern of failure, you start finding it everywhere. The solution is obvious: the bigger a media outfit’s reach is, the stronger its filter should be — the more responsibility it should take for checking stuff out.

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Maybe you came across this little story last week about Rush Limbaugh spreading a false tale about a federal judge’s hunting proclivities. Limbaugh told his considerable audience that the judge in charge of a case about the constitutionality of Obama’s health-care reform law is an avid bear hunter and amateur taxidermist — and might somehow therefore be out for liberal blood. Rush’s staff apparently picked up this bogus item from a short-lived Wikipedia hoax. The judge, it turns out, does have a thing for flowers — he’s president of the American Camellia Society — but has never shot a bear.

Now, for years, the ritual in the media when this sort of thing happened was to wag a finger at the online information source. Bad Wikipedia! Bad Web! Look at the crap those crazies publish — you just can’t trust anything you read online.

That was the line most of the press took in the granddaddy exemplar of this kind of gaffe: Pierre Salinger’s 1996 “scoop” that the US military had shot down TWA Flight 800. Salinger, a former TV correspondent and White house press aide, was shocked and chagrined to learn that the “documents” he’d discovered — and injected directly into the big-media bloodstream — had for some time been widely circulated, and thoroughly debunked, on the Internet. In 1996, commentators hung the responsibility for Salinger’s (and their own industry’s) failure of Net-smarts on the Net itself.

Fortunately, we’ve finally begun to move beyond this “blame it on the Net” reflex. (The New York Times headlined its piece about Limbaugh and the judge “Limbaugh Taken In.”) But the incidence of journalists’ falling for online hoaxes and misinformation remains high. There was the prank in which a student added a fictitious quote to Maurice Jarre’s Wikipedia bio; Wikipedia editors quickly removed the made-up material, yet the quote wound up in many of the composer’s mainstream-media obits. Recently, a Washington Post reporter quoted the Twitter feed of a fictitious California congressman as if he were a real representative.

These are all simple instances of blog-broadcast barrier failure: Media institutions with mass-market-size followings pick up bad information online and run with it, without properly checking it out.
[Read more…]

As you may have read, a group of high-profile and high-quality science bloggers recently left the network that had long housed them because the parent company had done a deal with Pepsi to create a nutrition blog in their midst.

Now we have a high-handed column from the New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan, which basically tells these bloggers: Grow up. Get real. This is the way the world works!

Most writers for “legacy” media like newspapers, magazines and TV see brush fires over business-editorial crossings as an occupational hazard. They don’t quit anytime there’s an ad that looks so much like an article it has to be marked “this is an advertisement.”

That may be because they have editors who (when they’re good) fight to defend standards against the encroachment of the business side. These bloggers had no choice but to represent themselves.

Heffernan goes on to fume about the bloggers’ “eek-a-mouse posturing” and mines their work for quotes that make them look silly or small-minded. I’ve read a lot of these blogs over the years and don’t recognize them in her portrait.

But she misses the bigger story here, so let me lay it out for you. The ScienceBlogs saga is a version of a tale that keeps repeating itself in our online culture — the one where a group of people who (correctly or not) thought of themselves as a community discover that they are being treated as a commodity.

This has been happening from the very beginning of human congregation online. It happened when AOL got sued by its moderators; it happened when the WELL’s pioneers lost their trust in the businessman who bought the service in the mid-’90s. I’m sure it will keep happening, so let’s try to understand it a little better than Heffernan does.

The ScienceBlogs affair is not a case of a bunch of reporters in a newsroom crying foul because a church/state line was crossed. This is a group of writers who believed they were collaborating in their own little space on the Web, a meritocracy of sorts built on their own labor. Then they woke up to the rude realization that somebody else owned their real estate — and was going to sell some of the space without their having any say in the matter.

As I understand it, the Pepsi blog was not an advertorial; it was a blog manned by Pepsico-salaried nutritional scientists. It might have been a good blog, for all we know. But it represented a change in the rules. The bloggers weren’t consulted. They thought of themselves as party hosts, and discovered that management though of them as “a source of revenue” (in the words of Bora Zivkovic, a SciBlogger who wrote the definitive post on the controversy).

For Heffernan, it might be better to try to imagine that her Times employers had sold the office or cubicle next to hers to some sponsor’s hand-picked writer, who would henceforth fill the magazine page opposite hers: “Here’s a sponsored journalist — have fun together!”

But, really, it’s not the details of the Pepsi blog that are important. After all, ScienceBlogs’ owner, Seed, withdrew the scheme once the bloggers raised a ruckus. It was too late. The bloggers had lost the illusion that they were involved in a community; they saw the businessman behind the curtain. There was no going back.

This loss of innocence is, I think, a nearly universal experience online. It occurs when one’s initial surge of idealistic delight at the freedom and opportunities of boundless self-expression slams into the realities of the media business online.

People who have experienced this will thereafter keep their antenna out and much more finely tuned to questions of ownership and governance and autonomy. They will not use the word “community” without thinking about it. They will also never again feel quite the same unqualified delight in sharing their writing online.

Should the science bloggers have known what was coming? Should they have been less innocent? Probably. But then they might not have been as exuberantly good at what they did.

I don’t think the outcome is a tragedy. The former ScienceBloggers will continue to be science bloggers, producing great posts and forming new communities. I think they’ll just handle the business-and-independence issues a little more carefully next time around. They are learning from their experience; I wish Heffernan had done so too.

BONUS LINKS: Ex-SciBlogger David Dobbs has a thoughtful response on his Neuron Culture blog.

And Jason Goldman, still on SciBlogs, helps point Heffernan to where the “real science” can be found there.

LATE UPDATE: Heffernan has posted a response at Dobbs’ blog.