I saw this on Twitter today from Jay Rosen:

Publishing used to be the barrier. Now that publishing is easy, getting your stuff picked up, linked to is an essential skill.

Jay was responding to a question from Howard Rheingold, who asked:

Skills for digitally-savvy journalists: RSS, map mashups, widgets, Twitter (video goes without saying). What else?

I read Jay’s answer and had two thoughts. One, this is absolutely right. Two, it is an insight that most working journalists today — at least those who are working for some newspaper or broadcast outlet or magazine, as opposed to those who have already lighted out for the online territories — are occupationally blind to.

They cannot see this because, all their working lives, the business of gathering their audience has been handled for them. Whether you are a brilliant journalist or a total hack, you get accustomed to assuming that you have a lot of readers because you are gifted and wonderful and creative. Whereas, in truth, whether you are in fact gifted and wonderful and creative, or not (and you? you are — of course you are!), you have those readers because you work for some company that has supplied them for you.

In other words, most journalists confuse what they have inherited ex officio with what they have earned through their own talent and sweat. It’s comforting but fundamentally unrealistic. (See Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody for more on this.)

This privilege disintegrates out on the Web once you leave the protective umbrella and traffic supply of a media company. For instance, this little blog used to be associated with Salon.com. In its previous incarnation as part of the Salon Blogs program, it got a significant amount of traffic off Salon’s home page. That was great — but it didn’t have much to do with the quality of what I was producing. (I suppose if I had raved like a lunatic or begun to peddle miracle cures, David Talbot or Joan Walsh would eventually have spoken up.)

When I left Salon the blog became an independent entity. Of course its traffic declined. I could have poured my energy into posting round the clock and promoting the blog — maybe I should have! I’d certainly have had fun. But I’ve been writing books instead. That challenge, at this point in my life and career, feels like it’s pushing me harder and teaching me more. And it’s a living. So the blog is a side effort, and I’m content, for now at least, with its being a poky little personal blog that people who are interested in my work can follow.

So the blog goes along day by day with a few hundred page views (measured for real, conservatively) or maybe breaks a thousand or two on a good day, and I’m fine with that. But then every now and then somebody I don’t know decides to promote something I’ve written on some high-traffic Web crossroads — and suddenly, blam, the traffic goes through the roof. For instance, last week I posted my thoughts on Sarah Lacy’s book. My regulars read it (or not), and I moved on. A week later, some kind soul posted a link to this review over on Y Combinator’s Reddit-style “hacker news” feed, and, blam, thousands of people were reading it –or, you know, at least loading it in their browsers.

Thank you to whoever did that. Writers are always grateful for readers.

This is the way the Web works. If this (or any) blog were my primary focus, I’d be out there rustling up readers for it, because that’s what you have to do. I think a lot of journalists still see this as a grubby, low, self-promoting activity that is beneath them. Of course, it can be done in a grubby way (and often is) — but that’s true of everything. Writing headlines is, after all, another form of the art of rustling up readers. It can be done with style and flair; it can be done crudely and effectively; it can be done clumsily and stupidly. But it must be done. There is no alternative.

Watching how Salon’s home page drove traffic to all its stories through the years depending on the quality of the headlines we wrote taught me to respect this art. The business of publishing a book and figuring out how to get it noticed taught me even more not to look down on it. It is, as Jay said, an essential skill for any journalist who does not already have some guaranteed audience in the back pocket. Those guarantees are increasingly rare — for entry-level folks, they’re virtually non-existent. Relying on them might be even more painful than learning some new tricks.

Romenesko is linking to this from Adam Lashinsky at Fortune:

I’ve been coming around to the opinion that bloggers are just journalists and that the oft-discussed distinctions aren’t meaningful. Let’s just say I’m in the minority. Old-school readers can’t stand these folks for their perceived lack of standards, and the new crowd (my panelists were no younger than I am) wants nothing to do with fuddy-duddy readers. I’m willing to make the same prediction about blogging that I made 10 years ago about “Internet” companies: In 10 years there won’t be an distinction. Blogging will be part of the multi-media spectrum.

So let’s repeat this once more.

Being a blogger does not make you a journalist any more than being a journalist makes you a blogger.

Journalists can (and more and more, they do) blog. People who have blogs are not typically writing journalism but have the opportunity — thanks to the technology — to perform acts of journalism and see them reach a wide public.

Lashinsky wants to erase the line between “journalist” to “blogger,” but it’s not a line, it’s a classic four-quadrant graph. There’s an X axis from “not blogging at all” to “blogging all the time,” and there’s a Y axis from, say, “writes the equivalent of a private diary” to “writes exclusively about public affairs.”

Calling blogging “part of the multimedia spectrum” speaks to the pro journalist’s perspective, for whom the blog is just one more form to explore. That’s a relatively minor aspect of blogging; the real excitement lies in the far wider reaches of the blogosphere that are filled with non-journalists who are beginning to figure out that journalism is no longer a closed guild.

I tried to explain this when I started my blog in July, 2002, and still think the explanation holds:

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

You go away for a week, you come back, and people are still arguing about blogging and journalism! Sheesh. This bit jumped out at me from my catchup reading, an exchange that took place on a panel at a conference hosted by Fortune:

Scoble said that the difference between bloggers and traditional media like Fortune magazine is that the audience participation helps keep his blog honest. “This is written by the audience. People participate in fact-checking,” he said.

Lashinsky, however, got the last laugh. “In the old school, we like to get it right the first time.”

This exchange could have taken place in any year since 2002. I imagine it will still be taking place five years from now. Here’s the problem: both positions are off in a fundamental way.

Scoble’s audience doesn’t write his blog; he does. Saying “this is written by the audience” is simply repepating a formulation of Web 2.0-style idealism that overstates the audience’s role. If it was “written by the audience,” then the audience would cease to be such — it would have become, in Dan Gillmor’s amusing coinage, the people formerly known as audience. (I haven’t seen a video or full transcript of the panel; context might shed some clarity here.) What Scoble means is what most bloggers understand: that their writing exists in a real-time dialogue with their readers, in a fashion that is simply impossible in print, and that does transform the writer’s experience.

Scoble is guilty of exaggeration; Lashinsky’s comment is the one that’s really off. It’s a glib line that I’m sure harvested a wave of guffaws. The thing is, everybody — old school or new — “likes” to get it right the first time. Doing so is hard work. I’m working like mad trying to get every little bit of chronology nailed down for my blogging book; this stuff matters when you’re composing non-fiction.

The problem with the “old school” defense is that, sadly, the old school — newspapers, magazines, broadcast — really screws up the details too regularly to make this argument a credible case. If you have personal deep knowledge of a story, you are bound to find an alarming volume of errors in most versions you encounter in the professional press: everything from misspelled names to basic factual goofs to broad misunderstandings of subject-area subtleties. Yes, there are rare reporters who you can count on to Get Stuff Right. Sadly, they are the exceptions.

Of course we all want “to get it right the first time.” If that’s not a given, then — blogger or ink-stained wretch — you’re in the wrong field. The question is, which approach, the old-fashioned newsroom or the two-way Web, yields the best results when you don’t get it right the first time? If you accept that we live in a fallen world and journalism is always going to be full of errors, one might well prefer the corrective feedback loop of the blogosphere, where you have the chance, thanks to the technology, both to hear from your readership that you’ve gotten something wrong and to correct the story immediately.

Amusingly, as I dig into the history of blogging, its coverage in the media has provided me with an alarming pile of gaffes and errors. Consider this one tiny but glaring example of many: When Justin Hall shut down his blog, posting a dramatic confessional video explaining his decision, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about his decision. The front-page article was headlined, “Time to get a life — pioneer blogger Justin Hall bows out at 31.”

Unfortunately, if you read the article carefully, you learn, a few paragraphs in, that “Hall recently turned 30.” The newspaper had contradicted itself in its own front-page headline. The article text was correct; the hed was wrong. The paper never fixed the error.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Scoble on this.

At the Personal Democracy Forum last week, which I did not attend, Jay Rosen delivered a talk in which he described the turmoil in today’s newsrooms as a phenomenon of tribal migration from the old print world to the Web:

The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great survival drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land that newsroom people have been living on — also called their business model — no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform….And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land.

This astute piece reminded me of the creative but premature choice of imagery John Markoff used back in 1995 when he wrote about the launch of Salon as a harbinger of “tribes of journalists” departing newsrooms for the Web. Today, Rosen suggests, this diaspora is finally beginning in earnest.

I think that his analysis is accurate as far as it goes, and offers a useful metaphor, but that it lets the “tribe” off too easily, in two ways.

First, there is the not insignificant point that Brad DeLong brings up — that the tribe is not composed of blameless victims:

the press corps’s flaws are much deeper than that–it’s not just that it doesn’t understand the new ground to which it is migrating, it’s that it did a lousy job on its own ground as well.

There’s no question in my mind that the woes of the journalism profession today have been at least partially self-inflicted. At the very historical moment that the news pros faced relentless new scrutiny from a vast army of dedicated amateur watchdogs and expert critics, they offered up a relentless sequence of missteps and disasters. Some were failures of professionalism, from the Jayson Blair meltdown to the Dan Rather screwup. But the biggest — the absence of a stiff media challenge to the Bush administration’s Iraq war misinformation campaign — was a failure of civic responsibility. With that failure, the professionals forfeited their claim to special privilege or unique public role as challengers of official wrongdoing and ferreters of truth. The democracy still needs these roles filled, of course. But after the Iraq bungle, the professional journalists’ claim to own them exclusively became much harder to accept.

The other area in which Rosen’s piece lets journalism’s incumbents off a little easy is in its picture of the change in the business landscape as a sort of vast, impersonal inevitability. Like the Irish Potato Famine or the pogroms, the digital age is just there, a force of history that is uprooting the tribe for reasons beyond its control. But in fact the tribe bears some responsibility here — at least its elders and leaders do. Perhaps the average newsroom grunt was in the dark, but top editors have been in a position for at least two decades to see the disruption ahead. Any of them could have sat down with their corporate bosses during that time and said, “This business is doomed unless we take some of the 20-25 percent profit margin you are enjoying and reinvest it in a totally different direction that won’t pay off for a long time.”

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that such advice would have been taken. The public corporations that own most newspapers today (and the private ones, too, for that matter) like their short-term profits. But a newsroom leader ought at least to have been able to frame this choice for the owners. Did that happen anywhere? If so, it happened so quietly it made no difference.

The incumbents of the journalism field are no more likely to risk giving up their profits and their privileges of place than those in any other field. Sunday’s NY Times Business section has an essay by Randall Stross arguing that Microsoft ought to give up on the new Windows 7 and rewrite its operating system from scratch. This would be exciting and bold and could pay long-term dividends, but would entail massive short-term disruption and revenue loss. It is no more likely to happen than the Times deciding tomorrow to shut down its presses and move all its news delivery online.

Migration is certainly still an option for many individual journalists. For institutions, I think the ships may have already sailed.

The Beltway-Blog Battle (James Poniewozik, Time, this week):

Maybe we’ll also stop arbitrarily dividing “real” from “amateur” journalists and simply distinguish good reporting from bad, informed opinion from hot air, information from stenography. Maybe we’ll remember this election as the one when we stopped talking about “the old media” and “the new media” and, simply, met the press.

I posted on Blogology in July 2002:

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

Another good quote from Poniewozik:

“if 3 million people read Drudge and 65,000 read the New Republic, which is mainstream?”

And this one raises my eyebrow a bit:

Russert was one of the last giants of old-school journalism…It’s hard to imagine a future Russert with that kind of singular authority, as the power to set the news agenda moves from insiders to outsiders.

They said the same thing about Cronkite when he retired, of course.