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The war between journalists and bloggers at the Washington Post

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Returning from long travels and a week’s vacation abroad, I waded in to catch up on the Washington-Post-fires-Dave-Weigel tempest and was quickly swamped by the sheer volume of thoughtful commentary.

I’ll conclude this post with a roundup. But for now let me just dig a bit into this bizarre Post ombudsman column on the affair.

It shouldn’t have been that hard to explain why the paper fired Weigel, a talented young journalist-blogger: he’d made some rude comments about some of the people he covered on an ostensibly private email list. Somebody leaked them, and now Weigel is out of a job, and the mailing list — Ezra Klein’s Journolist — is shuttered too.

It seems self-evident to me that Weigel had been hired to placate the right, even though he was plainly not a movement conservative himself. Now he’d gone and shot his mouth off in a way that enraged the right; he no longer served the Post’s needs. And he gave an opening for the faction at the Post that thinks, even at this late date, that this newfangled blogging stuff ought to be curtailed. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg quotes (anonymous) members of this faction and suggests that, in its rush to embrace blogs, the Post “now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training.”

I’m going to resist pointing out how effective the Post’s adult supervision and excretory skills were during the Iraq war buildup, because I want to move on to ombudsman Andrew Alexander’s explanation of the Post’s move, which takes us into strange new territory in the whole bloggers-vs.-journalists realm.

The Weigel affair, Alexander writes, “raises questions about whether The Post has adequately defined the role of bloggers like Weigel. Are they neutral reporters or ideologues?”

Ahh. Those are the two options in the Post newsroom? No wonder the paper is having such trouble!

Alexander goes on to quote Post managing editor Raju Narisetti, whose explanation of the firing offers one headscratcher after another.

“I don’t think you need to be a conservative to cover the conservative movement,” Narisetti told me late today. “But you do need to be impartial… in your views.”

Hold on: If Narisetti wants someone “impartial” covering the conservative movement, that would disqualify any actual conservative from the job, right?

More from Narisetti:

“We’re living in an era when maybe we need to add a level” of inquiry, he said. “It may be in our interests to ask potential reporters: ‘In private… have you expressed any opinions that would make it difficult for you to do your job.'”

I had to read that one twice, but yes, Narisetti does indeed seem to be proposing that the Post screen hires by making sure that they have never expressed any potentially upsetting opinions in private! If you’re going to work for the Post, anything you’ve ever said in private might be held against you. Aspiring Supreme Court nominees have to make sure they leave no paper trails; aspiring Post employees, it seems, would have to leave no signs of mental life, period.

Now, the Post has a long tradition of telling reporters to limit their own political expression outside the paper, and this makes sense up to a point. But this is a paper whose former managing editor, Leonard Downie, once claimed, “I stopped having even private opinions about politicians or issues so that I would have a completely open mind in supervising our coverage.” (I’ve always wondered how, exactly, Downie achieved this advanced level of self-abnegation without benefit of either Zen enlightenment or frontal lobotomy.)

Of course, good journalism is not produced by ciphers. The best journalism emerges from the volatile engagement between the minds of smart, curious reporters and the realities they encounter as they witness events and interview participants. Neither “neutral” nor “ideologue,” such a journalist is simply a human being.

Rather than vainly struggle to decide whether its bloggers ought to be “neutral reporters” or “ideologues,” I’d suggest that the Post simply lets them be bloggers — writers with a point of view that emerges, post by post. Since they are bloggers employed by the Washington Post, they will also be bloggers who do journalism, and that means they have a responsibility to aim for accuracy and fairness and to grapple with whatever the world throws at them that challenges their point of view. (Yes, they should also be savvy enough about the online medium to understand that comments to private mailing lists are unlikely to remain private forever.)

Ironically, my only occasional reading of Weigel’s blog left me with the sense that this is precisely the sort of journalist he is — a hard-working beat reporter in blogger’s clothes whose own perspective was never easy to pin down because he actually seemed to be trying to work it out. That the Post felt compelled to cut him loose suggests that the paper continues to sail into the future without a rudder.

For an example of how an august institution of journalism can embrace blogging without losing its bearings, just look at the Atlantic, which now has a vibrant corps of bloggers, nearly all of whom weighed in on the Weigel controversy. You could spend all day reading their posts, and many others, on this brouhaha. (I did.)

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf dissects the same incoherent ombudsman column I did, and argues that Weigel be judged on his body of work, not his email indiscretions.

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates sees “something much deeper at work here, something about the decline of privilege. This isn’t about the future of journalism. This is about people who don’t want to have to compete, or be held accountable for the falsehoods they write.”

Also at the Atlantic, Julian Sanchez finds “the lesson for young writers from all this: Be Tracy Flick. Don’t say anything remotely interesting, certainly not over e-mail. If you lack the mental discipline to completely suppress critical thought about people and institutions you spend your life covering, get good at pretending.”

Other Atlantic posts on Weigel: James Fallows, Marc Ambinder, Andrew Sullivan (“There is a war going on within American journalism”).

Matthew Yglesias addresses “the odd notion that the ideal reporter would be someone who actually doesn’t have opinions, as if ‘the facts’ were purely transparent and could be merely observed, processed, and then regurgitated into inverted pyramid form without passing through the muck of ‘judgment’ or ‘thoughts about the world.’ ”

Jim Henley sees this controversy as a run-in between the differing mindsets of newspaper and magazine journalists.

More takes from John McQuaid and Mayhill Fowler. Many of these links were culled from Jay Rosen’s extraordinarily valuable Twitter feed.

UPDATE: Technically, it seems, Weigel “resigned” rather than was “fired.” Meaning he submitted his resignation in the wake of controversy and his editors accepted it. They didn’t have to, of course, so I think the spirit of this thing is very much a firing.

Why can’t journalists handle public criticism?

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Why do so many journalists find it so hard to handle public criticism? If you’re an athlete, you’re used to it. If you’re an artist, critics will regularly take you down. If you are in government, the pundits and now the bloggers will show no mercy. If you’re in business, the market will punish you.

In all these cases, the seasoned professional learns to deal with it. But over and over today, we encounter the sorry spectacle of distinguished reporters losing it when their work is publicly attacked — or columnists sneering at the feedback they get in poorly moderated web comments.

Clark Hoyt recently concluded his tenure as the New York Times’ “public editor” (aka ombudsman) with a farewell column that described the reactions of Times journalists to his work. It seems the process of being critiqued in public in their own paper continues to be alienating and dispiriting to them. Journalists typically, and rightly, see themselves as bearers of public accountability — holding the feet of government officials, business leaders and other public figures to the fire of their inquiries. Yet, remarkably, a surprising number of journalists still find it hard to accept being held to account themselves.

One passage in Hoyt’s column jumped out at me as a fascinating window onto the psyche of the working journalist today:

Times journalists have been astonishingly candid, even when facing painful questions any of us would want to duck. Of course, journalists don’t relish being criticized in public any more than anyone else. A writer shaken by a conclusion I was reaching told me, if you say that, I’ll have to kill myself. I said, no, you won’t. Well, the writer said, I’ll have to go in the hospital. I wrote what I intended, with no ill consequences for anyone’s health.

“If you say that, I’ll have to kill myself”? Even in jest, the line suggests a thinness of skin entirely inappropriate to any public figure. “Journalists don’t relish being criticized in public any more than anyone else,” according to Hoyt. Yet the work of journalists so often involves criticizing others in public that it is something they must expect in return. Surely they, of all professionals, ought to be able to take what they readily dish out.

I would argue that the difficulty American journalists have with hearing or responding to criticism lies in the profession’s pathological heritage of self-abnegation. We say, “To err is human,” right? But journalists too often work inside an institutional culture which says to them, “Be inhuman.” Do not have opinions — and if you do, for god’s sake don’t share them. Do not attend protests or take stands on issues. Do not vote; or, if you do, don’t tell anyone whom you voted for.

The good soldier journalists buy into this acculturation. They suppress their own individuality and perspectives. They subsume their own work into the larger editorial “we,” and learn to refer to themselves as “this reporter” instead of using the personal pronoun. When something goes wrong with the system they are a part of, when the little piece of journalism they have added to the larger edifice comes under attack for some flaw, they count on the edifice to protect them.

But no longer. Reasonable criticism of news coverage can now be published as easily online as the original reports, and the public expects media outlets to respond. Many editors and reporters understand that a new approach to accountability simply makes sense. So the institutions have begun, haltingly but significantly, to open up.

But many individual journalists find themselves at sea when called upon to explain mistakes, defend choices and engage in discussions with their readers and critics. Nothing in their professional lives has prepared them for this. In fact, a lot of their professional training explicitly taught them that all of this was dangerous, unprofessional, bad. They grew up thinking — and some still think — that the professional thing to do, when questioned in public, is (a) don’t respond at all; (b) respond with “no comment — we stand by our story”; or if things get really bad (c) your editor will do the talking.

Unfortunately, this means that the typical blogger has more experience dealing with criticism — measuring a reasonable response, managing trolls and restraining the urge to flame — than the typical newsroom journalist. That, I think, is why we regularly see the kind of journalist freakout that the New York Times’ James Risen visited upon us (and very quickly apologized for).

The syndrome I am describing here, of course, is already a relic of a previous era; most young journalists entering the field today have a very different relationship to their own work and the public. And many of the older generation, which I am definitely a part of now, have either learned to make their way through new waters, or kept their own steady course and even keel in rough seas.

But every newsroom has some ticking time-bombs, people ready to explode in a torrent of ill-considered invective. When they do, I think we can try to show some understanding. The next time you see some seasoned journalist lose his bearings when called upon to discuss or defend his work, chalk it up to inexperience, not stupidity or rudeness.

Crossposted from the MediaShift Idea Lab.

Memo to Steve: We already are a nation of bloggers

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Let’s look at Steve Jobs’ comment last night at his onstage interview at the Wall Street Journal’s D conference and see how many mistaken assumptions and fallacies we can mine from it:

“”I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself. We need editorial more than ever right now.”

First, there’s a condescending assumption here that bloggers are some sort of inferior order. This is the sort of ressentiment we often hear from laid-off newsroom denizens who blame legions of bloggers for the business troubles of their former employers. But it’s funny to hear it from one-time rebel and industry-disrupter Jobs. Jobs has his own beef with the tech-news blogosphere, which relentlessly struggles to break the cone of silence he imposes on Apple news. But here he lets the chip on his shoulder place him on the wrong side of history. The media institutions he praised at D (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) have all been leading the charge to embrace blogging themselves.

Next, there’s this strange notion that blogs aren’t, or can’t be, “editorial.” If an editor is someone who makes choices about what to cover, then any good blogger is also an editor. If an editor is someone who reviews someone else’s copy for mistakes or quality control, then most bloggers have an army of editors — their readers. Yes, blogging has largely discarded the old model of editing as bureaucratic workflow, and that has pros and cons. But to suggest that blogs are somehow bad because they aren’t “editorial” — and that the traditional newsroom’s editing process guarantees something better — betrays a real ignorance of how journalism really works.

Most important, there’s Jobs’ implicit belief in a zero-sum, either-or media world, in which either bloggers prosper at the expense of the old-fashioned newsroom, or traditional media prospers and bloggers are put in their place. Such views have always been wrong-headed, and never more so than today. We are in the middle of a full-throttle reinvention of the news industry, as old-line journalism rushes to figure out how to bring its skills and traditions to bear in the new realities of online news and throngs of hard-working, imaginative bloggers are experimenting with new styles and techniques of journalism that technology has enabled. It is not a time for handwringing about the prospect of a “nation of bloggers.” We are already a nation of bloggers. The only question is, how do we make sure we get the news and information we need now that we are?

Given all this, it seems a shame that — when it comes to media, at least — Jobs, who once encouraged his Macintosh team with a war-cry about how much better it was to be a pirate than to join the navy, has chosen to side so visibly with the fleet.

“Say Everything” in paperback, and new postscript

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When we were preparing the new paperback edition of Say Everything — on sale as of today! — I knew I wanted to add some material covering the period since I brought the book to a close (roughly the end of 2008). To keep this material as timely and up to date as possible we decided to publish the postscript online rather than add it to the book.

I offer this now for what I hope is your pleasure. The essay, “Four cases for the persistence of blogging,” stands on its own as a look at the impact of four phenomena — Twitter, Facebook, Apple’s App Store, and the rise of content farms — on blogging and the future of the independent Web.

To keep my life simple I’m not hosting comments over on the book’s site, but this thread here at Wordyard can serve that purpose.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

The Internet, as it has evolved in the nearly two decades since its emergence from the public sector that incubated it, is a messy, sometimes anarchic commons. The same openness that allows myriad novelties, including blogging, to prosper also leaves it vulnerable to con artists, junk peddlers and spam. Businesspeople from Steve Jobs on down dream of reasserting control over the environment, cleaning up the mess, banishing the hackers and cranks and porn merchants, and figuring out how to reinflate profit margins that the Web has, for the majority of industries, decimated.

For this vision to be realized, the legions of bloggers whose ascent Say Everything chronicled must drop their keyboards and docilely accept losing all the autonomy, bonhomie and voice that their posts have provided for them. No one should wait up for that to happen any time soon.

The Wall Street Journal: Cavalier about corrections?

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Last week I wrote about my fruitless quest to alert the Wall Street Journal to a mistake it had made in a book review — misspelling the name of the author the piece mainly focused on.

Yesterday I made one final effort to close this loop; I emailed the book review’s author, Philip Delves Broughton. Broughton responded quickly and courteously, agreed that it was a mistake (one he’d been responsible for), and noted that as a freelance contributor all he could do was notify the book review’s editor.

As of today this mistake, now 11 days old, remains uncorrected. In the face of my persistent and no doubt annoying barrage of emails, phone calls, and blog posts, the Journal newsroom has remained entirely mum.

Now, there are a few ways to read this situation. You could say: Who cares? It’s just a misspelling of somebody’s name.

If it’s your name, of course, you may care a great deal. If you’re the author, you might care not just for vanity, but for the sake of the people who might be Googling your writing or looking your book up to purchase it on Amazon.

In this case, the author, Mac McClelland, happens, right now, to be doing some on-the-ground reporting from the Gulf oil spill for Mother Jones. If you were her, you might want readers to connect the book review with the in-the-news byline.

So another possible response is: The Journal’s editors and reporters are very busy people. They’ve got financial meltdowns to cover. Why are you harassing them with this trivia?

That’s just fine — unless the Journal actually cares whether its readers trust its coverage. If a news outlet can’t be bothered to get an author’s name right, can you count on it to get the financial stories right?

I’m sorry, but none of these responses is adequate. Until and unless we get a more plausible response, the only interpretation that makes sense is a very sad one: that the Wall Street Journal, once one of the world’s great trusted news institutions, lacks a functioning correction process. Or it simply doesn’t care about sweating the details any more.

UPDATE: This post is now linked to from Romenesko, and the very first comment there provides a nice illustration of my argument. Mark Jackson writes, “Really? This is a big deal to you? Column inches. Limited space. Priorities. Possibly the world financial system crashing was a bigger issue? Just sayin’.”

It seems to me that the Journal has every right to say, “We no longer have the resources to fix small errors like misspelled names. You should no longer count on us getting that stuff right.”

Something tells me no editor at the paper is likely to say that. Because when most of us signed on as journalists we signed on for the small stuff too. And readers expect that — and expect some kind of response from the newsroom when they point out an error.

[Crossposted at the MediaBugs blog]

How hard is it to report an error to the Wall Street Journal? Hard.

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The correction process is a simple thing in most newsrooms, right? If the news outlet gets something wrong, people will tell the editors — they’ll email or call or post a comment on the website. And then the editors will correct the mistake.

End of story? If only.

One of the early field results of the MediaBugs experiment is a simple one. It turns out that, in the case of many news organizations, including some pretty prominent ones, just figuring out how to tell the newsroom that there’s a problem requires persistence and stamina.

Consider this anonymous error report we received at MediaBugs a few days ago. It said that the Wall Street Journal, in a recent book review, had misspelled the name of the author being reviewed. The book is Mac McClelland’s For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. The Journal spelled her name “McLelland.” (The publisher’s page listing the book, which I’ll take as an authoritative source, spells it with the extra “c.”)

Now, MediaBugs is focused on Bay Area-based news organizations and coverage, and — while we’ll handle reports that focus on the Journal’s Bay Area coverage — we’re not going to deal with most of the paper’s content. So we marked the McClelland report “off topic.”

But I figured that it did seem to be a real mistake, albeit a small one (but not that small, unless you think misspelling the name of the central subject of an article is not a big deal). If I were an editor at the Journal I’d want to know about it and correct it. So as a courtesy I set out to inform the newspaper.

My first stop was the story’s comments, where I thought I’d just post the information and let the Journal editors glean it at their leisure. The page had zero comments, so I figured my note would not be lost in a sea of rants.

I wrote a brief note about the problem, then discovered that I would need to register at the Journal site before they’d accept my comment. So I registered and confirmed my email address, re-entered my comment, and clicked “post.” Nothing happened. I tried again with a different browser, guessing that there might be some browser-specific posting bug. No luck with either Firefox or Safari. No wonder the story has zero comments! So much for that feedback channel. (To try to figure out what the problem was, I took a look at the next day’s Journal books piece. It had five comments — so sometimes, I gues,s the comments work. Interestingly, these comments reported errors in that review: it contained impossible, self-contradictory dates. These errors were reported five days ago. The piece has not been corrected.)

For my second approach, I looked for some link on the Journal site for “corrections” or “report an error.” No such link exists on the Journal home page, nor did searching voluminous “Help” and “Customer Service” pages turn up anything. The “Contact us” page offers three general email addresses for feedback, labeled as follows:

Send a comment/inquiry about an article or feature in The Wall Street Journal to: wsjcontact@dowjones.com.

React to something you’ve read on WSJ.com at: newseditors@wsj.com.

Offer a comment/suggestion about features and content on WSJ.com at: feedback@wsj.com.

I challenge anyone who is not a part of the WSJ organization to interpret which of these three lines of inquiry would be an appropriate choice to report an error. Apparently there’s a distinction between responding to the print and Web editions of the Journal, but what about with stories that appear in both places, as is the case for so much Journal content? And what are we supposed to make of the distinction between “reacting to something you’ve read” and “offering a comment/suggestion about features and content”?

I opted for door number one, since I was reporting a mistake in the printed Journal and that seemed to be the choice relating to the newspaper as opposed to Web-only material. But plainly I was grasping at straws. I sent a polite note to the wsjcontact address, and copied it for good measure to the managing and executive editors’ addresses that were also listed on the Contact page. This was two days ago.

For my third effort, I resorted to the good old telephone. The Journal only lists a single phone number on its Contact page, so I called it. It turns out to be an automated inbox for the entire Dow Jones operation. So you walk your way through the voice menu patiently, only to end up at a recording that tells you there’s no one to receive your call but you’re welcome to leave a message.

So that’s what I just did. I will now rest from my labors. We’ll see if any of these efforts elicits a response, or whether this post somehow prods the Journal beast from its slumber.

I went to these lengths because, right now, this is my work. But we shouldn’t have any illusions about normal members of the public. They won’t jump through these hoops. They will conclude — rightly or wrongly but very understandably, either way — that the newsroom doesn’t actually care about hearing about its mistakes.

If we want to understand why people don’t trust the media, this might be a very good place to start.

[Crossposted to the MediaBugs blog]

“Failsafe” is an oxymoron: BP’s Gulf spill and the St. Francis Dam

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I listened to this interview yesterday with BP director Robert Dudley on the News Hour:

ROBERT DUDLEY: …The blowout preventers are something that are used on oil and gas wells all over the world, every well. They just are designed not to fail with multiple failsafe systems. That has failed. So, we have a crisis.

…JEFFREY BROWN: Excuse me, but the — the technology — the unexpected happened. And so the question that you keep hearing over and over again is, why wasn’t there a plan for a worst-case scenario, which appears to have happened?

ROBERT DUDLEY: Blowout preventers are designed not to fail. They have connections with the rig that can close them. When there’s a disconnection with the rig, they close, and they’re also designed to be able to manually go down with robots and intervene and close them. Those three steps, for whatever reason, failed in this case. It’s unprecedented. We need to understand why and how that happened.

The failsafe failed. It always does. “Designed not to fail” can never mean “certain not to fail.” There is no such thing as “failsafe” — just different degrees of risk management, different choices about how much money to spend to reduce the likelihood of disaster, which can never entirely be eliminated.

Two different social attitudes conspire to lead us to disasters like the Gulf spill. On the one hand, there is the understandable but naive demand on the part of the public and its proxies in the media for certainty: How can we be sure that this never happens again? Sorry, we can’t. If we want to drill for oil we should assume that there will be spills. If we don’t like spills, we should figure out other ways to supply our energy.

On the other side, there is what I’d call the arrogance of the engineering mindset: the willingness to push limits — to drill deeper, to dam higher — with a certain reckless confidence that our imperfect minds and hands can handle whatever failures they cause.

Put these two together and you have, rather than any sort of “failsafe,” a dynamic of guaranteed failure. The public demands the impossibility of “failsafe” systems; the engineers claim to provide them; and everything is great until the inevitable failure. Each new failure inspires the engineers to redouble their efforts to achieve the elusive failsafe solution, which lulls the public into thinking that there will never be another disaster, until there is.

I wrote about these issues as they relate to software in Dreaming in Code. But at some point the need to understand this cycle demands a more artistic response.

May I suggest you give a listen to Frank Black’s “St. Francis Dam Disaster,” a great modern folksong about a colossal engineering failure of a different era.

No more bouncers at the journalism club door

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[I’m posting a lightly edited text of the talk I gave Friday at Stanford Law School’s “Future of Journalism: Unpacking the Rhetoric” conference. As you will see, I took seriously the concept of unpacking the rhetoric, and tried to answer the questions on the event’s agenda.]

I’ve been asked to defend the tenet “We are all journalists now.” But there are so many questions in those five words!

Who is we? What is a journalist? When is now? And, most importantly, for those of you whose memories extend back to the Clinton administration, what is the meaning of is — or in this case, “are”?

We aren’t all journalists now. My wonderful parents? they’re not journalists. They have a computer that’s connected to the Internet. But they’re not journalists. My ten-year-old twins? They aren’t, either. Not yet, anyway.

Am I? I’ve been a writer for 30 years. Worked for a newspaper for 10, a web magazine for another 10. But I never went to journalism school. Never been a member of SPJ or any other professional organization.

So I’m not happy with “we are all journalists now.” Let’s give it an edit. Let’s change it to “Now, anyone can do journalism.”

So what have I done here? First, I’ve moved from focusing on the role, the label, the professional imprimatur of the word “journalist,” to the verb, the activity, the pursuit. I’ve switched from talking about an individual’s identification with a professional label to pointing our attention to an activity.

Second: I’ve changed the statement from one about static definitions of states of being to one about the potential for participation.

We’re still going to have to address the fact that the “we” in the first version and the “anyone” in the second still ignore those reaches of our society and world where the tools of the Internet remain either inaccessible or unfamiliar. So we probably need to do one more tweak of the wording, maybe to “Now, anyone who’s online can do journalism” — or “Now, anyone on the network can do journalism.”

Now these are tenets I can get behind.

Still, we’re left this term “doing journalism.” What are we talking about here?

Here’s my take: You’re doing journalism when you’re delivering an accurate and timely account of some event to some public.

[Read more…]

Busy-ness: three days, three conferences

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If you want to hear from me over the next few days and you are in the Bay Area, you have a bunch of opportunities.

Friday I’ll be presenting at Stanford Law School’s conference on “The Future of News: Unpacking the Rhetoric” (as I wrote here). I look forward to unpacking a lot of rhetoric there; my suitcases are full and I definitely would like to travel more lightly. Seriously, there’s a great lineup there and I don’t think it will be the usual vague rehash of tired old tropes.

Saturday, I’ll be speaking at WordCamp SF. I’m thrilled about this, partly because I love WordPress, partly because I’ve had a great time at the two previous WordCamps I’ve attended, and partly because I’m talking about blogging’s place in our culture and WordPress’s place in the history of blogging (which I really didn’t get deeply into in Say Everything) — and after all this time I still love talking about this stuff.

Sunday, I’ll be at Journalism Innovations III and RemakeCamp, speaking about MediaBugs as one of a gazillion fascinating projects in journalism that people will be presenting there.

Come on down if you can, and definitely say hi if you do!

Who’s a journalist now?

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For as long as we humans have been online we have been arguing about how being online changes the nature of publishing and journalism. So these days, when I hear people arguing about who qualifies as a journalist, or whether bloggers are journalists, I usually yawn. I wrote this five years ago (during one of Apple’s previous campaigns against a blogger):

A blogger is someone who uses a certain kind of tool to publish a certain kind of Web site. The label tells us nothing about how the tool is used or what is published. We went through this discussion a decade ago, when people first started asking whether Web sites were journalism. To understand this, just take the question, “Are bloggers journalists?” and reframe it in terms of previous generations of tools. “Are telephone callers journalists?” “Are typewriter users journalists?” “Are mimeograph operators journalists?” Or, most simply, “Are writers journalists?” Well, duh, sometimes! But sometimes not.

When I was invited to the event that’s happening at Stanford Law School on Friday — “Future of Journalism: Unpacking the Rhetoric” — my knee jerked a bit along these lines. But I soon got the sense that this would be a more valuable and less superficial conversation than most of them have been.

So I’ll be there, Friday, along with a whole bunch of people more expert than I am, fielding discussion of the statement: “Everyone is a journalist now.” (Which, in that form, I think is simply, patently untrue, but with a little adjustment — to, say, “Now (almost) anyone can do journalism” — becomes pretty defensible.)

All this, of course, was before the whole affaire Gizmodo, which, as if on cue, has thrust our noses right into this little matter..

I have my own thoughts on the topic. But before I deliver them, I also want to hear from you. Which corners and angles of this discussion are most interesting to you? Should we care about the label “journalist”? If so, how do we distinguish the person in that role? Is it about employment, or accreditation, or what you do, or the size of your audience, or a particular set of ideals? What about shield laws and access to press conferences or White House briefings? Is this argument worth having? What does society gain by having “journalist” be a static role that only a small number of people qualify for? Can society gain something else by opening up the qualifications — and is there a cost?

Come to think of it, there really is plenty to talk about.