Of Journoblogging and mid-stream media

Watching the to-do on two blogs I follow (Techcrunch and A VC) on the concept of Journobloggers (those creatures who are journos who blog as their main raison d'etre) made me realise that the media is becoming ever more nuanced.

In essence the discussion goes as follows. Fred Wilson (A VC) noted that:

When I started blogging four and a half years ago, there was a clear delineation between bloggers and journalists. But that's all changed and now we have this new category, the journablogger.

The journablogger has his or her own blog or works in a blog network like paid content, techcrunch, gigaom, alley insider, read write web, mashable, venturebeat, etc, etc. Just look at the top of techmeme's leader board and you'll see them right next to the traditional journalists like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNET, etc.

These journabloggers got their start as bloggers who operated outside of the traditional world of journalism where doing your homework and getting the story straight are requirements for the job. That was good. It allowed them to be quick, get the story out, and fill the blog with opinion.

Problem was, he fingered two TechCrunch journo-bloggers for a bit of sloppiness, and this drew the TC F(ire)

So what this really comes down to is this. Wilson didn’t like the coverage. But instead of simply disagreeing with and rebutting the points made in the posts, he went after the reputation of the writers themselves. That would be inappropriate even if he was right. But the fact that he was both conflicted and wrong makes it inexcusable.

Wilson failed to uphold the very standards of integrity that he demands from others. He failed to contact Erick or Matt before writing, and didn’t seem to have the facts to back up his argument. In a twitter exchange between us on this issue, he defended his sloppiness on the fact that he’s a blogger, saying “if you are a blogger you can say what you think, once you become a journalist, you have a different standard.”

Now, frankly, I’m confused. Bloggers can say what they think, but journalists can’t? I think what he’s trying to say is that Erick and Matt are no longer bloggers and now need to hold themselves to a higher standard - one that Wilson explicitly doesn’t hold himself to. That sounds like hypocrisy 101 to me.

Also, in a comment to his original post, he says “Erick didn’t get it wrong…but i think he missed the opportunity to get it right.”

Now, Fred later recalled the term "Journobloggers", but whether its called a spadeblogger or a journoshovel, there is a key New Media point being made here, ie there is a totally new continuum of journalism emerging, and where once the Olde Media "journalist" was on the wavefront of fast, topical news you now have the "perpetual beta" of the Blogworld usurping that role - and also injecting a lot of the Op-Ed into the vacuum where more serious (ie time lagged) journalists fail to tread their wares.

Is some of this instant op-ed scurrilous and inaccurate - absolutely! Will there be spats between the various blogs and bloggers - totally! It is (as others have noted before) merely the re-emergence of broadsides etc, those scurrilous, inflamatory "micro-media" of days gone by. And just as some of those metamorphosed into "proper" media, so it will happen again. And again.

At real issue here, in 2008, is attention - and money. The "Journoblogs" are now sucking quite a bit of attention from the "Trad" Cottage Blogger industry (as the increasing wails of Olde A Listers will testify), and increasingly sucking money away from the MSM. As they are (New)MSM in all but name, one could argue that this is merely the process of re-setting expectations of what these mid-stream media companies will be doing to differentiate themselves from Cottage Bloggers (because they are companies now in all but name, not individual bloggers) - riding the perpetual blogging beta or inclining to the older codes of journalism.

Endgame - there will be a form of on line, rapid turnaround media company - call it Journoblogging or Midstream Media or Online OpEd or whatever, which is not as fact-checked as MSM but is far quicker to the fore, is updated by commentators as well as writers, and where it is more important to watch the "conversation" than any one organ.

In that way its maybe less efficient - ie takes more reading time - but it is more immediate, and we - the newsvores - will learn to parse it along with the the existing dailies, weeklies, journals etc as we go about gathering the information we like, when we want it etc.