You’ve heard about the lost/possibly stolen/possibly purchased prototype iPhone, right? When the story first broke, an Apple developer had supposedly left the prototype in a bar and someone had found it, passed it along to Gizmodo where it had been dismantled, analyzed and all of its bells and whistles leaked to the blog-reading public. But the plot thickened and now the authorities—never mind some furious Apple executives—suspect that the Gizmodo blogger bought the top-secret phone for a reported $5,000. This led to a police raid on his house with a search warrant and the seizure of his computer. He wasn’t home at the time but the police didn’t let that stop them—so things get thicker and thicker.
The reason I bring this up is a quote from the CEO of Gawker, Nick Denton. Gawker, which calls itself a “new media publishing company,” owns Gizmodo. Denton said, “We may inadvertently do good. We may inadvertently commit journalism. That is not the institutional intention.”
This came up in a discussion of whether the blogger’s rights as a journalist had been violated. That begs the equally thick question of whether blogging is journalism in the first place, or will be a substitute and/or new form of journalism as the future of media plays out.
I’ve been a journalist and I’ve been a blogger and can tell you that there is a huge difference. Some blogs do, indeed, report. Some bloggers are as serious about their stories and as rigorous in their process as professionals in any newsroom. But most blogs are opinion, first-person commentary and, in many cases, totally unnecessary over-sharing of personal detail that would be better kept to oneself. There’s a home for blogging within journalism but it’s more analogous to the editorial page than the front page.
My bigger issue is what will happen to the Fourth Estate. It is the institutional intent, in fact the social mandate of journalism that it does good. A free press is our watchdog on malefactors of all sorts. The Medill Innocence Project would not have freed 11 innocent people, five of them from death row, if it shook its fist at the sky in a blogging rant. Instead, solid, dogged, determined investigative journalism with irrefutable facts and sources are responsible. Bernard Madoff would not be in prison if it were not for journalists doing their jobs. President Richard Nixon would have retired from the White House instead of his post-resignation hiding place if it were not for journalism. The Vietnam War would have gone on even longer if journalist had not brought it into America’s living rooms on the 6 o’clock news.
Denton is right about one thing. Journalism is an act of commission. It is done on purpose by purposeful people, people who do not pay their sources or buy stolen property in order to get a story. If blogging is the future of journalism, we are in big trouble.
