March Blogger Meetup: Blogger Small Group Overview, Afterthoughts, A Panda Driving a Car and Errantry

The com­bined blogger/podcasting meet­up last night was the best yet. There were so many peo­ple there that we broke up into three small groups: one for pod­cast­ers, one for blog­gers and one for peo­ple to dis­cuss with Denise Polver­ine [who paid for the beer!] how cleveland.com can incor­po­rate more blog con­tent into their site. I did­n’t get a chance to browse the Cleveland.com or the pod­cast­ing groups because the blog­ger dis­cus­sion was so live­ly. Hope­ful­ly oth­ers from the oth­er groups will blog about their stuff. I know I’d like to know.

Updates:

Col­li­sion Bend and Sar­don­ic Views on the cleveland.com group.

Blog Group Overview:

Jay Miller from Crain’s Cleve­land start­ed off the night with the top­ic that would pret­ty much take up the whole evening. He is not a blog­ger him­self, but was here to find out the state of the blog­ger [and/or, +/-, vs.] jour­nal­ist dis­cus­sion.

As I said before, we had a live­ly one. Democ­ra­cy Guy and Vir­tu­al Lori both have jour­nal­ism degrees and Calla­han’s Cleve­land Diary is a trig cove on just about any sub­ject. Red Wheel­bar­row, Your Dai­ly Art and Organ­ic Mechan­ic pro­vid­ed a good bal­ance to the dis­cus­sion. Pop Life was there, and anoth­er blog­ger came in a bit lat­er, but I did­n’t catch his name. There was also a new blog­ger named Daniel­la, but I fool­ish­ly failed to get her con­tact info [She found me, I’ve spelled her name cor­rect­ly and linked to her blog]. Roll call ends now.

Red Wheel­bar­row offers his own suc­cinct thoughts on our group. Democ­ra­cy Guy, too.

Jay came in want­i­ng to find out if blog­gers are will­ing to adopt some of the jour­nal­is­tic tricks of the trade into their blogs. It seemed that he was con­cerned with ensur­ing that blog­gers report things in such a way that the con­tent is accu­rate enough to avoid get­ting sued. Every­one had strong feel­ings on this mat­ter. It came across, at least to me, that Jay felt as if blogs are slop­py or lazy jour­nal­ism, or that, with no set of guide­lines, the medi­um can’t become a respectable part of The Media. While there is some mer­it to these ideas, and there are sure­ly a large amount of blog­gers who are the web equiv­a­lent of dirty-beard­ed soap­box ranter, our group was of a con­trary opin­ion.

The gen­er­al con­sen­sus of the blog­gers present was that if we aren’t com­fort­able say­ing some­thing on our blog that we would­n’t say to some­one in per­son, we don’t write about it. Trans­paren­cy was a word brought up time and again. I learned a bit about the jour­nal­is­tic process, some­thing called the invert­ed tri­an­gle method which starts out lay­ing out all the facts, and then nar­rows down to the end by stat­ing the author’s opin­ion. My imme­di­ate reac­tion to this is that the method can often be disin­gen­u­ous. As a some­what typ­i­cal con­sumer of mass media, I have been trained to think that hard news is noth­ing but fact, so “dis­cov­er­ing” that a writer has a bias makes peo­ple bitch and moan about spin. The trans­paren­cy comes in when peo­ple [or blog­gers] say “These are the facts” [with sup­port­ing links] and “This is what I think about that” [with com­ments open for rebut­tal or dis­cus­sion].

The point was then raised that blog­gers have no check upon them. I assume this was more along the lines of edi­to­r­i­al checks for accu­ra­cy than any­thing else, because just about every­one said that [jour­nal­is­tic] blogs are pret­ty much always checked by anoth­er blog with a dis­sent­ing opin­ion. Then Jay men­tioned that peo­ple who read blogs are unlike­ly to search out dis­sent­ing opin­ions. Then some­one else said that it is no dif­fer­ent than a per­son who only reads The New York Times for their news. Hooboy. Live­ly. 🙂

We moved back toward libel ter­ri­to­ry and were tak­ing that into the direc­tion of free speech, mak­ing analo­gies all over the place. Does link­ing to a blog post that lat­er turns out to be false make you an accom­plice in libel? Shot right back was, if I cut out a news­pa­per clip­ping and give it to my friend, and the clip­ping lat­er turns out to be false, is that com­plic­i­ty in libel? The final con­clu­sion before we end­ed seemed to be that the larg­er your audi­ence the more liable you are to be sued for libel. Jay said that he thought that hav­ing a bit more knowl­edge of jour­nal­ism would allow blog­gers to keep their vis­i­bil­i­ty high.

I’m sure I missed some­thing or got some­thing wrong, so feel free to cor­rect me.

After­thoughts:

I don’t think Jay meant to come across this way, but my back got up almost imme­di­ate­ly when he men­tioned that blog­gers might ben­e­fit from a bet­ter knowl­edge and appli­ca­tion of jour­nal­ism. I am under the impres­sion that he feels that the cur­rent jour­nal­is­tic process is the best one. Blog­gers in some sense are quite counter to that, which is why my hack­les rose at the men­tion of becom­ing more like a jour­nal­ist. To me it smacks of allow­ing your­self to be edit­ed. And while any new method is wor­thy of exam­i­na­tion and new knowl­edge can be noth­ing if not help­ful, I did­n’t like the way it came across.

If any­thing, I think blogs pre­vent folks from being just pas­sive con­sumers of news. Read­ing blogs is basi­cal­ly the equiv­a­lent of talk­ing to thou­sands of blokes down the pub and then using your own men­tal fac­ul­ties to syn­the­size it. I’d rather have that, with all its accom­pa­ny­ing blath­er­ers and trolls and slop­pi­ness, than hav­ing to get all of my news, rel­a­tive­ly untouch­able [until blog­gers start work­ing on the case] and accept­ed as gose­pl, from 4 or 5 media con­glom­er­ates.

The libel dis­cus­sion and nascent free speech issues con­tained with­in it, and the men­tion that blogs might fall into obscu­ri­ty if “jour­nal­is­tic integri­ty” is not fol­lowed, just strike me as scare tac­tics, even though the intent might be just the oppo­site.

The blogs falling into obscu­ri­ty if they are inef­fec­tive is a good thing. It is nat­ur­al selec­tion in a vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment. If they can’t stand the heat they get burnt. I kind of get the feel­ing that non-blog jour­nal­ism might feel a bit threat­ened by the pos­si­b­li­ty that peo­ple would rather lis­ten to opin­ion­at­ed writ­ing on any­thing under the sun that also allows them to check on the sources, than lis­ten to the faux-objec­tive or ultra-objec­tive dreck that can be found every­where else.

I’ve tried to be a bit con­trary in this post for the hopes of con­tin­u­ing the dis­cus­sion here. So, dis­cuss folks!

A Pan­da Dri­ving a Car:

Errantry:

I could hard­ly sleep last night because I had so many thoughts swirling around in my head as a result of the meet­up. One thing that came to mind is that I don’t like the term “fram­ing” when used in dis­cus­sion. Fram­ing an argu­ment seems to lim­it it imme­di­ate­ly by stuff­ing it into The Box we’re always sup­posed to think out­side of. It binds a top­ic and just think­ing about it in those terms is reduc­tive instead of expan­sive. I like say­ing that you are look­ing through a lens, because then it is both obvi­ous that you are com­ing at the top­ic through a bias [lens­es dis­torty things] but you also allow the top­ic to remain amor­phous and do what it wants.

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