Blogging a Must for Professional Journalists

The headline says it all. Blogging is a must for professional journalists. Magda Abu-Fadil is a foreign correspondent and director of the Journalism Training Program at the American University of Beirut. She gave an interview to IJNet about the future of journalism training and how blogging and social media needs to be a part of that training.

The interview was conducted by May Elian and Dana Liebelson in 2011.  Some of Abu-Fadil's comments are spot on and others miss the mark.

She is adamant that social media will play a big role in shaping journalism of the future. This assumption has proven to be a true statement. Just take a look at any journalism jobs out there. Almost all of them ask for the applicant to have experience with blogging and social media. A journalist must be able to tell a news story and they must also be able to make that story more personable on a blog.

The one statement that irritates me by Abu-Fadil is her answer when asked, "How do you feel about professional journalists switching to new media? How can bloggers get paid?"

Her answer: "I'm not paid by The Huffington Post and I don't mind. I have a paying job. This is like a hobby. I could start a blog or website and work on monetizing it, but it requires more time and effort than I can afford now. As for professional journalists turning to blogging: it's a must. There's infinitely more exposure. I also believe in open source journalism."

Her statement is a problem. It is a fundamental problem that traditional media and new media keep pushing. Bloggers and journalists deserve to be paid. Blogging journalists especially deserve to be paid. Yes, exposure is nice but I want to pay the bills.

Blogging is just as challenging as writing a news story for a newspaper. It requires time and effort. Abu-Fadil is correct in stating that she could start a blog and monetize it but if The Huffington Post wants her to blog on a regular or semi-regular basis, the company should be willing to pay her for her words. If the words are worth publication then they are worth compensation.

It appears to be a media trend that major companies don't want to pay blogging journalists. The only incentive they have to offer is "exposure." Yet, those very same companies are still raking in ad revenue on those blog posts that they want for free. The company gets paid while the blogger build up the site, bring in the readers and get a hearty hand-shake. If all the journalism bloggers were to stop writing for The Huffington Post for free, there would be no HuffPo. I find it odd that the bloggers are not getting the respect they deserve and are willing to accept it.

Abu-Fadil has very interesting ideas and I think she would be a fascinating teacher to have. She doesn't see new media as a threat to journalism and she appears to believe that journalists need to be adaptable to the changes of the 21st century.

But I strongly, strongly disagree with the idea that journalists (even if it is fun, hobby writing) should  not get paid for their words.

I also believe that education is important especially in this ever-evolving field which Abu-Fadil says she isn't sure "if it's worth all the money" for.  Again, all the journalism jobs I've looked at want their writers to have a Bachelor's Degree or higher.  It'd be worth "all the money" for education if new media journalists could get paid for their work instead of in exposure.

Are Blogs a Problem in New Media? Or the Writers?

Can we believe a blogger over a journalist? That is the very essence of the question that Mike Klassen asks in two opinion pieces on the merits of blogging as a form of journalism. The question arose from an award given to the Vancouver Observer. The Canadian Journalism Foundation awarded the publication with its highest honor – the Excellence in Journalism award.

Klassen's opinions dissect whether blogs can be viewed as real journalism. He criticized CJF for missing an important fact –that the Vancouver Observer is linked to a political organization currently in power. He claims that journalists who follow the credo of giving news impartially are finding CJF's honor “a bitter pill.”

The opinions Klassen writes are interesting. He does give good insight into the checks and balances that journalists strive for in print and online media. What is odd about the articles he writes is that he feels it is okay to criticize CJF and the Vancouver Observer for violating journalism standards, yet he doesn't hold his own writing online, at least in the case of the two linked opinions, to the same standards.

Through out his pieces he uses anonymous sources and attempts to claim their quotes as fact. Anonymous sources cannot be verified. Klassen violates these two basic tests of impartiality in his pieces. Since most journalists or as I am, journalism majors, will pick up on this he attempts to justify his article by stating he runs blogs but that it isn't considered to be journalism.

“That's because, while we are aware of the their influence and consider it our responsibility to ensure accuracy in our content, we are not bound by a requirement to be objective,” he writes.

Two paragraphs later in “Blogs are not the New Journalism” he says that bloggers are a threat to reliable journalism. The threat is not from blogs. Nor is the threat from journalism. The threat comes from the writers. Klassen's opinion could have held more credibility if he had followed his own message.

Bloggers that give off the appearance of legitimate media but don't meet journalistic practices are the real threat to the practice of journalism online whether it be via a blog or a website. All writers who address the news (opinions) and/or write the news should hold themselves to high ethical standards to produce quality pieces worthy of the title “Journalism”.