phil ringnalda

Despite the fact that it’s as silly a question as “is food a vegetable?” or “how high is the sky?”, the question of “are blogs journalism?” just doesn’t seem to want to go away. Every newspaper or magazine article seems to feel the need to ask it, and generally answer “No!” Although a quick glance at any of the top links lists will show, by a combination of links to news stories, opinion pieces, “what foo are you?” quizzes, and pictures of kids, kitties, and Chris Pirillo’s chest, that asking “are blogs foo?” is a stupid question for values of foo other than “a way to easily publish short bits of content on the web,” I do understand the question they are asking, and I thought I’d do my part to set the record straight: hell yes, blogs are journalism, and what’s more they are only the fun parts you can do sitting down, with none of the nasty bits!

Being a publisher can be fun, when you get to make the big policy decisions and rake in the cash, though the parts where you deal with labor unions and screaming Congressmen aren’t so fun. Guess what? We don’t have any labor problems, and when people scream at us we delete their email and block their IP address in our comments. We may not have much cash coming in, but then we don’t have shareholders, either.

Being an editor can be fun, when you are deciding that someone’s pet story is boring trash that should be shredded, but it’s no fun getting chewed out for missing the biggest story of the week. Too bad: nobody expects us to carry every story; if we don’t want to, we don’t.

Being a copy editor is great sadistic fun, marking up every tiny mistake, but it’s a bitch when you miss something obvious yourself, and let a big stupid mistake or twenty slip by. Us? We correct our first couple of mistakes ourselves, and change anything else when someone points it out, usually without having to leave any evidence behind. No “Corrections” column in the next issue for us, thanks very much. That gives us more time to rip you a new one over all the mistakes your editor missed.

Being a reporter isn’t all that much fun, unless you can do your reporting by sitting in a comfy chair stealing other people’s ideas, and big chunks of their words. If you have to get on the phone, or worse yet actually go out and chase people down, it’s already annoying before you even get to the part where they refuse to talk to you. That’s why we let you do that part of it: if we’ve got a friend on the inside of something, we’ll give him a call, but otherwise you can go ahead and do the legwork for us. ‘Preciate it.

So, there you have it: doing a journalistic blog means getting to do all the good parts of every job in journalism, without any of the nasty annoying parts. No wonder you keep asking!