Bloggers not to blame for the broadening of journalism

Not sure I agree with everything Malachi says in his oped of earlier this week, but this part is worth repeating, for those who still think there is a war on between MSM and the blogosphere:

…there is one big flaw in the perception that bloggers and journalists are at war with each other; they actually feed off each other. They have a symbiotic relationship – and it is changing. It used to be that journalism was a coherent and well-demarcated profession.

The job was defined by the National Union of Journalists, as much as by the employer. So, as a newspaper reporter, when I started, I would have caused a strike if I had carried a camera.

I use a camera for blogging. The bloggers define their own functions and play with whatever technology suits them. And most don’t worry about quality. It seems almost in the intrinsic character of blogging that the background noise is too high and that the audio hisses.

As a radio journalist, in the days of tape-recording, I was not allowed to edit my own tapes, but had to work alongside an audio engineer. Now, even in the BBC, I can edit everything. In fact, I edit packages for Sunday Sequence at home. I often record talks for Radio Scotland and email them to the producer. So bloggers are not to blame for the broadening definition of a journalist; it is happening anyway.

As for the rest, as Andy Starr noted back in 2004, blogging is as blogging does… One big advantage is that we can narrowcast and have considerably more freedom to cover what we think is the right to cover than our friends and colleagues in the MSM…

In the meantime just keep an eye on the NI Water story… Slugger understands that UTV has done a considerable amount of work on this.  But with the exception of the News Letter, Slugger has pretty much been left alone to blaze (not sure if that’s quite the right word) its own trail on this…