Of Journalism and Blogging 2.0

Are bloggers journalists? This is a question that's been getting an awful lot of attention lately, and it's an important one, inasmuch as it determines whether they receive press protections. And it's particularly relevant at a time when a certain celebrity blogger is breaking, or claiming to break, major international news.

But it's also a dumb question. It's poorly conceived, with a built-in assumption that the term "bloggers," as a group, means anything. Are all bloggers journalists? Of course not. Many of them are people who merely want to post pictures of their cats. (It's always cats, for some reason.) But are some bloggers journalists? Indisputably. What else are you going to call someone like Josh Marshall, whose site is a must-read for anyone covering politics?

Here's a question you don't hear people asking: Are journalists journalists? Well, guess what: The answer is the same. Some of them do all the things you'd hope a journalist would do, like fact-check their stories and call people for comment, and some of them don't. An awful lot of gossip "reporters" make a living cut-and-pasting items from emails or obscure websites and printing them without getting them confirmed. A lot of people I know would call that "blogging." Yet you don't hear anyone challenging their right to be known as journalists.

Ditto for opinion or lifestyle columnists, whose job it is to spout off about whatever they feel like without necessarily adding any new information -- the same thing bloggers are frequently rapped for. If Jean Teasdale of The Onion were a real person and not a parody, she'd get to call herself a journalist.

If bad, irresponsible journalists get to claim the same press protections and prerogatives of their good, responsible colleagues, then it's only fair that the same should go for bloggers. The alternative is to start issuing journalism licenses -- not a good idea.

The good news is that the blogosphere seems to be entering a new phase. Calll it Blogging 2.0. Anecdotally, more and more bloggers and blog-owners are looking to break news, seeing that as the surest way to build traffic in a market that's saturated with opinion and attitude. "A link and a joke doesn't cut it anymore" is the way Nick Denton, of Gawker Media, put it to me some months ago.

So, yes, stodgy journalism purists are going to have to get used to bloggers getting away with calling themselves journalists. But, more and more, bloggers are going to have to get used to earning it.