Changes in the way we exchange information and a declining economy continue to hammer America’s newspapers. It’s these factors, and not a dislike for some one editorial position or another that explain the force reductions across the industry.

Regardless of attitudes towards the editorial policies of the daily press, the fact remains that professional news organizations staffed by professional journalists are our best, most reliable, source of major news stories. For all their alleged faults they are the only game in town.

(And what about network news programs? For the most part they seem to deliver information derived elsewhere. The exception of course are video photo-op ‘late-breaking’ stories of car crashes and fires. But the nature of the medium seems to preclude thoughtful, long-form features and backgrounders that we get in the print press.)

Bloggers would be hard pressed for the news they comment on if it weren’t for the stories developed by their professional brethren. But at the same time bloggers have held the professionals’ feet to the fire for not picking up on important, but ignored, stories.

As aggregators bloggers need stories to ‘aggregate.’ Nothing wrong with that. That function is important for bringing to the blogger’s special audience stories that might have otherwise been missed.

As news gatherers and investigators reporters have decided advantages over bloggers. In what follows I understand that there are always exceptions that prove the rule.

One of the greatest is that they are employed. Bloggers often have other jobs or full time obligations. If they don’t feel like writing, or haven’t the time, or are writing incompetently, there is no editor or publisher threatening unemployment. You can’t lay off someone who doesn’t work for you.

Reporters (providing there’s a benevolent nod from some assignment editor) have time to pursue an investigation or write a long-form feature. If they are short of ideas someone will surely ‘suggest’ that they get busy.

I believe that in journalism schools novice reporters are taught how to use all the public sources of information, and what they are…city agencies, public records like property reports, police reports, corporate records and so forth. There are lots of them. My guess is that bloggers are far from knowing them all.

Perhaps a reporter’s biggest advantage is what I think of as an “Implied Authority to Ask Questions.”  The reporter can call someone, identify himself or herself as from The Daily Blatt and at least expect to be listened to. (No answers to questions guaranteed, of course.)

If he tells the interviewed source that the conversation is “off the record” or “on background” that source has at least a reasonable expectation of the conditions being honored. But call up a possible source and say, “Hello, I’m Joe Bloggs could you comment on….” click.

For the coverage of local events bloggers may have some advantages over reporters. For the most part they write about material they already know and are interested in. They probably have sources they trust and who trust them; general assignment reporters, coming new to a topic, may may not.

Carolyn’s Community, and One Can a Week do an excellent job, as do our sports guys, Zoom Zoom Tucson, Comic Matters, Tucson Tails, and Views From Baja Arizona… to name only a few. (In my judgement Hugh Holub has provided the best coverage of the border in Southern Arizona.)

To round out the offerings we have enough cranky columnists and their annoyed commentators to satisfy just about any reader.

On a final note, we bloggers are expected to credit the material from which we quote. At least “A NY Times report says” and so on. The expectation doesn’t always go both ways. Sometimes we’re granted no more than “A local blog reports.” Oh? And which blog is that, and what news source is it published in? Attribution should be a two way street.

Or maybe we do, it’s pretty hard to say. One of the projects of the National Institute for Civil Discourse will be to measure civility in the comment threads over at the Arizona Daily Star.

I’m pretty sure what they’re going to find; some comments are civil and the occasional comment is raunchy and offensive. Comments that violate the Star’s rules of acceptable standards are frequently removed.

It does seem to me that the denizens of the Star comment threads are a bit more excitable than what we see here at Citizen.com, but I may be prejudiced. At any rate, it’s probably best if we don’t expect too much cooly reasoned debate in a venue one function of which is to allow for blowing off steam.

I’ll be interested to see how the researchers measure civility. Will there be units of civility (Raunchies), applied according to some standard of measurement? Will we be able to say of some post, “That was uncivil to the four ‘Raunchie’ level?”

I think most people recognize when discourse becomes uncivil, and in the real world restrain themselves— from fear of public disapproval of behavior that is ill bred or boorish.

In the virtual world of comment threads there would probably be a major improvement in tone if every comment required the use of one’s real name. This could be assured by site management, which already knows the names of our commentators.

Related Posts

Civil Discourse and Civil Disobedience

Brodesky on Blogs

The Data Port Comment Policy

About The Data Port

In June, 2009, Gannett launched a group of hyper-local news sites collectively known as InJersey.com. The role of each site was to report the local news from New Jersey communities. Each InJersey site was staffed by (at least) one Gannett reporter and by volunteer bloggers.

As the number of covered communities grew, Gannett reporters assigned to individual sites sometimes had reporting/editing duties on more than one site. They did not live in the towns they were covering and their work loads increased.

While some sites got fairly respectable page hits (Freehold, New Jersey averaged about 65,000 page views a month) some of the others scored only a couple of thousand. This made it very difficult to generate advertising revenue.

Blogger participation fell off and Gannett staffers focused more on their print assignments. Pressed for time, they simply reposted their dead tree stories to the web sites. Finally it was time to turn out the lights…the party was over.

TucsonCitizen.com came on line at about the same time and with the same goal of local news coverage provided by bloggers. Some of our bloggers have trained journalism backgrounds and experience; those who don’t— my judgement call here—make a commendable  effort in the direction of fact checking and journalistic ethics.

But we’re bloggers, and we’re volunteers, which means that we write only about what interests us, and only when the spirit moves us. Some of us discover that writing well, and regularly, is harder than we thought. Readers lose sight of some less regular writers, even though the subject matter of their posts is of real interest. They tend to be pushed aside, as we fight for the equivalent of  above the fold presence for our stories on our home page  This tends to skew the balance of TucsonCitizen.com, which would profit from greater editorial control.

But when all is said and done, I think our local coverage is pretty darn good.

I really urge everyone to read this story about the demise of InJersey.