By Autumn Lorimer
The war in Iraq. Mayoral election results. Cravings for Rocky Road ice cream.
Credible reporting on civic affairs, upcoming events and interesting facts have been the bread and butter of American newspapers for decades. Recently, something new has been added to the list of items running under a newspaper?s banner: the random rantings of reporters and community members.
Across the nation, hundreds of newspapers are adding blogs to their Web sites, a sort of digital message board where anyone can post notes and ideas. The information posted on these sites ranges from heated political commentaries and well thought-out opinions to personal diary entries and Grandma Betty?s famous apple pie recipe.
Site hits are up, and so is online advertising revenue. But one question remains unclear: Is blogging really journalism?
Purists say no. Because there is no verification of facts or content screening, some journalists view blogs as nothing more than a community gossip board free from responsibility and say they have no place on a newspaper?s Web site.
Other papers, however, see blogs as the shining future of journalism, where every reader has a voice. They argue newspapers have always featured similar practices, such as editorial pages, and that it is a natural next step in newspaper evolution.
The Salt Lake Tribune and the Provo Daily Herald have both jumped on the blogging bandwagon.
?With our staff blogs, we view it as a way to offer more, and maybe to some extent to let our readers know a little more about who we are,? said Tim Fitzpatrick, managing editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, which hosts 11 reporter blogs that mainly give behind the scenes information on stories published in the paper.
On the Tribune?s site, community members are not allowed to create their own blog but can post any comment on one of the reporter?s sites.
?You don?t want a newspaper that is entirely personality driven, but you don?t want it to be a big faceless blob either,? he said. ?We have to be more transparent and have to be more up front about what we?re doing. That can be a little unnerving, but ultimately, healthy. In some ways, we?re getting the same things that we?ve demanded of the government all along.?
Blogging newspapers say the sites give readers a more dynamic, minute-by-minute experience. Instead of waiting a full day for the news to be delivered to their doorsteps, blogs allow subscribers to read the news and comment on it almost instantly.
True, it?s not traditional journalism with fact checking or information gathering, but that doesn?t matter, according to John Robinson, blogging lecturer and editor of the Greensboro News and Record in North Carolina. The truth, he said, will still rise to the surface.
?You can?t say, ?I don?t give any respect to bloggers because they aren?t following the same form I am,?? he said. ?The newspaper model is not the only model. Newspaper people need to get over it, because blogs are here to stay. (Blogless newspapers are) going to be run over by a bulldozer if they haven?t already.?
Bloggers say they see themselves as adding to the editorial content of the paper and to the overall discussion of life in their communities.
?One of the benefits of blogging here is that I know that my entries are read and I derive satisfaction from such,? wrote one blogger on the Daily Herald?s site. ?I attempt to add value to other readers by publishing comments and suggestions that I hope will help them have a more positive day.?
Most newspapers that allow blogging have strict policies on what content will remain posted. Bloggers must register, a practice that Fitzpatrick said, ?knocks down a lot of the whackos,? and postings are regularly checked for slanderous or false material.
?At the beginning, we worried a lot about (inaccurate comments), but my paper has been doing this for a year and a half, and have had very few comments that are offensive,? Robinson said. ?It?s not as a big of a problem as I thought it would be. You can kill blogs if you want. We can say, go find some other playground to play in; don?t play in ours. I don?t edit them, but I might ban you or delete your comments or ask you to tone it down.?
The combination of staffing limitations and the instant nature of blogging has some papers extremely nervous, however, and for good reason. Blogs by their very nature provide a platform for freewheeling commentary, which some argue could cause serious libel and defamation problems.
The fact is most newspaper staffs are simply not large enough to keep a continuous eye out for false information.
?The real problem is that most of the people who are producing blogs are not trained information producers,? said Scott Shamp, director of New Media Institute at the University of Georgia. ?There are standards?accuracy, validity, what we train in journalism programs. I think it?s dangerous for a newspaper organization to secede over that power to a volunteer group to produce content that the paper will distribute.?
In fact, Shamp says he can see only one reason a newspaper would ever dream of hosting a blog on its Web site: money.
?Newspapers can tell you that they want to give a voice to their readers, but that?s not it,? he said. ?It?s cheap. It costs them nothing to publish that and people are reading it and you can sell ads. It?s economics. Any serious newspaper would never do this. Can you imagine the New York Times doing this? No way.?
To date, the Deseret Morning News has stayed firmly on the blogless side of the fence. Managing Editor Rick Hall said the paper has considered adding a blog, but that so far it sees the risks as outweighing the benefits.
?We?ve thought about it, probably like everyone else in the world,? he said. ?We have been very careful about blogging because of the credibility issue. Anybody can say anything they want at any time without any verification. When you strip journalism down to its bare soul, all we have to offer the public is credibility.
?There?s a lot of work to journalism that you don?t see. The writing is pretty easy. It?s the reporting that takes time. You have to get to the right people, cross check the information, verify the information. That?s what so rarely happens in a blog.?
No blogging cases have been brought to court yet, so there is still room for debate on whether or not a paper is responsible for online postings. If misinformation is published on the web site, however, it is possible the newspaper could be sued for libel.
Actionable or not, the mere chance that one off-the-wall comment might be found libelous is enough to keep some papers from touching blogging with a 10-foot pole.
?What bloggers have in their corner is passion, but that doesn?t mean that they are good at communicating that passion,? Shamp said. ?I don?t think any court in the world will support a paper that says that it?s just a blog. Well, tough luck. You published it.?
Even for papers that could afford it, the idea of hiring a full-time staffer to check blog postings for potentially libelous material raises some interesting issues. The draw to blogs is that they are uncensored. As soon as someone checks each entry, Shamp argued, blogs have lost their value.
There are less serious problems with blogging as well. Allowing everyone to be the reporter makes every topic fair game. Some fear that the flood of information will make important issues fade into the background.
Ironically, that is exactly why others say the blogging craze will be short lived.
?I believe the public will always want an editor?not someone who tells them what to read or what to think, but someone who sifts through the mountains of information and helps to make sense of it,? Hall said. ?Someone to give you some of what you want and some of what you need and the opportunity to go deeper into some of those areas you want to go deeper into.?
Most anti-bloggers can?t see the trend surviving past the next decade. They say that while blogs will be successful in their own right, they will not be seen on newspaper sites in the future.
?(Blogs) will be just like a community bulletin board, and they?ll be successful in that capacity,? Shamp said. ?They?ll sell ads and stay around, but this is not the future of journalism. How can you say that people are going to be more interested in someone?s cat getting caught in a tree than they are in real news??