Journalists vs Bloggers

The under­ly­ing themes of the recent Future of Media and Pub­Camp seems to be Journ­al­ists vs Blog­gers, as ilus­trated by posts by Stephen, Stilgher­rian and others.

Ser­i­ously old media types, this story is over 10 years old. New media has been mak­ing inroads in old media well before then.

Want a good example, 10 years ago I used to write for a local music web­site, today you would call it a blog, a few pas­sion­ate people cov­er­ing the local music industry. Which covered news and reviews and was widely read by local music fans and industry heavy­weights. Our com­pet­i­tion was a weekly music liftout in the only daily main­stream news­pa­per The West Aus­tralian, the weekly street press Xpress, a weekly radio show on a couple of the com­munity sta­tions and that was about it. The stu­dent press covered gigs, a couple of print fan­zines and a couple of web sites but noth­ing on a reg­u­lar basis.

The powers that be at The West Aus­tralian did not con­sider the Perth music industry worthy of invest­ing resources in. They rarely reviewed local bands, the only news they car­ried news that came through press releases and at one stage decided that the liftout was not return­ing enough rev­enue and stop pro­du­cing it.

Xpress was run on a shoes­tring budget, the news depended on press releases and if the editor went out the week­end before and talked to people. The review­ers were paid a pit­tance (I know I was offered a job review­ing for them) and the qual­ity of some of their report­ing was ques­tion­able. One of my favour­ite reviews of one my favour­ite bands, men­tioned how great two songs they played. How­ever, the review I wrote, men­tioned the same two songs, as songs they did not play, because a gui­tar string broke on one song and the other was on the play list, but not played as the band ran out of time.

The local music news on two com­munity radio sta­tions was provided by pas­sion­ate ama­teurs, but it was the best source of news. I know because the blog team provided it to one sta­tions and my friends did the other sta­tion. It was the best source for news because the people who repor­ted the news, where out talk­ing to people find­ing out what was hap­pen­ing, check­ing sources and reporting.

Pas­sion­ate ama­teurs whether they are work­ing for old media or new media, who care about the sub­ject and take the time to talk people are always going to bet­ter, than a pro­fes­sional with lim­ited resources who relies on press releases.

The other excep­tion, I take with this Journ­al­ists vs Blog­gers dis­pute, is that old media types value the work I did for the stu­dent press, street press, news­tand magazines and even press releases I wrote appear­ing word for word in news­pa­pers are more import­ant than any­thing I wrote for a blog.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 11:07 pm and is filed under blogging . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.