Is blogging journalism? (and what the question should be)

Blogging is heralded by some, mostly bloggers, as the answer to crap science journalism and the crisis heralded for the business model of traditional journalism. Blogging, they contend, is journalism just published by a different, cheaper medium. Even better, instead of generalists writing half informed articles further butchered by mindless sub-editors, content is written by experts in their field.

On the face of it, this sounds an attractive future and perhaps the potential loss of science journalists from national news outlets is nothing to mourn. Yet the debate over the desirability of this possible future, or indeed if blogging is journalism, rages on. Ed Yong wrote a good critique of this debate a while back (although I contend it's not 2006 to still talk about this).

On one level, and as Yong points out, this is a silly debate. Blogging is no more or less journalism than writing something that goes into a newspaper – the medium through which words are made public is a moot point. What matters is the meaning of those words, where they came from, the process by which they came to be written and who they are intended for.

For the record, journalism has many definitions but my favourite is writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a popular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying topical newspaper or popular magazine writing as distinguished from scholarly writing. But I really don’t think the definition of journalism is that interesting.

What I am much more interested is, from a science perspective, can writing about science on blogs replace writing about science in newspapers? My own feeling is categorically not yet. This is simply because, like them or loathe them, newspapers command an authority that blogs do not. Read something in a newspaper and, whilst you know there is an editorial line to toe, you expect that the story has been written as an attempt to represent rather than twist the facts. You might disagree, and “editorial line” is a euphemism that contains a multitude of sins, but I still trust what I read in a paper more than what I read in a blog I have no knowledge of. Newspapers have a brand to maintain, a reputation to uphold, a bank account to ravage with defamation cases. Blogs can fold and reform at no cost.

This becomes clearer in the inverse. The blogosphere is full of misinformation on science, from vaccines to climate change, but the science community are not nearly as exorcised by this as they are by a single bad headline in the Express. Climategate became a story when mainstream papers picked it up, not when the blogs were spinning. This is because they know that the Express has much greater potential to cause harm because it is seen, by some, as a trusted source of information, an opinion former. Newspapers matter because millions of people read and believe what is in them. The same simply is not true of most, if not all, blogs.

This fact is, at once, implicitly understood by those that call for the heads of journalists when they get things wrong and ignored by the same people when they suggest blogs can replace them. Until blogs command the same kind of respect, authority and balance as, rightly or wrongly, journalists that publish in newspapers are held to, they will not replace them. Perhaps the answer is a curated site, like Comment is free, or Discover Blogs, but we know they are not immune to controversy. Furthermore, what level of curation is required and would that kill the very thing that makes blogs attractive?

The question I think we should ask is will blogs meet the needs of the science community and a diverse readership? Working out how to provide blogs the kind of authority newspapers enjoy will go some way to answering that question but that will not be trivial to do and, to me, appears some way off.