Can Blogs Do Journalism?
On the face of it, the question of whether blogs can do journalism is absurd — like asking whether sites published on Vignette can do journalism. A blog, after all, is just a content management system — revolutionary because it made web-native publishing free …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands at the end of a year spent litigating blogs' legitimacy. In March 2007 the Online Journalism Review asked whether blogs were a 'parasitic' medium living off mainstream reporting; by September, BuzzMachine was diagnosing what was wrong with newspapers' own blog efforts; and two weeks before this post, gapingvoid pushed back on the 'blogging is dead' obituary.
Publishing 2.0's move is to dissolve the question rather than answer it: a blog is just a content management system that made web-native publishing free, so asking whether blogs can do journalism is like asking whether sites built on Vignette can. That framing echoes the identity argument from early 2006 — Slate's 'not just another column about blogging' and AdAge's 'a blogger is just a writer with a cooler name' — and its pickup by the New York Times shows the debate had reached beyond the blogosphere into legacy print.
First-order effects
- The argument hands professional bloggers like Gawker a ready rebuttal to 'parasite' charges: if the CMS is neutral, the criticism has to attach to reporting practices, not the publishing format.
- Newspapers running blogs can no longer treat the format itself as the quality problem — their own weak blog efforts become an editing-and-resourcing question instead.
Second-order effects
- Mainstream outlets weighing blog strategies face pressure to compete on process — sourcing, editing, accountability — rather than dismissing the format, since the tooling barrier to entry is now zero.
- The 'parasitic medium' framing loses traction as the debate shifts to who does original work, forcing critics of blogs to name specific failures rather than blame the platform.
Third-order effects
- If the tool-versus-practice distinction holds, the durable line in media stops being blog versus newspaper and becomes who performs verification and editing — a structural split between platforms and practices that outlasts any single publishing technology.
The trend: Web publishing debates are shifting from judging formats (blog versus newspaper) to judging practices (reporting, editing, sourcing) as content management tools commoditize distribution.