The Knee-Jerk Journalistic View of Bloggers

Oh, don’t you love it when you open up your RSS reader, and find something that encapsulates an aspect of your life? Ladies & gentlemen, Mr Howard Owens:

Most of the bad bloggers tend to gravitate toward current affairs blogging.

Unfortunately, political blogs are also the kind of blogs most journalists tend to read. So a lot of journalists have a very low opinion of blogging.

Those of us more immersed in blogging, or who have grown beyond merely the current affairs bloggers, know that there is more to blogging than rants and raves.[From Journalists who learn to blog help their online sites grow beyond repuporsed print news | Howard Owens]

This is exactly what I face when I go into a room full of our journalists to do a blogging workshop with them. I always start these sessions by allowing them to tell me what they think blogging is, and I’ve only once had anyone come anywhere near the broadest truth. Instead, they almost always focus down on what they see as uninformed political ranting. It’s just another thing journalists have to unlearn to become any good as bloggers.