Don't Blame the Bloggers

By Michelle Leder
July 14, 2008

Last week, just before everyone headed off for the July 4th holiday weekend, a young woman named Jessica DaSilva shook up the journalism community. She got lots of folks thinking about the future of journalism, the layoffs that have roiled the industry, and what role new media, specifically blogs, play in all of this.

DaSilva, an intern at The Tampa Tribune, a newspaper where I got my start nearly 20 years ago, blogged about a meeting that Tribune editor Janet Coats had with the paper’s staff about the latest round of layoffs and a new approach to news gathering. (Coats’ memo detailing the changes is here). Because that meeting was unlikely to find its way into the Tribune’s pages (or probably even those of the competing St. Petersburg Times), DaSilva did something that’s very natural these days: she wrote about the meeting on her personal blog.

Nearly a week later, DaSilva’s post has attracted over 150 comments from a wide range of people, some of whom have threatened to make sure that DaSilva “never gets hired” again. Unfortunately, that kind of egomaniacal comment (and cowardly anonymous one, to boot) shows exactly why some journalists still don’t get what blogging is all about and why they still view it as a threat instead of as a natural complement to news gathering. In general, newspapers (and the companies that run them) have done a pretty awful job at reporting on their own industry. That’s what has enabled sites like Romenesko, with its steady stream of leaked memos, and newer voices like DaSilva’s, to thrive online. So it’s unfortunate that some journalists feel threatened by the newest form of media.

As a blogger and a journalist who writes for mainstream media outlets, I’m often frustrated by the disconnect and bitter feelings between the two groups. Get a group of bloggers together and they’ll complain about the evil and lazy “Main Stream Media”. And mainstream journalists are often quick to point to fact-checking errors, or even spelling mistakes as a sign of blogger incompetence. Because I’m part of both worlds, I know that both camps are wrong.

Like it or not, the business model for news gathering is changing rapidly. DaSilva was bold enough to write about it on her personal site. Journalists who seek to punish her for being the messenger of bad news really need to start looking for other folks to blame.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism