"Honest To Blog!" — Intro to Amateur Blog Production

That blogs have become so much a part of our cultural vernacular that they’re now routinely referenced everywhere from The New York Times to Academy Award-nominated comedy Juno is evidence of the enormous impact they’ve made on the cultural landscape in the last four years.

Publishing was once an exclusive niche sitting high and mighty in the rarefied dominion of the business elite. To see work translated into print on a published page, one needed to curry favor with one of a few powerful magnates with the financial and capital resources to fire up the presses at will. Now, in this golden age of information of which we are all a part, all you need to achieve the title of “published author” is a keyboard and some bandwidth — Hearst is probably rolling in his grave.
While the most obvious impact of the advent of blogging can be seen in online diaries like LiveJournal and Xanga, through which millions of (mostly teenaged) bloggers have found an outlet and a means for personal expression, its impact can be seen perhaps most clearly in the realm of news reportage.

The rise to prominence of the “blogosphere,” some would say, has brought about radical changes in the way the public perceives journalism. On the internet, one will inevitably find both, and the distinction between the two is not always an easy one to make.

To simply make the claim that the difference between amateur journalism and the professional variety is dictated solely by the absence or presence of monetary gain — that is, whether or not the individual in question is receiving monetary compensation for his or her efforts — boils the equation down to an overy-simplistic notion that style and content of reporting is dictated solely by profit margins, and overlooks fact that many established bloggers now making a steady living off of their online efforts were once indistinguishable from amateurs working off of platforms like Blogger. There are structural differences inherent to the classifications of amateur and professional journalists — differences that might seem obvious when approaching the matter from a holistic viewpoint, but when attempting to dissect the issue in a more analytical context are more nebulous and difficult to identify.

Could the difference be defined simply in terms of traditional reporting versus blogging? While this convenient heuristic might have been applicable five years ago, when the vast waters of blogdom were largely uncharted by the media powers-that-be, in today's world, major news sources use blogs as a way to supplement their more straightforward journalistic efforts, to add a face to their company, to appeal to a different demographic of Internet users than would normally visit The Wall Street Journal or CNN websites. Bloggers under the editorial jurisdiction of traditional news outlets cannot rightly be considered amateurs, not only because they are paid professionals, but also because they operate under the codes, practices and institutions of corporate entities who can dictate the direction of their writing.

The difference between amateurs and professionals, then, should be attributed to fundamental differences in journalistic philosophy that result in largely divergent styles of coverage. In an article titled "Mapping the Journalism-Blogging Relationship," Wilson Lowry, from the University of Alabama, explains some of the ways in which blogging has capitalized on perceived weakness in the traditional media's coverage of the news. "Difficulties posed by external and internal factors have led journalism to neglect some types of news information, which in turn have been poached by bloggers. These include partisan expression, ‘old stories’, stories driven by non-elite sources, and highly specialized content."

Clearly, there isn't a binary state of "professional" or "amateur," but rather a spectrum ranging from the personal diaries on LiveJournal to more traditional news sources like The New York Times and FoxNews, to name a few. In between is where the territory gets murky, and where it becomes more difficult to differentiate between the two categories. Political blogs like the Daily-Kos and the Drudge Report, began as amateur projects, though they might still embrace the journalistic philosophies espoused at their founding, now generate revenue and have large staffs who maintain the website.

While these "professional amateurs" can't be considered true amateurs, it's interesting to observe how their style of journalism differs from that of the "real professionals." Their role in public discourse provides a foil to the news-cycle-dominated professional realm. Trent Lott, New Orleans and Dan Rather all received attention in the blogosphere inordinate to what they would have seen in traditional media. Even when it was more established, professional bloggers covering these stories, the contrast to the coverage doled out by broadcast and print journalism was striking. Obviously the blogosphere, a hotspot for amateur media production, still provides a platform far different from that available through traditional media — even when those doing the blogging are compensated for their efforts.

At this moment in history, when YouTube and Wikipedia are making headlines for their emphasis on user-generated content, a line has been drawn in the sand between amateur and professional media production, and a debate has sparked over the merits of each — a debate that has extended into the realm of journalism.

There are those who argue that, while amateur journalists posting on blogs might lack the vast resources available to the big names in print and broadcast journalism, it is still capable of producing just as high a quality of reporting, and of delivering stories that even the best reporter at The Washington Post might not be able to. The flip-side of that argument, there are those who point to the institutions developed around professional journalism (and the lack of these institutions in amateur journalism) as they reason why amateur journalism is not equal to or greater than the established variety.

A closer look at both sides of the argument is merited.