Bloggers vs. Journalists. (Wish I’d written this…)

Suppose Coca-Cola offered to pay Joe Blogpack $2,500 to do a column talking about a dead rat found in a storage container at a Pepsi bottling facility, how quickly do you think he would jump? Do you think he would care if the story is true? And if he did, would he have access to the resources to find out if it’s true? Suppose news.google.com is running 200 links to other bloggers who didn’t take the time to fact check – our honorable Joe Blogpack checks his facts against the tainted stories and even thinks he’s doing the right thing.

And this, kids, is the difference between ‘reporting’ and ‘journalism’. We’ve just had our standards lowered by the willingness of our mainstream media to report anything – rumors, opinions, lightly edited press releases, as “news” and run on to the next hot topic and pray that you don’t change the channel during the ads.

Blogging isn’t going to replace journalism because of these exact problems. Blogging might do a lot of harm to the mainstream US news media but it’s their own damn fault for abandoning true journalism and resorting to showing the same video clip everyone else has, just 2 minutes earlier and with more sensationalistic or opinionated commentary.

As seen here: Slashdot: