Blogging versus journalism, Exhibit 2

Charles Cooper writes about the poor quality of blog posts from the Democratic National Convention. I guess my response is “What did you expect? Journalism?”

We are all excited to see blogging even getting some air-time (although hearing some of these old school commentators trying to describe it is surreal to say the least). But there are pretty low entry barriers to blogging. You need to have a computer. But pretty much anyone with the means can blog.

I assume that one needs to have some credentials to be a journalist for a major news publication though. Maybe a degree in journalism for starters? So comparing bloggers to journalists doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. We need to stop trying to turn bloggers into journalists. Isn’t it OK to just let blogging be blogging and not apply the quality standards of journalism?

You get away with a lot of things in the blogging world that you don’t get away with in the world of journalism. Poor writing is one of them (I’m sure I am guilty of that from time to time). And looking at the list of people blogging from the DNC, especially the ones “credentialed as bloggers” (whatever that means), I’m guessing they don’t have the training and experience to compete with the writing talents of the “journalists”.

I just feel like we should cut these people some slack.