journalist blogs

Adam Penenberg takes up a subject close to my heart, reporter blogs in the latest Wired:

For all the press that bloggers have received for revolutionizing journalism by bringing Gutenberg’s printing press to the digital masses, when push comes to shove, journalists who operate personal weblogs face an inherent conflict of interest. In the end, it’s the blogs that usually get short shrift.

And according to some, that’s the way it ought to be. As Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs and publisher of the defunct Silicon Alley Reporter, put it in an e-mail: “Blogger + reporter = big problem. I wouldn’t do that, and I’m sure it will end in tears. I know as an editor of a magazine or newspaper I wouldn’t want my paid editors putting scoops out on their blog when those scoops could be driving and growing the print product.”

This me as a particularly un-nuanced view. I can see the problem with reporters blogging on subjects close to their beat — a technology reporter with a blog about Microsoft, for example, which seems to be what Calacanis is getting at. But why can’t a technology reporter blog about birding, civil war re-enactments, or his cats? Where’s the conflict there?

Personally, I’m a general assignment reporter — I don’t have a beat; I report on just about whatever comes up. So it’s not like I’m taking any particular expertise I’ve learned and applying it to this blog; I’m not publishing scoops here; and none of my posts could be “growing the print product.”

Penenberg continues:

But it’s not just about who gets the scoops. A more serious question is how can bloggers, whose success depends largely on sharing unvarnished opinions, also work as so-called objective journalists?

There are no easy answers, and many media outlets find it easiest to avoid perceptions of bias by simply issuing blanket restrictions on what their reporters can say and do outside of work.

This is a trickier question, but one to which I’ve give some thought. I write this blog under my own name, obviously, and assume that some of my editors might read it at one point or another. I try not to write anything that I would be embarrassed about appearing in Page 6 or being quoted on.

I didn’t ask anyone’s permission when I first started blogging, but I already had a website up under the derekrose.com domain when I was hired at the News. I only started posting on journalism-related issues and controversies (“Memogate”, Edward Lee Pitts, etc) after seeing other journalists do so on Romenesko letters, and not getting smote down. But you’re not going to see articles here on what I think about abortion, the Mideast conflict, private Social Security accounts, etc., which I think would be inappropriate.