As a young reporter, I was slipped a copy of the Wall Street Journal’s stylebook by a friend and former Journal employee.  I spent weeks studying how to build their famous "A-head" articles (those daffy articles in the middle of the front page), ledes for stories (yes, it is spelled that way), nut graphs and, most important, its rules for attribution and fairness.

If Rupert Murdoch succeeds in his bid for the Wall Street Journal, the Journal as we know it could disappear. In its place, we may find the biggest blogging platform ever launched for one man’s right-wing views.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’m liberal. (Don’t get me started on Iraq). And yes, this blog is biased. But I’m not telling you it’s news. It’s commentary.

Fox News is supposedly news. But anyone who’s spent any significant time watching it knows it has a significant right-wing bias.

Puh-lease don’t talk to me about the liberal media bias. Let’s say it exists. But any self-respecting newspaper or news source doesn’t present opinion as fact, doesn’t leave out the other point of view, doesn’t launch diatribes in the middle of a news program.

Those are all offenses I’ve seen committed on Fox News in the happily few times I’ve viewed it. I’ve only in the rarest instances seen blatant disregard for commonly accepted journalistic practices in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, which I read every day (Plagiarism aside, of course. That’s not as important, right? Just kidding).

Pardon me? You say the Wall Street Journal is well-known for its conservative views? Well, yes. The Journal’s editorials are somewhere to the right of the late Barry Goldwater. In fact, when you Google "Rupert Murdoch Wall Street Journal”, one of the first things you come up with is a 2004 article by Murdoch in the Wall Street Journal praising our dear President.

But Murdoch’s article appeared in the Opinion section, where it belongs.  Until now, the Wall Street Journal has  known the difference between opinion pieces (those are blogs on paper, youngsters) and objective reporting.

I’m not sure Murdoch does.

See Also

• Murdoch’s 2004 Wall Street Journal opinion piece
• Rupert Murdoch Built Global Media Empire with Bold Moves
• My recent blogs about media

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The Role of `Citizen Journalists’

Citizen journalists are creating quite a stir. Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic, says his network of thousands of amateurs around the world represent the biggest news gathering team in the world.

My friend Andrew Keen, meanwhile, believes that many of these people are hacks who give journalism a bad name.

"If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics to commerce, to arts and culture," he writes in his book scheduled for release this spring, "The Cult of the Amateur: How the Democratization of the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture and Our Values."

I disagree with both. I think these amateurs are an entirely new animal. Call it the Fifth Estate.

Recall (from high school U.S. gov class) that there are four "estates" that serve to maintain a balance of power in the American democracy: the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch and, more informally, journalists. Congress nails the President, the President vetos bills, the Supreme Court overturns Congressional votes and the news guys  turn up dirt on everybody. (If they go too far, they get nailed by the courts, too).

Amateurs reporting on events or writing blogs are no more "journalists" than civics teachers are congressmen or Bush critics are Presidents. They’re something else. But they serve as a great check on the other four estates, as the growing influence of blogs suggests.

The reason people get away with calling amateurs "citizen journalists" is because there’s no licensing board to create journalists, as there is for the lawyers who dominate the first three estates. But most of these citizens could no more become reporters for the New York Times than I could practice law. At its best, journalism has clearly defined standards of impartiality, writing style and reporting — scandals and Fox News not withstanding.

Anyone who was at Digital Media Summit last week probably thinks I’m a hypocrite. I moderated a panel called "Confronting the Citizen Journalist" that included Brody and an exercised Keen in the audience.

Hey, a guy’s allowed to change his mind.

Exactly what to call the Fifth Estate I don’t know. CBS MarketWatch columnist Bambi Francisco, who also sat on the panel, has a blog (which this week also focused on confronting citizen journalists), and she’s certainly no amateur. So what do we call these citizen bloggers? I vote for cloggers.

See Also

• Bambi’s column
• Digital Media Summit
• Now Public
• Andrew’s website

Posted under Uncategorized