Earlier this summer, I got frustrated with a college football journalist-turned-blogger, and in an effort to vent some of my frustration, I googled, “(Redacted) sucks.” The effort worked, there was plenty of commentary on the guy, the man has made a career out of pissing off college football fans and it was nice to receive confirmation that not only do others see what I was seeing, but others have been seeing this for twenty years. Blog posts from 2007 poured to Google’s surface lamenting this man’s idiocy. They were not the only ones.
A good share of the 2007 round of “(Redacted) sucks” posts were part of an informal series in which bloggers were responding to other bloggers, Texas’s to Georgia’s and USC’s to Texas’s, the college football blogosphere discussing, in op-ed format, the best way to deal with one specific jackass. Standing over my bathroom sink, swearing I’d brush my teeth after reading one more essay, three things struck me about the discourse:
First, the bloggers were engaging in what would become one of the most relevant questions of the upcoming media era: What’s the best way to deal with a troll? Does it matter if they’re being intentional with their trolling? What are the costs of engagement? What are the costs of standing idly by?
Second, the writing on these blogs was, by today’s standards, very good. High-quality word choice and thoughtful sentence structure were the norm, to a degree that made me—and I’d consider The Barking Crow’s writing among the better writing out there in today’s market—a little ashamed of not working harder on that aspect of this job. A lot of times, societal things are getting better and society thinks they’re getting worse. I don’t think this is the case with writing. Writing has gotten worse these last fifteen years, and I don’t know how much to blame the demise of print, for eliminating the necessity of conciseness, and Twitter, for eliminating the previous norms of punctuation, but there are plenty of contributing factors. We’ve lamented this before—a lot of what people consider good writing these days is just printed in a serif font—but I was surprised that even the bloggers were writing so well in 2007. 2007 wasn’t that long ago.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the bloggers were writing from a position on one side of what they saw as a clear divide. The journalist in question was a journalist. The bloggers in question were bloggers. The journalist was writing for an establishment media outlet. The bloggers were writing for a scattered assortment of nascent websites. The journalist was working with the resources of a legacy institution and the accompanying journalistic standards. The bloggers were working with few resources and few standards. Each job was serving a purpose in the college football media ecosystem, but the two were very different. They’ve become so blurred in the years since.
As is often the case, college football is embodying broader American trends here. It’s probably embodying global trends, even, just in our American flavor. We need journalists, and we need bloggers, but in what turned into an unfortunate industrial war, outlets which used to hold themselves to rigorous standards established by the best in their field have swung into blogger lanes, publishing rumors spread by individual anonymous sources and unloading paragraph after paragraph of hardly-proofread scree. The race to be first to a story has lowered the prevalence of facts. The indifference of the consumer base to the benefit of editors has resulted in their removal, at least in part, from the process of publishing written work. It’s economically understandable, it’s all economically understandable, but it’s one of those market inefficiencies: A series of short-term thinking has gutted a crucial institution. People distrust the media, and there’s plenty of reason why. Journalism, as an industry, has dropped the ball, and too many journalists—already the most out of touch they’ve ever been—have responded by spitting defenses about how important journalists are, using instances of heinous harassment they receive from the wacky to justify an implication that they, by virtue of a journalism degree and a press pass, are immune from criticism. Society needs healthy discourse, they say, and then reject even good-faith critiques.
There are great journalists out there, and there is great journalism out there, and there was plenty of shitty journalism in the decades and centuries before this one. But the ratio has shifted, especially on the national scene, and I think it would be useful to define a few terms.
Journalism
Journalism, real journalism, is a strictly defined profession with a rigorous set of industrially accepted standards. You treat anonymous sources with caution, even if you can verify their identity. You report independently, treating others’ reporting with excessive skepticism to avoid a multiplication of errors. You publicize your corrections. I do not have a degree in journalism. I am not a journalist. We do not engage in journalism here at The Barking Crow. But these are the sorts of ethical codes reputable outlets follow. These are the sorts of practices journalism students and young journalists learning on the job are (or should be) taught.
Rumor mills are ok. Rumor mills have their place. But journalism, real journalism, also has its place. Its place is to be the source of truth. That truth is what gives reputable outlets their repute. Without truth, the repute wanes.
This is lower-stakes in the sports world, and a decent share of sports journalists have been often deservedly bullied in recent years for an unwarranted projection of self-importance. But as the industry has slacked on standards in the lower-stakes areas, they’ve also slipped where the stakes are high. That hasn’t turned out well for our society.
Blogging
It’s important to note that none of these roles or terms is mutually exclusive. Journalists can write blog posts. Bloggers can engage in journalism. Writers can report, reporters can write, and there are times it’s possible for an individual to simultaneously do all four. It is useful at times for there to be crossover, and I’m not trying to advocate for the boxing-in of individual journalists or bloggers. What we’re after is an understanding of when journalists are blogging, and when bloggers are reporting, and etc. etc. etc. We don’t do much journalism or reporting on this site, but others do. Good for them.
Blogging is, I would offer, any published work written primarily to be posted on the internet. It’s epitomized on sites like this one, where the word count can range anywhere from one hundred words to six thousand and the blogger has free reign on topic and style, but it ranges from microblogging (Twitter, Tumblr, some Instagram captions) to online-based journalism (Substack, for example). It is a very wide net, and as more and more media becomes online-only, it is growing so much that it may soon lose its definition. What’s not blogging, though? Work written to be published in physical print that is then also published online. There are a lot of journalists now who exclusively blog, but most of what the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times do is not blogging, because it’s being written for a physical paper, and New Yorker articles are not blogging, because they’re being written for a physical magazine.
What’s tricky about this definition is that “blogger” has an implied informality to it, but what I think it’s important to stress is that not only bloggers blog. Everybody blogs. Journalists mostly blog now. Many don’t like that term, but that’s what they’re doing. The word comes from “weblog,” a portmanteau of “web” and “log.” A blog is a log maintained on the web. An online log. When we blog, we’re using a tool. That tool is useful, because it allows people to share thoughts and information rapidly, but it is also dangerous, because it allows people to share thoughts and information rapidly. This is why a divide between journalists and bloggers is healthy, even if both parties are technically engaging in blogging.
Reporting, Opinion, and Analysis
Reporting is the sharing of information. Opinion is the sharing of opinion. Analysis is an attempt to explain the context around information, sometimes in order to offer predictions. Because of this, analysis is usually contained within articles based on reporting. When an article about a hurricane shares that the hurricane has reached Category 4 status, that piece of the article is reporting. When the article then consults an insurance industry expert about the projected cost of damage should the hurricane follow its forecasted path, that expert is sharing analysis. When someone then says that to prevent so many hurricanes from reaching such severity, Congress should outlaw the Hummer, that is opinion.
Analysis is important to the media right now. It’s in high demand. It’s also something to be handled with a lot of care. It’s not pure opinion, so it’s presented as truth, but people get things wrong. It’s also easy to let opinion slide in under the guise of analysis, or to intentionally insert opinion via what’s passing for analysis. Worse still, more and more reporters are being asked to analyze themselves, within their reporting. Rather than only sharing the hurricane information, they’re being asked to paint the broadest picture of the situation, turning the process into one supremely vulnerable to subjectivity. Interestingly, blogging makes it easier to separate reporting from analysis, with so much space on the page and the convenience of subheaders. Also, blogging has few formalized barriers between reporting and opinion like those which exist in legacy media. Analysis is a lot closer to opinion than it is to reporting, yet it is intertwined in most reporting without a lot of guardrails. This is bad.
Writing
Truman Capote was likely too harsh on Jack Kerouac, but he did see what was coming: A lot of what’s printed on screens or on paper these days is not writing. It is typing. It’s easy to get obnoxious about this, but too many media consumers are willing to refer to something as great writing these days simply because it’s long, just like a song isn’t great music just because the singer has a beautiful voice. People can like it, there’s nothing wrong with liking it, but the Subway Italian B.M.T.™ isn’t the pinnacle of manmade cuisine.
Writing is a craft, like cooking or painting or woodworking. Writing involves taking a set of materials—words, punctuation—and creating a product from them. Just as I’m not exactly cooking when I pour milk on cereal, not all written work is really writing. Each achieves its intended purpose, but a lot of written media is milk on cereal, and that is different from writing. Writers and journalists and bloggers are different things, and again, there is overlap, but you can be any of the three without being either of the other. Here at The Barking Crow, we consider ourselves bloggers and occasionally writers, but we rarely engage in journalism or reporting. We mostly engage in analysis, opinion, and writing (and humor, but that’s far enough from this discussion that we don’t need to delve into it further).
This is a little obnoxious of me, I know that, but I do think media consumers benefit from encountering good writing now and then, and I think media consumers also benefit from having it pointed out to them that Times New Roman and black words on a white page (or white words on a black page) aren’t the things that determine what’s good writing and what isn’t. We try to put good writing into everything we do on this site, and most of the time, including in this post, we don’t approach it with the rigor to really make it all that good. This blog post is probably five hundred words longer than it needs to be. But, good writing is out there, and it feels great to encounter, especially since it’s a lot rarer to encounter than it was in 2007.
I like this analysis–and the definition of the terms. 👍