Tim Carmody tries to take apart both the reporter/blogger split and the reporting/blogging split.
Now, [reporting and blogging] are different from what it means to be a blogger or a reporter. The latter are a matter of identity, not activity.
This exercise of limning just what makes one fulfill these terms or makes one’s writing fit into these categories is a useful one. The roles and the activities are not mutually exclusive, and they are not all that well defined in common usage.
Carmody defines blogging as writing online in serial form that is collected into a single database; reporting is searching for information and determining it’s veracity.
“Blogger” and “reporter” are, Carmody says, in the same vein as “writer”; if someone says they are a writer, we assume they identify with the act of writing whether professionally, as a vocation, or as a skill one has honed. (There is obviously a floor below which one is no longer a writer, an important concept.)
Carmody posits that reporters have traditionally been seen as representing their institutions, while bloggers have been, in the short time there have been bloggers, more personally connected to their writings. Of course the former is eroded by print reporters going on television to talk about the story of the day and blogging institutions where there may be a person identified with it, but many individuals writing posts.
The connotations of these words are many, varied and largely dependent upon one’s experience with bloggers, blogging, reporters and reporting, and it should be noted that those B words are viewed quite negatively by journalism’s old guard. The reality is that one is just a way of doing things, like briefs or narrative journalism, and the other is just the identity one has chosen for himself or has thrust upon him. They are not, nor should they be, mutually exclusive and antagonistic.
