Bloggers at the gates

Are bloggers really fearsome barbarian hordes storming the gates of the Fourth Estate? Many mainstream journalists see them that way, writes Danah Boyd, citing proof in a New York Times story about bloggers being credentialed to cover the Democratic National Convention. Its headline: Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps:

As i’ve written before, blogging is rhetorically situated between journalism and diarying. Most often, people label blogging as one or the other in order to degrade it. The NYTimes pulled this act today because they have a professional interest in portraying convention bloggers as “low-brow” and unworthy of reading, while the NYTimes will present the real “high-brow” convention story. By framing bloggers as diarists, the NYTimes is demanding that the reader see blogs as petty, childish and self-absorbed. ...

I am horrified by this article. Not only does the NYTimes reveal their naiveté about blogging, but they use their lack of clarity to demean a practice that they perceive as threatening. No wonder their professionalism is under attack.

Personally, I didn't find the NYT story horrifying, although it conveys a definite "oh my, there's a Big Change in the air" feel. As for the headline, it strikes me as just an unfortunate choice of words made by an editor struggling to avoid using a word -- "bloggers" -- that might still be unfamiliar to many newspaper readers. (After all, a Pew Internet survey released earlier this year found that only 11 percent of U.S. Internet users read blogs.)

As for the Big Change, well, I seem to recall a similar fuss being raised when MTV correspondents began covering the presidential race a couple of administrations back. Of course, now Rock the Vote has become just another fixture on the campaign trail.

Oh, on a related note, J.D. Lasica points out that TV is the place to look for "petty, childish and self-absorbed" political coverage.