| In her paper "It's Just a Matter of Common Sense":
Ethnography as Invisible Work, Diana Forsythe makes
the argument that misconceptions about the work
of an ethnographer lead non-experts to believe
that they can conduct ethnographies as valid
as those an expert would conduct. Forsythe lists
six misconceptions, but the upshot is that
ethnography has a low threshold for entry: all
you need, after all, is a pen, paper, recorder
and a few open-ended questions! This approach,
of course, ignores the rigorous methodology
honed by professionals over years and years.
Other disciplines have low thresholds as well.
In the last decade, software products have
significantly lowered the threshold for
the fields of graphic and web design, for
example.
Blogs have lowered the threshold for journalism.
Thus, we now see journalists attempting to
deal with the same issues that have threatened
ethnographers and web and graphic designers.
Usually, when such a threshold-lowering occurs,
it is only the surface-qualities of the work
that have been made easier, not the much
more difficult "invisible work" which is
ignored by the avant garde armatures. In
the case of blogs, the ignored work is that
which is usually done by an army of editors.
While my own experience working at newspapers is limited,
I believe I have enough exposure to speak
responsibly on the matter. My grandfather worked
at newspapers most of his life, covering World
War II among other issues. My father has worked 25
years at newspapers around the country, the Associated Press and
CNN, usually as a copy editor. Editing is an
intense job: it leaves most with ulcers or
worse. It is intense because of the scrutiny
that must be applied to every story that goes
out on the wire. The ramifications of incorrect data
are enormous. While on blogs someone
may "call you out" if your references are not
accurate, an editor at a newspaper will be fired
for a similar transgression (I guarantee
that a regiment of CBS editors are looking
for jobs right now).
Editors also attempt to ensure objectivity in news writing.
This can never be perfectly done. But, again, people
work hard trying (as far as I know, my father never
received any encouragement to bias stories [he also
never worked at Fox]). And while a pure separation of
news and opinion is an ideal, it is an ideal worth
working toward. The argument some blog-theorists
give for their liberal blending of opinion and
news is that, well, the ideal just is not attainable,
so why try? Revel in your subjectivity! But this
is just talk radio transmogrified.
But what are blogs really used for anyway? During
the Democratic National Convention Technorati created
an online feed that displayed recent postings from several
political blogs. For kicks, I checked the page every
couple of hours over the course of the convention to see
what people were blogging. The results:
real-time rants/play-by-play: 4
unrelated posting: 12
expletive laced missives: 5
links to news/very brief comment(0-1 sentence): 18
reproductions only: 10
reproduction/links/short response: 8
meta (about blogging): 5
short column/links/some quotes: 14
column, no quotes,links: 3
tongue-in-cheek: 4
personal-update: 3
original, relevant content: 0
very short observation: 5
The upshot: most posts were unrelated or spun
articles produced by media outlets.
Blogs have value. They are a good forum for vetting
formative ideas and further scrutinizing released stories.
But it is important not to confuse the surface
threshold-lowering that a technology manifests
with underlying processes.
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