The difference between bloggers and journalists
Are bloggers journalists? Can you distinguish? Is what I’m doing right now just another form of mainstream media? What rights and responsibilities do bloggers have? This has been debated lots in blogs (of course), law courts, legislatures, and perhaps even a dead-trees op-ed or two.
In tracking the recent canning of infamous pro-SCO hack Maureen O’Gara from LinuxToday, one substantial difference was made clear to me. Journalists can get fired. Well, I suppose bloggers can get fired too, and it happens all the time, but fire a blogger and they lose the job, not the blog. Fire a journalist, and their words stop appearing in print in your paper. Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Bloggers are most akin to someone who owns their own newspaper, and uses it to push their own agenda (not that that would ever happen in the offline world). Bloggers are not journalists in the conventional sense, employees of an owner, with the checks and balances of that system in place. Usually that’s a good thing. What rights and privileges they (we?) should have is not obvious to me.