Rosen's BloggerCon III Comment on Blogs & Journalism

I didn't attend the BloggerCon III conference back on November 6, 2004, but I was able to listen to the Journalism session because IT Conversations recorded the entire conference and made it available online for anyone in the world to hear.

Rosen's comment at the end of the session jumped out at me because I think he has an important insight for how blogs may be a more natural way for how people consume information. Blog readers start from the opinions of the bloggers they trust, and then they read the factual details if there's some type of conflict or argument -- or if they're interested in learning more.

I've actually referred to Rosen's comment before in a comment on this site when I said,

Rosen talked about how people start with the emotional passion of opinions and then go and research the facts -- as opposed to the traditional paradigm of facts -> analysis -> opinion

Rosen says it much better in his full quote, and I took the time to write it down so I could directly quote it in future posts.

This is what Rosen had to say 1:02:18 into the recording of the Journalism session led by Scott Rosenberg:

JAY ROSEN: I want to put one idea in people's heads. The great thing about blogs for journalists is that it is "denaturalizing" their world. It's making their assumptions clear for the first time.

So in the mainstream journalism world, it is natural -- it is obvious -- that the first thing you need is reliable information -- news. And from that we can have analysis. And then further down in the transaction, there's opinion.

And so a well-rounded information diet begins with facts and news, moves to analysis, and later on opinion -- which is also the stages a journalist goes through in their career. You start off being a reporter. Maybe we'll let you do some analysis pieces later on. And eventually you become a columnist.

What blogging is doing is showing that that's just a convention. It's just a convenient way of dividing up the world. And while it may be true that people get their facts first, and then they kind of want some analysis, and then they move onto opinion. It also works in the reverse.

Lots of people get engaged first through argument. And it's argument that causes them to look for information. And to me this is one of the most valuable things about blogging. It's denaturalizing the journalist's view of how the world works. Because a lot of people want to enter into the public world through the eyes and the arguments and the ideas of bloggers. And it's from there that they go in search of news stories and information.

And not only is that just as good a way of getting the news, but it even might be more natural.

While I'm at it, there is another quote from the moderator of the session that I've found myself repeating in conversations without knowing exactly where it came from.

We talked to a lot of journalists about objectivity, but I don't think I had anybody tell me as succintly as Rosenberg does as to motives behind it. Rosenberg believes that the normative standard of "He Said / She Said" objectivity really came about to limit the liability of the corporations than anything else. Here's what he says (1:09:02 into the recording):

SCOTT ROSENBERG: So this idea of advocacy journalism as the new thing is actually really a mistake -- I mean, if you just look at the history. Objectivity is sort of the relatively recent entry into the lexicon of journalism. If you go back to the 19th Century, the 18th Century -- didn't exist. It's a byproduct of a business structure around journalism as much as anything else I believe.

I'm sure that I had someone else say something similar to us on camera, but I thought I'd throw this in this post as well.