Denied! : “Bloggers just aren’t journalists” by Chris McCosky

Denied! is a regular special feature that will see me take an article/action/story and let the culprit in question know exactly why they are wrong.

This week I will be targeting all-mighty journalist Chris McCosky from the Detroit News and his recent elitist article condemning (practically) all bloggers around the world. Essentially what he says is annoying him is that bloggers are discrediting the media, but personally I believe his discontent runs deeper than that.

His opening argument criticizing the legitimacy of bloggers is as follows:

“Journalism employs trained professionals. We actually have to go to school for this stuff.”

Truth be told, I completely sympathize with this statement. Not because it’s a valid argument towards his case, but because I felt the exact same way as a Business graduate looking for a marketing job. I realized that anyone and everyone is encouraged to apply for these positions and that my Business degree with a focus on Marketing gave me no edge at all. At first I was bitter and ranted on and on just like Chris did here in his article. After stopping to think about it for a second, I realized that perhaps my degree didn’t really give me an edge and in fact there could be countless non ‘marketers’ that would be much better at the job than I. The first step to recovery in this situation of feeling a decline in the value of your degree and profession is admitting the problem.

Which leads me to step number two: doing something about the problem. Besides perhaps having a linguistic edge over us non-journalist, you must realize that your sole added value as a writer is as you point out, “We actually talk to, in person, the people we write about.” So that’s what you should stick to, and sleep safe knowing that us bloggers will probably never have access to these sources. Journalists provide factual data, and bloggers take it and play with it how they like. That’s how the game works, welcome to the 21st century. If people weren’t interested in sports enough to share their opinions and blog about them, there would certainly be a decrease in the amount of newspapers bought or sites visited. This would essentially lead to a decrease in revenue of media entities, and would lead to some fully trained journalists such as Chris to be out of work. It is in nobody’s interest to mess with the fragile ecosystem in place.

What ecosystem do I speak of? Let’s make it very clear that the majority of bloggers do not make a living out of blogging. I would say it’s on the other side of the spectrum if you consider ‘journalists’. Hence it is completely wrong to look at the two as rival products, in fact they are complementary to each other’s success. As I mentioned, bloggers rely on journalists to do all the ‘hard work’ for them. If there was no hard work for bloggers to ‘copy and paste’, it is then that the journalists should feel threatened. But to take the current situation and publicly belittle bloggers who just blog as hobby is very irresponsible. You are biting the hand that feeds you.

I don’t know what kind of insecurities has rattled Chris’ cage but it is clear that he would like professional journalists such as himself to be given much more credit – and this I can’t say I support. Since journalists rely on constant stories and a readerbase to make a living, their‘work’ ends up being far less reliable than Chris makes it out to be. As Chris brought up himself, ESPN and every other news company of some sort will generate story after story just to keep readers coming to their site. You will have: made up trade rumours, stories that are misleading, reporting news that should be left personal, over dramatizing events, and making more out of a story than what you must have been taught in ‘Journalism Ethics 101′. I think anyone who follows sports closely will know what I am talking about. Furthermore, every story needs to have a catch or keep readers interested, which results in twisting the real story for their personal point. Imagine a tabloid magazine reporting dull news – this is a recipe for disaster. Sports media similarly needs to keep filling the headlines that will sell papers and make web surfers click the story. A blogger on the other hand has no quota to fill and no credentials to make up a story, so at least what he reports is what he genuinely feels. No bosses to worry about, no sportstars he has to keep happy to get more interviews, and no readerbase that he has to keep hooked. Yes, there will be instances where an irresponsible blogger will try to draw all eyes on him, but it is not the standard that should be applied to the other millions of bloggers out there. Much like there are bad journalists, there are bad bloggers.

You must also try to understand that just because you have a journalism degree, it doesn’t mean that you know more about sports than us bloggers sitting at home in the basement in their pijamas. In fact, those who end up blogging about sports for no revenue must be die-hard sports fans – wouldn’t you agree?

It is time to get off your high horse and accept bloggers and blogging, because it is not a phenomenon that will pass with time. People from the dawn of time have enjoyed communication, sharing thoughts and ideas and feeling part of a community. So get use to us, and if anything step up your journalism work so us bloggers won’t have a chance to ‘discredit’ your reporting – as I have just done here today.