The false dichotomy
One of the presents I received last month was the book Zoete koek en speculatie by Dutch science journalist Hans van Maanen. I may write a book review about it but it’ll be in Dutch so will be inaccessible to most of my readers. In short, the book picks apart many articles that appeared over the years in newspapers, especially the science sections, with claims that “cinnamon is dangerous to pregnant women”, “contact with dogs can cause blindness”, etcetera.
It turns out–surprise, surprise–that journalists filling the science sections of newspapers have a) deadlines and b) blank pages to fill, and therefore are prone to publish rubbish. Sometimes, they will just copy a press release which was actually copied from another press release which was written by a guy who misread the original article, stuff like that. Needless to say, the resulting article will have an interesting headline (often a scary one - lots of stuff seems to cause cancer these days), but will be short on facts or miss the finer points of the research the article refers to.
Sounds a bit like what us bloggers do, actually. We copy information from blogs, press releases, etcetera rather than going to the source, and our research (well, certainly mine) often is mediocre. Mainly not because we have deadlines or have empty webpages to fill, but we can spend only so much time blogging. The reasons are different, the result is the same. Substandard reporting, reporting things as facts without ascertaining the validaty of that, etcetera, etcetera.
The reasons why people blog are varied, and some even make their daily bread with it. The quality of bloggers is varied as well. But most of the blogs are there to genuinely attempt to inform the readership about whatever the blog is about (or about a lot of stuff, like my blog). And the rise of open source software has learnt us (well… many of us knew that already) that paying people is not a guarantee for better quality, or vice versa, that the fact that someone does something for its own sake rather than to make money is not a guarantee that the result will be below par. So the fact that I’m writing this without getting money in return does not make it worse or better than when I would have been paid. In fact, I may be indirectly paid because someone stumbles over my blog, likes what it says, and hires me. Or not. It doesn’t matter and it shouldn’t matter.
The false dichotomy is between blogging and journalism (or, broader, “professional writing”). I don’t see a dichotomy.
I wrote a bit professionally. Not a lot, some articles for magazines like PC World and Personal Computer Magazine in the Netherlands and internationally in Linux Journal; I had a paid ITWorld.com column on Jini for a while, and I helped edit one book. Not a lot, but enough to see that most of the difference consists of a human spell checker (a.k.a. “editor”). It is nice to have an editor, I learnt a lot about writing from my editors (but not as much as in the communications courses I had in business school, frankly), but they don’t really influence what you write, they influence how you write it. And mostly only in a minor way.
Bottom line: things don’t become more true because there’s a big name publisher spending money to put it on dead tree material. If you believe everything you read in weblogs, you’re just as dumb as when you believe everything you read in the newspaper, be it the New York Times or the National Enquirer. Take what you read with a grain of salt, do your own research if it interests you, and draw your own conclusions.
At least with a blog, you can directly and publicly tell the author he’s wrong 
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