I’ve been thinking again about bloggers, journalists, and the intersection of the two.
This week, I sent the following suggestions to the Hawaii SPJ board concerning their annual Excellence in Journalism competition. There’s a lot of competition for their awards and they carry weight in the journalism community. They use independent judges who don’t play local favorites. What’s more, they aren’t afraid to refrain of naming a winner in a category if the judges feel the submissions are not good enough.
I’ve been an on-again, off-again member of SPJ, and last year I rejoined after several years out of the fold. One goal is to nudge the Hawaii chapter towards more appropriate recognition of blogs and other online journalism, especially those independent of the corporate media.
I have no idea whether or not they will be receptive, but if SPJ doesn’t pick up on the idea, then perhaps this is the time to create a new group to encourage recognition of excellence in independent online journalism.
To: SPJ Hawaii
Subject: Internet categories for Excellence in Journalism contest
I don’t think there’s any disagreement over the increasing importance of the Internet in delivering news, analysis, and opinion.
And there are a lot of journalists, myself included, who have turned to the Internet as a venue for writing because of the turmoil in the news industry and the relative lack of jobs in journalism. The Internet is more than the web sites of established news organizations. It includes independent bloggers and independent news sites as well.
In my view, SPJ’s Excellence in Journalism competition should include categories consistent with the breadth of online content produced by independent blogs as well as by the web sites of mainstream media.
Currently, your Internet categories are limited to:
I1. Online Spot News Reporting.
I2. Online General News Reporting.
I3. Best Online Multimedia Presentation.
I4. Best Web Page Design
I would suggest that these should be expanded to also include many of the same categories as in Print:
Government reporting
Feature reporting
Investigative reporting
Public Service Reporting
Column Writing/News
Column Writing/Features
Editorial OpinionIn addition, just as there are different categories for daily newspapers, non-daily newspapers, and magazines, as well as “Open Print”, it might be appropriate to further divide the Internet into entries from online sites affiliated with established media and independent sites or blogs.
Overall, expanding the categories to reflect the diversity of the online world would accomplish at least a couple of things. Organizationally, it would encourage bloggers and other online journalists to participate in the annual competition and, perhaps, join SPJ and serve as an entry point to other SPJ activities. And by recognizing quality online journalism, it would also provide an incentive for individual online journalists to raise the overall quality of online offerings.
Reactions and suggestions welcome.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I don’t know how SPJ is set up for membership requirements, but as long as you are a member you should be able to compete. And you are probably right in that they need to update their categories.
There certainly is a need for investigative reporting, and recognition for it, especially since there is so little of it. More investigative reporting might actually help clean up Hawai’i politics. Hawai’i politics permeates every issue and impacts every individual in the State. Hurray for your work, Ian.
the situation is only going to get worse, despite the best efforts of solid journalists
perhaps someday there could be a category for most informative and insightful annonymous blog post
it would be cool to have a prize go to a screenname
The problem I believe is that the SPJ wants people to conform to their ethics.
A blogger like me could never conform to some of the ethics http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
*”Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage.”
Geez… there is no way I can show compassion to someone who may read my blog that I may have outed for something.
*”Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.”
A blogger should be able to blog about who they want to blog about.
*”Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.”
Well I guess I’m out the door…
SPJ will never give me an award if I have to adhere to there ethics.
Nothing against them… but I’d prefer to set my own rules as a blogger.
I think the standards you cite are reasonable for journalistic blogs. However, “overriding public need” sounds pretty vague and could be broadly defined.
Hear, hear! I would join the SPJ, just to support the expanded recognition of online journalists. (I have never been a member before.) I consider myself a journalist, comparable to anyone with “ink,” though my offerings have been digital-only for over a decade.
Damon might not be able to conform to those spelling requirements either.
Since so much of responsible journalism requires editing and vetting, independent bloggers don’t have that backup. If you claim as a blogger to be a “journalist,” then you may open the door to all sorts of legal liabilities, such as slander lawsuits.
But with the SA website giving up on serving readers, the field is wide open.
May I tag on a question, as this particular posting will have journalists who may be willing to answer it. Today’s Star Advertiser has a story from the NYT by Andrew Kramer which had this dramatic sentence, “With calamity perhaps only a few minutes away, all that stood between the flames and the village, Zaprudino, was 58-year old Vladimir M. Ulyonov, equipped with a shovel and a lot of anger at his government for failing to provide even the most minimal assistance”.
Powerful writing and shades of Russian history and literature, I looked through the rest of the SA article to find out the fate of Zaprudino, but there was nothing. So I went to the NYT’s itself and found the article had been considerably shortened and yes the village was saved.
Now I have no problem with shortening wire stories or whatever they call them, but does anyone actually read them to see if they make sense when cut or are they simply measured by the inch?
My feeling is to let the professional journalists have their own organization. This has nothing to do with how I view what I do on my blog. I took only one course many years ago at UH on the subject, and don’t feel in the same league as those who chose journalism as their profession and went out and got a news or editorial job full-time.
Some bloggers are already journalists. Ian, for example, and Joan Conrow also. That’s different. Others, having lost the chance to practice their profession as newspapers downsize, may resort to blogging. Still, they were and remain professional journalists.
While the definition of journalism may be blurring and without denigrating the advancing role of blogs and other new media, why not leave the sPj to the Pjs and have something new for those of us who never worked at a paper ( ‘cept for my college paper)?
Some associate membership might be a good idea, though. When we lived in Japan we were associate members of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.
Our dues were much higher than the pros paid. I think they tolerated us because of that subsidy. But we were groupies, never journalists. We hung out with the pros, we were not pros. Of course, that was because they had a great place to eat lunch, a good bar, sushi, press conferences, and international newpapers to read. If SPJ had similar facilities I might be banging the door down.
As journalism– narrowly defined as those fulltime employees paid by newspapers, network TV, radio and print media such as magazines–shrinks, then the relevancy of such awards declines simply because the remaining “pros” (again, narrowly defined) increasingly occupy a smaller part of the media universe. In “the old days,” they were the media, 99.9%.
As a free-lancer who sold dozens of feature stories to Bay Area newspapers circa 1988-2006, and now as a blogger and writer for AOL’s Daily Finance, I would say one of the primary jobs of the media is to make sense of the “news” and provide a context for what makes a story “news.” In that sense, the blogosphere is besting the “pros” –and that could be partly because global media corporations own most of the U.S. media. The sad reality from my POV as a freelancer who worked closely with editors is that unspoken fear permeates these old-line media organizations now–fear of crossing “corporate” and behind the veil, fear of alienating big advertisers. It will be denied, of course, but I’d like to know what others with direct access to editors see/think. The important stories get killed or buried via various excuses, and hard-hitting editorials getting watered down to pablum. No wonder old-line media is struggling to remain relevant.
Thanks for making the request of SPJ, Ian, but I’ve found it much more rewarding to get positive comments from my readers and stir up a heated discussion than receive an SPJ award. And frankly, after seeing some of the people/stories that won the last go-round, the competition doesn’t seem to be all that meaningful, anyway.
We’re in a new era and new arena that requires new forms of recognition — or maybe none of those traditional forms of competition at all.
Right on, Ian! (this comment is apparently too short, or so I am advised; first time I’ve been “chastised” by software for brevity!)