Should newspaper bloggers be subjected to the editing filter?

Here's a post I just made to the online-news list at the Poynter Institute:

In his provocative challenge to the online newspaper industry Wednesday (E&P's Stop the Presses), Steve Outing made a passing reference to weblogs being subjected to the newsroom editing process. Though it didn't draw any commentary on this list, I think it raises important issues:

> There's also the issue of editing reporters' weblog content. Most
likely you'll want to have webloggers post their content without
publishing, then have the city and/or copy desk edit it before hitting
"Publish." That's going to take some editor time if you have a lot of
staff journalist webloggers.

Here's the question: If newspapers do embrace the idea of weblogging by their reporters and editors, should those blogs be subjected to the same editorial filter as the rest of the newspaper and news site?

I'll kick off the discussion by suggesting that they should be subjected to a form of Editing Lite.

Perhaps the chief appeal and attraction of weblogs are their free-form, unfiltered nature. You get to hear people in their natural dialect, writing from their gut with a voice and tone that too often can be filtered into a homogenous blandness after passing through the typical newsroom's editing machine. A lightly edited, hands-off weblog would show journalists as human beings with opinions, emotions and personal lives.

I suspect the effort will not be worth it if the city editor or features editor has to sign off in advance on every entry in every journalist's weblog. If that becomes the standard, newspapers shouldn't bother, because the more interesting blogs will be done by journalists on their personal sites in their off hours.

I like the Dan Gillmor model: He posts items and headlines himself, and an editor reads over his shoulder soon afterward to make sure nothing is amiss. If Gillmor has any doubts about the veracity or authenticity of an item, he consults his editors beforehand. This is how it should be: the newsroom supports its blogging journalists, rather than serving as a filter to screen out comments that might ruffle some feathers.

I say this from the perspective of someone who has spent 20 years in newspaper newsrooms, most of that time as an editor. I respect the newsroom process, and believe that it's the reason why news organizations will always maintain an advantage over other forms of open-source journalism. But I also have seen what it does to any writing that veers from the accepted conventions. Vivid writing, controversial points of view, personal opinion -- much of that is bleeded out during the editing process (many times for good reasons, but sometimes not).

I've heard from bloggers at newspapers who are both subjected to the editing process and others who largely edit themselves. The former group pumps out a daily or weekly blog that goes through a top edit and copy edit and publishes but once a day -- and on the copy desk's schedule. Nothing too special here: The blog becomes a modern equivalent of three-dot journalism. The latter group, by contrast, seems to hew closer to the ethos of the weblog form, less hidebound in terms of newsroom conventions, and committed to blog culture -- publishing immediately, posting around the clock rather than on the copy desk's schedule, linking frequently offsite, incorporating reader comments. In some cases, an editor will sweep in after the fact to clean up grammar or typos, but they're given a degree of freedom to interact online to a degree without parallel among their print peers.

Is such a hands-off policy with respect to newsroom bloggers, on a wider scale, possible, or even imaginable, in newsrooms today? My guess is that the objections some would raise -- the specter of liability, harm to the newspaper's official line -- can be overcome by posting reasonable guidelines and a benign, over-the-shoulder editing check. The upsides, though, would be considerable. Instead of blogs confined to narrowly scripted beats, they could usher in a refreshing new openness to newsrooms and attach a human face to reporters. They would show that newspapers aren't monolithic corporations but made up of individuals with varying viewpoints and who have more in common with their readers than their readers could possibly know from reading their print articles.

Yes, there will be some ruffled feathers on occasion, but that's part of the price you pay if you want to evolve into a more open, less autocratic institution. Ultimately, profit will weigh heavily in the decision. The controversies raised by ruffling internal and external feathers -- and the excitement of a new tool available to journalists -- are exactly what will draw traffic and eyeballs to your site and its advertising.

The chief practical obstacle that newsroom blogging faces is the time issue. Few reporters or editors have the spare time to devote to a weblog. The likely solution is that a weblog can be made a part of a select group of writers' job assignments. In San Jose, for instance, Dan Gillmor's three-times-a-week column was converted into a column that appears twice a week as his regular column and once a week as a compilation of his top weblog items.

Blogging is the best tool online news sites have to interact with users. If you're going to do blogging, embrace it wholesale, with all that it portends. Not a crippled, filtered, top-down version that will render it meaningless.

JD Lasica
independent journalist and senior editor, Online Journalism Review

Thoughts?

(This item was slightly edited after the initial posting on the mailing-list.)

This entry originally appeared July 1, 2002, on my Manila blog.

Posted by jdlasica at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Conversation (0)