A Blogger Is A Journalist

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You have a blog. You consider yourself a blogger–heck, a “pro-” blogger even. Do you consider yourself a journalist?

I like this definition of “journalist” from Wikipedia: “A journalist is a person who practices journalism, the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues and people.”

By that definition, a blogger who blogs regularly must be considered a journalist. Even a person who reports about nonsense (like the journalists for The Onion) are journalists by that definition. We can split hairs about whether a person who reports untruths or non-truths is really a journalist in the traditional sense but the fact is that even the blogger who takes a satirical position is influenced by current events, trends, issues and people in his or her blogging.

Having premised that a blogger as we traditionally understand him is also a journalist, how many of us actually study journalistic techniques and reporting? I’d gather not many.

Yes, blogging is a fluid medium influenced by the particular writing styles of the individual blogger. The blogger has his own voice, perspectives and experiences that he shares through his writing. But I think we can all work on the “dissemination” part of the definition of journalism above.

Studying journalism techniques allows us to learn writing styes that are particular to certain industries. The sports writer/blogger tries to convey action, the excitement of the moment, the emotional highs and lows of winning and losing. In contrast, the political blogger uses a lot of satire and opinion. Whereas, the technology blogger wants to convey feelings of anxious anticipation for a new product.

In my opinion (and of course you are all welcome to disagree), we bloggers focus too much on getting the latest scoop, generating the best linkbait, speaking our minds on everything under the sun. We spend too little time on the ways in which to communicate to our readers in order to best get our message across. Sometimes, telling a story is the best way to inspire your readers. Other times, absolute satire is the way to get a point across.

My proposal to you is that we should all study the journalistic techniques of various genres (sports, technology, politics, etc.). Maybe it helps to look at mainstream media blogs to see how their writers use words to convey emotion in their posts. Maybe we can visit the bookstore and pick up some genre-specific newspapers or magazines. Let’s think about how they write, how they blend words, how they conjure up images in our minds with their sentences. I’d gather there would be a lot we can learn.

Here’s a link to get you started: visit Poynter Online (a site dedicated to making better journalists) and study their tutorials. I guarantee we can all learn something from traditional journalistic techniques to improve our blogging.