Why don’t you ever call me?
Are bloggers journalists? While a recent California court ruling extended the state’s shield law to bloggers, with the judge saying that “we can see no sustainable basis to distinguish petitioners [the online journalists] from the reporters, editors, and publishers who provide news to the public through traditional print and broadcast media,” many bloggers still don’t do a lot of primary reporting, relying mainly on information they get from other web sites and blogs. That’s not surprising, given the nature of blogs (after all, the very first web logs were exactly what the name implies: logs of the poster’s journeys around the web, consisting of little more than links with some explanatory text). However, as Robert Scoble points out, in commenting on the coverage of his impending departure from Microsoft, “bloggers rarely call before writing. It’s something I hope we can change. Call before running the story. It’s what great journalists do.” It’s actually something even mediocre journalists do. I agree with Scoble on this, but there’s also a flip side: many sources aren’t as receptive as he is to calls from bloggers. However, the California ruling provides some hope that this is changing. Now it’s up to the bloggers to respond to that change and start picking up the phone (or at least sending a quick email), before clicking the “Publish” button.
