Bloggers MIGHT Just Be Journalists

An exciting signal moment for bloggers this week, as Joshua M. Marshall of Talking Points Memo won one of the biggest journalism prizes for investigative reporting. Marshall was awarded a George Polk Award for legal reporting for his site’s leadership and reporting on the fired U.S. Attorneys scandal last year. The citation: “His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration’s bidding.”
I’ve been having the “are bloggers journalists?” debate for three years, ever since my own foray into blogging at the White House, and I’ve argued that I think most journalists misunderstand the bloggers’ side of this debate: Most bloggers aren’t interested in doing journalism or being held to the ethical/moral standards of a profession they’re not in. Instead, I think most bloggers are in it for fun