Smart thoughts from GigaOM as the HuffPost wins a Pulitzer and the NYT launches another stand-alone blog:
“The question ‘are blogs journalism?’ — or similar questions such as ‘Is Twitter journalism?’ — make no sense any more, if they ever did. Are telephones journalism? Are pencils and pens journalism? No. They are just tools. A blog is also just a tool, one which can be used for journalism and for many other things as well.”
I mostly agree, but that being said, I think there is a big difference between original reporting and aggregation, between thinking and curating. The tools of blogging have made the latter items much easier to do.
One challenge for so-called old media in adapting to the new world order is that the audience still has an expectation from them of quality original reporting, and it’s difficult if not impossible to fund news analysis, foreign bureaus, unions, reporters on assignment, long-form journalism, spotless editing (etc.) and still make payroll, while your upstart competitors do not bear the burden but often do reap the rewards of these expenditures.