How nice it must be as a blogger to have an editor to protect you from your solecisms. That would be a real luxury. A Washington Post memo on blogging includes a checklist for new blogs which says: “Blog items need to be edited. Your proposal needs to say who will edit blog copy.”

The bit about the value of promotion in print and at the main online site also sounds like a dream for independent bloggers.

The memo, available at the Washington City Paper, talks a lot of sense about blogging. It includes the need for regular updating (at least once a day) which I have not been doing recently.

With my infrequent posts I was surprised to find myself in Adrian Monck’s table of ten British journo-bloggers. It must be the long tail that has kept me there but thanks Adrian.

Yes, I could do with an editor to nag me for the copy.

Yet, there is something special about the immediacy of an unedited blog. Discuss.

After reading the comments on Jay Rosen’s post attacking Michael Skube’s Los Angeles Times piece on blogging, I went out and bought a copy of The Cult of the Amateur.

It was probably only a few of the 339 comments that motivated me but they gave an overall impression of a bunch of people who simply hated traditional media. This was one comment: “There’s a war on for the minds of America, and the blogs are winning. The trad media is terrified, because they know it. Their pedestal has been kicked out from under them, and they just can’t stand that.”

And another: “YouTube is doing to TV news what blogs are doing to pundits. In a year or two CNN will be as parasitic upon the internet as we have even been upon the MSM.”

Most of the comments were responding to Rosen’s call for examples of blogs doing original reporting. Of course they do. But there was an overall tone suggesting it was about a battle between bloggers and traditional media. The commenters were not company I would care to keep.

Skube’s piece was a polemic emphasising and generalising to make its point. I was undermined by inaccuracy. Yet why did it being about an outpouring of vitriol?

It was clearly written to be provocative but concluded with a point that needs debating:

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

Rosen has since responded in the LA Times.

Andrew Keen’s argument in The Cult of the Amateur is not so very different. In essence it is that our cultural values are being overturned. He puts it like this:

What happens, you might ask, when ignorance meets egotism meets bad taste meets mob rule?
The monkeys take over. Say good-bye to today’s experts and cultural gatekeepers — our reporters, news anchors, editors, music companies, and Hollywood movie studios. In today’s cult of the amateur, the monkeys are running the show. Wither their infinite typewriters, they are authoring the future. And we may not like how it reads.

Keen, unlike Skube, cannot be accused of not knowing or understanding the web. He has his own blog, has been involved in web start-ups and commentated widely on culture, media and technology. His central argument comes across in an interview on the Colbert Report:
He has sparked a serious debate including a fascinating exchange between himself and Emily Bell, editor in chief of Guardian Unlimited, which nicely demonstrates how the web can facilitate the development of argument and counter argument.

Jeff Howe put a strong argument for not ignoring Keen saying his arguments will “sound mightily persuasive to a significant constituency who do believe the Internet is primarily a repository of porn, spam and corrosive amateurism. Failing to recognize that the choir to which Keen preaches might just be larger than our own congregation is an arrogant, and potentially irreversible blunder.”

I read The Cult of the Amateur with growing frustration, feeling Keen wanted to put the genie back in the bottle. The chapter headed “Solutions” suggested he might have some answers. On newspapers his best shot is to comment that Guardian Unlimited has “managed to achieve some measure of economic success by effectively balancing its costs with its online advertising sales”.

That does not answer the shortfall caused when the loss of print sales and advertising revenue does not match the income from online advertising, which is doesn’t. Howard Owens is another who has engaged in the debate, in a series of three posts. In the third post he says:

The media train is hurtling forward, but journalists are not driving. Even the biggest traditional media companies are not at the wheel. In fact, there is nobody making sure we stay on the rails. The train is propelled by collective action — the action of ambitious entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and investors, technology researchers and engineers, computer programmers and amateur hackers and curious and demanding audiences, as well as some of us in the media, with our constant demands for new, different and better. All of these swirling forces create the turbulence that keeps the train on its collusion course with our collective destiny.

And I have no idea what that is, or if we’ll ever really get there.

Scary stuff, to be sure, but that’s the reality of the situation.

So it’s adapt or die.

That just about sums up our knowledge at the moment. It also takes me back to my starting point which is that there are a lot of people, confused and worried about the uncertain future of journalism who need to be a part of the discussion. Calling on Skube to retire or accusing Keen of Stalinism is not likely to make them feel there is a debate worth joining.

I hope there will be all opinions present when Andrew Keen takes part in a discussion moderated by Richard Sambrook at the Frontline Club in London on September 6. I would be there is I wasn’t flying to Spain that evening,

Little more than a year ago Ray Hartley was blogging his experiences at the about-to-be-launched South African paper, The Times, of which he is editor. He is still blogging and has been joined by other staffers working in the paper’s integrated newsroom.

He reflects on the paper’s first year in an interview at RAP21, African press network site, in which he says:

You have to ask yourself why critics are wary of blogging. It’s not just about blogging, it’s about a change in the organizational culture of newspapers. If you understand that a newspaper is not a lecturing instrument, but rather an engagement with an opinionated audience, you understand blogging right away.

That is as neat an argument for newspaper blogs as I have seen. (via Sans Serif)

The question of the extent to which a story can be told through the links in a blog post has been raised by Shane Richmond at the Telegraph, commenting on my criticism of Jay Rosen’s attack on the writer of an article in the Los Angeles Times.

The LA Times article was a slack piece of journalism attacking blogging, designed to irritate everyone who believes blogs have a valuable part to play in journalism. It was born of ignorance and a refusal to accept change. But I felt that Rosen’s explosive response was likely to only reinforce the views of those who know little about blogging.

I described Rosen’s post as a “contentless diatribe”. Richmond wrote: “Still, Rosen’s riposte is not quite ‘contentless’. His argument is not in the text, it’s in the links.” Perhaps, it is my old fashioned apprenticeship in journalism that makes me hold to the view that every piece of writing should be able to stand on its own — to have sufficient content to intelligible.

The ability to hyperlink to source material is one of the greatest things the web has brought to journalism and is far too little used on online news pages. It creates much greater transparency, allowing the reader to examine original reports, opinions and speeches. Readers are better equipped to make up their own minds.

In writing a blog post, I have developed four linking rules for myself:

1. It should be capable of being read and make sense without following any of the links.
2. Link to all source material when possible, providing, at least, a brief indication its content.
3. When it is not possible to link because the material is not available on the web quote from it more extensively.
4. Where I hope that readers will have knowledge but suspect some will not, provide links to background material such as biography or history.

While media converges and faces a future of which we know little, it would be surprising if all those who teach journalism agreed. So criticism by Jeff Jarvis (City University of New York) of Pete Hamill (New York University) is notable only for the entrenched position it suggests.

Hamill talking on New York public radio (quoted by Jarvis) said:

You know blogging, the blogosphere. When I teach at NYU I try to tell these young potential journalists: don’t waste your time with blogs because you need to be somewhere where there are editors, where you are getting paid. A blog might be useful therapy, but it’s not, at this stage of its development, journalism. I think that is a big mistake to be doing that kind of stuff.

Jarvis, naturally on his Buzzmachine blog, responds by telling students: ": I wouldn’t waste your time with this advice about blogs."

I too disagree with Hamill (I would, having decided to blog) but his points on editing and making money are worthy of discussion. Additionally, I would like to know his position on journalists who blog as part of their jobs. There is something to talk about here.

Responding the the interviewer, Hamill also said:

I agree with you. I think one reason for it is the overdependence on the internet: to sit in a building and call up all the statements from politician x y or z or think tank a b or c is not the same as going to 116th street and seeing the change over from Puerto Rican culture to Mexican culture.

Jarvis, who revels in being provocative, responds, in a post headed "Pay no attention": "So the internet and blogs are bad for journalism. Or is that just bad for columnists? Or Hamill? Or journalism students?"

Given that Hamill’s comments on blogging and journalism were small points in a long interview promoting his new novel about immigrants in New York, there is good sense in his suggestion that reporters are not getting out into the streets enough. It would be interesting to explore these ideas with him.

While I see great benefits from the internet for journalistic research, I do see students hiding behind it rather than getting out and talking to people. But near universal ownership of telephones had a similar effect long before the internet. There is a good debate to be had here…

The ejection of a reporter for the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, from a baseball match for blogging should should concern journalists in the UK, says Roy Greenslade.

He points out that attempts to restrict press freedom in the reporting of football have mostly affected photographers. Celtic tried to licence photographers and, in 2004, an attempt was made to put a two-hour delay on publication of digital pictures.

I missed the Sunday Times piece that suggested that because a lot of blogs are started and then abandoned the form is “destined to become a footnote in the history of computing”.

But The Australian republished it yesterday (via ABC digital futures). As a piece that provides an excuse to mention some celebs who have given up and print a picture of Lindsay Lohan it works.

There is no reason to dispute the “fact” that 200 million blogs have been started and then abandoned. It is probably as good a guess as any other.

But it means no more than one of those pre-written pieces for the thin news days over Christmas and the New Year about the millions of diaries that have been sold and that only a half of one per cent, or whatever figure is chosen, will be active come Easter.

It is simply the nature of the animal that most of those that are started will not survive for long. But hundreds of years show that the failure of most diarists to keep up their entries does does not mean the format is dead. Blogs have a lot of similarities.

There was a surge in page hits at Wordblog last week. That was pleasing but on examination a considerable proportion of them are for robots.txt.

In the past neither of the stats systems (one from my hosting company and the other a blog plug-in) on the site have shown much evidence of them. But last week both showed around 950 hits and they seem to have come after upgrading WordPress software to version 2.1 on Tuesday.

Is it a coincidence or is something else going on?

Being left behind on London during the Davos jamboree has “become a social blunder on a par with being caught in the capital in August,” says Ruth Sutherland in the Observer business section.

Yes, there is a touch of sour grapes and like her I would rather enjoy being there next year. Every blogger who can seems to have made their way to Switzerland.

Arianna Huffington gives us a taste of this up-market event which makes it sound like one of those giant Harry Potter fests they go in for in the US. She wrote: “There are hundreds of different “sessions” (including panels, workshops, and working lunches) taking place over the four and a half day conference — and that doesn’t include all the unofficial parties, dinners, and “nightcaps” that go on here until the wee hours of the morning.”

Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis was there too, blogging: “Right now I am off to a drinks function hosted by Lakshmi Mittal, followed by a dinner at which Stern and Cameron are due to speak about the environment. Later on there are no end of drinks parties to attend. I am told that Guy Ruddle, head of Telegraph Talk and part of our Davos team, has volunteered to monitor and report on those late-at-night bashes.”

Jeff Jarvis took his Buzzmachine there and was able to give us his world view: “Reuters was holding a lunch party today up at the top of one of the mountains that lords over us here at Davos. I was looking forward to being there and seeing the view, shooting video, eating cheese. But I was not looking forward to the ride. I hate heights. But the promise of wine and cheese got me into the funicular railway and up and up and up we went.”

Tim Webber, at the BBC’s Davos blog, tells us: “Looking back at the past week, what was the hottest ticket in town? Undoubtedly the Google party on Friday night.”

Over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Larry Elliott tells us: “Davos is where you can see all the names in your contacts book - and the ones you hope to add - under one roof. Was that really Jean-Claude Trichet chatting to George Soros? Yes it was. Shall I accept that invitation to go to lunch with Bono? Only if doesn’t clash with my session with Bill Gates. Davos, believe me, brings out the groupie in all of us.”

So there you have it: Davos has defined social media.

Having revisited The Times blogs (see previous post), I felt it was time to take a look at the Telegraph’s, another of my targets last October when I asked what was the purpose of newspaper blogs. There I found editor Will Lewis busy at the Davos Diary.

He was tired of talking about blogging. He had gone to one of the high-powered meetings to talk about how traditional media has to adapt their business models to meet the challenges of the web and broader digital changes.

But he found it all got bogged down by colleagues, Americans in particular, who wanted to talk about the “meaning of blogging” and whether old media journalists should do it.

In his mind there was no debate to be had. “Blogging and enabling readers to interact and comment on our thoughts is part of what we do at the Telegraph,” he writes.

I still have not looked at changes in the paper’s blogs but I did find the editor leading from the front.