If you can't beat them, join them

I’ve been blogging for almost two weeks now. Only a few people, mostly those I know and have bribed with coffee, have commented. But I’m out here. Web-logging to my heart’s content about all kinds of topics — obituaries for pets, objectivity, mistakes in stories, multi-tasking media maniacs, mucking horse stalls.

Mucking stalls?

You’ll have to read the blog’s archives.

Later this month when I go to a national editors conference, that will undoubtedly be a topic of heated discussion. No, not my stalls or even my blog. The blogs of others.

Like Yahoo.

Yahoo Inc. announced this week that it will feature the work of self-published Internet bloggers side by side with the mainstream news. The heated part of this discussion? Yahoo’s blogs-with-news will undoubtedly further blur the distinctions between (1.) the free-for-all, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go online journals known as blogs (Yahoo calls them “grassroots journalism by everyday people”) and (2.) the news (online, on air or in print), written and reported by journalists who work for professional news organizations.

The scary part about this is that Yahoo isn’t a professional news organization, and its bloggers aren’t trained reporters whose work is fact-checked and edited, with an eye on accuracy, libel and privacy laws, ethics and other standards we consider primary to publication.

Bloggers pretty much agree that it’s OK to write just about anything, regardless of the truth, as long as they admit it and provide some hypertext links to the world outside of the blog. They also don’t keep their opinions to themselves, as journalists are taught to do (except when we write columns and editorials, which are separated from the news and clearly labeled).

Along comes Jeff Jarvis, former-newspaper-journalist-turned-newspaper-critic, who climbs on his high horse to applaud Yahoo and declare that “You don’t need to have a degree, you don’t need to have a paycheck, you don’t need to have a byline. If you inform the public, you are committing an act of journalism.”

I prefer the more moderate words of Bill Keller, New York Times executive editor, who is quoted in Business Week as saying, with regard to blogging, “Most of what you know, you know because of the mainstream media. Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That’s not bad. But it’s not enough.”

While bloggers have broken legitimate news stories and brought forth some decent, unfiltered content, readers need to recognize the difference between news and blogs, just as they separate news from opinion and fact from fiction.

That’s not easy in the chaotic world of the Internet.

Which brings me back to my own fledgling efforts at blogging. I see the blog as an interactive extension of my Editor's Notes column (not news) and as a conversation with you (faithful readers) about the Tracy Press and the news industry and whatever else comes to the mind of a small-town newspaper editor with a laptop.

You’re welcome to join me in the blogosphere. I’ll watch for your comments and post them!

• Cheri Matthews, editor of the Tracy Press, can be reached in the traditional ways, by phone or by e-mail, or at www.tracypress.com/weblog/cmatthews/.