Bill White on Blogging...And NewsOverCoffee's Response

The Morning Call's Bill White had a column on Monday (July 31) about local bloggers titled "Dressed or not, local bloggers get their say". His column primarily featured Nazareth resident Bernie O'Hare's blog lehighvalleyramblings, but noted several others including this one. In it he noted NewsOverCoffee (including a web address, which was most appreciated) and the comment, "and took me to task about my column last Monday." (You can read my post here defending Nazareth in general.)

Bill noted he has a blog, you can read it here. And he included the following warning:

"What you need to keep in mind as you read these blogs is that you're getting one person's take on things, often posted annonymously. It can make for irresponsible, even destructive misstatements or invasion of privacy, with no accountability. There's no editor, no professional constraints. In some cases, no moral restraints either."

In short, reading a blog is much like any interaction you have with anyone who has something to tell you or share with you. You need to consider who is telling you, what they are saying, why they may be saying it, and determine what you think of it.

Yet all in all he seems to like blogs, as entertainment - not journalism.

A few personal observations on blogs I've noticed (and in some cases in contradiction to some points Bill makes) and considered when putting this site together:

1. Many blogs are as much about the person writing them as the topics the person writes about. That is what makes this site (newsovercoffee.com) different - it is about the community. The questions and commentary I make are to facilitate, not dictate discussion.
   
2. Local blogs are often attributed as this one, Bernie O'Hare's, Old Allentown Fairground's, and even Bill White's among others.
3. The blog format is much more open, accessible, interactive and conversational than traditional print news. It also costs much less than an annual paid subscription. The print newspapers determine whose opinion will be heard and how it will be presented, whereas the blog either allows comments or not. And yes I can take them down if they don't meet my standards, but to date I haven't had to do that - heck I even left two spam comments on from before I required authentication.
4. For a community based site, like this one, there may be no professional or moral restraints, but my name is on the line, I live here, my children go to school here, and I have a personal obligation to the betterment of the community or I wouldn't be doing this, so in many ways I have more at stake to do well, than a "professional media person" does.
5. I don't see this site in competition with a daily newspaper - it is more local than that. This site fills a gap that can't be bridged by a daily. We have too many municipalities in PA to have a single daily cover everyone within their readership in depth on a regular basis. It doesn't, however, make the information I provide any less important. Nor should it be grounds to belittle the format I use to distribute this information, which happens to be a blog.

And as for blogs as journalism, I believe the landscape is changing and news organizations aren't currently able to determine where this is all heading. While they may have been king in the age of the typewriter, the democracy of the web could yet render them obsolete - and they are starting to get it (craig's list and classifieds for example) - so they are protecting their most sacred flank, the journalism, by belittling the child crying out that the emperor has no clothes! (I guess thereby disproving another of White's comments)

What do you think? Should journalists like White blog for their newspaper? Should blogs like this one be viewed as entertainment only? Can communities keep one another informed through sites like this in lieu of the traditional press? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

(Sorry for the delay in posting, as we left for vacation on Monday, packing the car and the kids, I guess I failed to see his colum only receiving an email from Bernie today alerting me to it. Thanks Bernie!)