Now, the only thing left to email it to my professor and print it off so he may have a hard copy as well.

=)

This makes Kristin a happy girl!

This is a relief, I must say. Although I am having problem now staying focused. I am almost there. I have the information.

Senioritis. Or something like it.

Give me another hour. That is my goal.

This is a Mass Comm LAW class, correct? So the law part must have something to do with it (haha, obviously, but run with me on this).

So I started thinking. Journalism in the traditional sense is most definitely intellectual property. It is created from the mind, doing the legwork to back it up, and is rewarded for that (usually with a salary or monetary compensation). In class, Professor Kerr spoke about how if you write something on a company computer, using company resources, on company time that you are being paid for, it belongs to that company.

Does the same laws of intellectual property apply to blogs as well?

I turned to Regina McNabb from the Intellectual Property Management Office at OU and she shined some light on the situation. Although she is not a lawyer, she works with IP daily and knows what she is talking about. Since, she said, the written word on a computer is in a fixed form is copyrighted automatically, it could be considered a copyright belonging to the individual. However, it is not a fixed format–it is constantly changing, so that is a gray matter. She said it would be copyrighted, but it would be difficult to get that information registered, which brings in a whole host of other problems.

As for the University’s laws, they only include trademarks, patents and copyrights. No where in there are blogs included. Nor are blogs considered part of the employees job description, so the case can be made that IP rights belong to the individual. However, if using University computers at work (as I am doing now, oddly enough) it could be argued to belong to the University. Since there is no precedent, she couldn’t say for sure.

What she did say though, was she considers blogs put out there for the consumption of others. Therefore, she believes it can be argued that fair use applies to any blog.

Now all of that may throw my definitions out the window here.

Not difficult, per se, but the dedication involved in posting religiously (or at least semi-regularly) is hard to come by sometimes. I have had three interviews by now, more scheduled to come, and still I have yet to blog about any of them. And one was even back in March. But the last interview with Patrick from thelostogle.com put me in my place. He started waxing poetical about ‘daily postings’ and ‘sacrificing personal lives.’  I immediately had an inward cringe that may have had something to do with the food (Patrick found an ant in his) but probably was in conjunction with the fact that I have neglected this blog like the proverbial stepchild.

My apologies.

I shall now try to rectify the situation.

Okay. Go.

March 31. 10:30 A.M. IHOP in Norman

Richard Hall, online assistant editor at The Oklahoman, helps keep the site newsok.com up and running. At this leisurely juice breakfast, in between the more pressing matters of which zombie book and movie was the best and the effects of sleep deprivation on the body, Richard mentioned some things about blogs that put a new perspective on them.

He said he considers blogs supplements to news, like a virtual sidebar.

Very interesting.

I have always been a personal fan of sidebars (Come on. They give better play to your piece because editors love the things, they contain all the fun stuff that might have been the victims of editorial slayings, and really, they a lot of times are read more than the actual story). This idea that blogs are sidebars to stories intrigued me. That is still newsy. That is still ‘journalism.’

He also said the blogs can generate a lot of traffic for the site in general (if they are any good, that is) and mentioned Steve Lackmeyer’s piece on the ‘snowstorm’ of weeks past and the negative effect the erroneous forecasts had on local businesses (the first post, of which there were several follow ups, here) and how much traffic that created for the site. (Oddly enough, to be fair on links here, thelostogle.com got in on some of that action too in several posts).

Richard had way more to say on the subject, but I can’t give all of it away. I have to save some tidbits for the behemoth story awaiting my attention.

April 6. 3:00 P.M. Gaylord Hall.

Warren Vieth, a wonderful professor and friend, sat down with me to discuss the very scary future of the journalism world, including blogs.

During the last election, Warren experimented with a blog placed on newsok.com where journalism students from one of his classes blogged about all things election. This was his first real foray into the blogging world and he said he wasn’t quite sure whether blogs carried the same status as news. The reason? Blogs, he said, don’t have to follow journalistic standards the same way news should have to.

However, as interesting as this all was, the part that really got to me was his analysis of this phenomena. He said looking through the history of journalism, it did not always have the same standards as modern journalism claims to have. Perhaps, he said, this blogging phenomena is not a positive change into a new more technological application of journalism, but a degradation of journalism into a lower state, a backwards regression, if you will.

Wow. Dismal for someone who has chosen a career path in journalism, such as myself. But still, I couldn’t help but run with this idea and thought about it for a long time afterward. The industry is changing, that is for certain. And no one seems to know into what, but maybe it won’t progress forward into a more reliable, more trustworthy, more convenient system as I have always assumed.

Warren really made me think, also, about what definition I wanted to use for ‘blogs’ and ‘journalism’ in this project. I had previously operated with an everything goes mentality, but after our chat, I think I have narrowed down both terms to something usable and reasonable in respects to both the project and the larger picture of online activities.

Finally, he told me this story about the foreign correspondent he took over for in Iraq and compared it to blogs. On second thought, I will save that for the final paper.

Last but not least, folks.

April 7, 11:20 A.M. Kona Ranch on Meridian.

The first thing that struck me about Patrick is he didn’t look like the South Park avatar he told me to look for at the restaurant. After the initial confusion died down, we were seated at a table and began the first awkward conversations that are characteristic of longer interviews. You’re going to be there for a while, so you need to stretch out talking points, yet, sitting in relative quiet is not fun for either the interviewer or interviewee. I’m not even going to discuss the fun dance you must do when food is involved as well– should you eat, should you stop talking and let them eat, what will you talk about while eating if you do so? Craziness.

Fortunately, Patrick quickly began to lead my list of easiest people to interview. He basically just took off on the questions and by the end of lunch was a quite pleasant man to talk to.

Although I must keep his identity secret (think Ogle superhero, Batman-esque), Patrick is part of the brains behind thelostogle.com, as previously mentioned. He also has a big-person job as well and blogs on the side for fun.

Anyway, Patrick definitely sees his blog as news and, furthermore, says he and the other writers have their own set of standards, which are basically, tell the truth. If they were consistentlymessing up, readers would lose trust and turn away from them. Makes sense.

He also told of how he corrects mistakes on the site and what he thinks is just common courtesy in the blogging world in terms of linking to sites and giving credit where it is due. He also discussed what he sees as a new evolving idea of fair use on the web, but as that all is prime law material, that will be going to my professor in my paper.

The future of papers was another topic of discussion and how blogs might claim an even larger part of the media once the current elder generation, um, leaves this world, and the younger, more tech savvy people take over.

All in all, the interviews I have had covered a multitude of topics and provided me with much to write about (whittling  those 60 inches for Professor Kerr, yay!)

Okay. Now to get the other interviews done and the story out of the way. Then: graduation!

A quick Google search gave me thousands of hits with people debating just the same thing I am. Nice to have an original, unique idea, eh?

Oh well. Just a capstone project.

Now I have hours worth of sifting and reading to do. Happy spring break to me. I just bookmarked some sites that looked promising and hopefully, I can send them this link and maybe get some commentary going on here. That is sure to make Professor Kerr happy.

In the meantime, one quick observation: with the thousands of hits found today, how is it even possible to tell how many are legitimate? Not to mention I severely limited my results by my keywords to sites only dealing with blogs mentioning journalism. Now it has me wondering… Out of all the blogs in the world, how many provide a journalistic service at all? What is the percentage? Maybe this isn’t a question of can blogs be journalism, but is is likely that blogs are journalism?

However, I did find one article that was fairly enlightening and interesting, an article by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell entitled, “Web of Influence.”

The article is pretty dated, at least in terms of the Web, from 2004. This probably means that the numbers are worth nothing to me, but some of the information is still relevant and rather interesting, as well.

The article starts out telling of Salam Pax, the pseudonym for a 29 year old Iraqi who blogged about living in a war zone. Apparently, a couple days after the campaign started in Iraq, he went missing. It turned out to be nothing, but he earned some online fame and now has a book and movie deal based solely on his blog.

Why? Because he was an expert in the field. The battlefield, maybe, but still. He knew firsthand how it felt to live in a war zone and decided to share that knowledge with those who didn’t share those experiences. And it paid off. It didn’t hurt that  he has a sense of humor and interesting observations either, but he wrote something that other people didn’t and that made it valuable.

On the same theme as the Middle East and the conflicts thereof, the article mentions Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan. He tried to publish opinion articles in various papers but didn’t have luck in getting them picked up. Since he could read three Middle Eastern languages, he could, and did, consume media in those languages and could assimilate a wider world view on the conflict. He too started a blog, and it gained readership because he often went against the conflict, unlike other media at the time. Since his blog reached huge numbers of people, he has been invited to write for various publications and to speak on CNN and NPR.

Expertise. That is the keyword in all of this. What do blogs provide that journalists cannot? Expertise. The article says:

For the mainstream media-which almost by definition suffer a deficit of specialized, detailed knowledge-blogs can also serve as repositories of expertise. And for readers worldwide, blogs can act as the “man on the street,” supplying unfiltered eyewitness accounts about foreign countries. This facet is an especially valuable service, given the decline in the number of foreign correspondents since the 1990s. Blogs may even provide expert analysis and summaries of foreign-language texts, such as newspaper articles and government studies, that reporters and pundits would not otherwise access or understand.

This does spur some questions for me though. This article is dated, granted, but it generally assumes that most of these bloggers are usually not part of the mainstream media. It does say:

For the moment, they [bloggers] are largely dependent upon traditional media for sources of information. Furthermore, bloggers have become victims of their own success: As more mainstream media outlets hire bloggers to provide content, they become more integrated into politics as usual. Inevitably, blogs will lose some of their novelty and immediacy as they start being co-opted by the very institutions they purport to critique.

But can’t these journalists be experts as well? I know I enjoy David Leonhardt’s ‘Economic Scene’and the blog he and others contribute to “Economix” at the New York Times. Does that count as expertise? He certainly seems to know his stuff, but a quick Google search shows several blogs who mention various articles by Leonhardt and disagree. Vehemently. But there are just as many who agree. Sifting through what is expert opinion with good backing and what is trash can be tricky.

But then again, journalists aren’t getting such great press these days. The article even mentions this: “A recent poll commissioned by the public relations firm Edelman revealed that Americans and Europeans trust the opinions of “average people” more than most authorities. Most bloggers are ordinary citizens, reading and reacting to those experts, and to the media.” Which leads back to an earlier question of who to trust on the Web?

The article was interesting but did nothing more than provide even more questions to have answered. My next step? Contacting those in the know. Wish me luck.

UPDATED: On a funny little side note, I found it amusing that the spell check on this blogging site does not recognize the words ’blog’ or ‘blogger.’ Hmmm….

More specifically, about whether bloggers are producing content worthy of being called journalism.

Let me explain.

I am a senior graduating in May from the University of Oklahoma with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. My capstone class, Mass Communications Law, requires that each student do a project in line with a specific major. Easy enough.

My topic is:

“Develop a report on the ongoing debate over “Who is a journalist?” today, focusing on whether what bloggers are doing qualifies as journalism and how the mainstream news industry is being influenced by the broader trend” (From Robert Kerr’s class handouts).

Seems simple at first glance. Blog = news, blogger= journalist, yes or no? But it is more complicated than that.

For instance, what about blogs that mainstream media produce themselves? Those are written by more traditional journalists, yet it is a sphere without as much cut and dried “journalism.” My initial thoughts are the public doesn’t trust it as much because the medium is such a fluid one and open to interpretation. The reporters can, and often do, treat blogs as more opinion-based, edging away from the Just-the-facts-Ma’am approach.

Then there are those bloggers who probably read 20 news stories in any medium over the course of 6 months, yet they are producing content about what they know, and people read it to get information. These blogs also provide the public with newsworthy information without the writer ever learning the journalism ropes.

I decided the medium under discussion would be an interesting way to present my findings as I interview and investigate this topic, hence this blog.

Any comments are, of course, more than appreciated.

We’ll see how this goes.