Last semester, my Facebook page got a major facelift. When I began working for the Daily Tar Heel, I had to remove all evidence that I had ever had an opinion on anything, lest it compromise my integrity as a journalist.
Rationally, I knew why I had to do that. I knew that if people read my stories, then looked on my Facebook page and saw that I had supported Obama in the 2008 election, they might make certain assumptions. But as I cancelled group memberships, and changed my political affiliations, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.
Did I really have to hide who I am to be a good journalist?
This question nagged at me the whole semester. I could not justify hiding my opinions. And in the age of the Internet, I'm not sure that I have to.
Within the ever expanding blogosphere, more and more journalists are maintaining personal blogs. Blogs that investigate, report and yes, even analyze breaking news and continuing stories.
The danger with political blogging, however, seems to be the risk of the proverbial soap box. Some bloggers seem to use their power to broadcast their opinions to the world to rant about what they think is wrong with government, without providing enough detail to support their claims. Bloggers can also really hurt the impact of their stories if they undermine them with sarcasm, even if they are making valid points (see Michelle Malkin's live feed from the 2010 SOTU).
But are bloggers like Malkin, or members of Daily Kos, the future of political journalism? Or is the new model for political blogging going to follow the centerist, "unbiased" (if there can be such a thing) Talking Points Memo?
With newspaper circulation declining, it seems that some papers have turned to blogs to help boost their Web site views. But some papers are not doing a very good job at blogging, it would seem.
Take the News and Observer. Their blogs WakeWatch and Under the Dome seem to be more of their old formulaic stories, just placed under the header "blogs." It seems that posts are more updates than actual analysis. So why are they called blogs?
As we move forward in rethinking journalism, we must remember to rethink. What good is a new format if it's the same writing style, the same stories?
Perhaps we need all kinds of blogs, the same way we need different news stations, radio stations and papers. We need the variety of opinions, the wide number of stories and versions of stories to find the truth.
Blogs are quite possibly a large part of the future of political communication. Perhaps if candidates and representatives maintained blogs (or their staff did), their constituents would better understand how they were being represented. There is danger in this, however, in that citizens would have to be discerning in what they believed. Citizens would probably have a greater responsibility to fact check on their own, rather than just relying the source at face value.
As journalists, we need to make a decision: are we ready to have opinions? Or do we keep writing straight news stories? Do we keep what we think to ourselves? Or follow the old rules?
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