Definitely check out the below-linked article, if only for the freaky-ass video of Randy Kuhl trying to be scary with a debate audience.  For the sake of this post, however, I am more concerned about the quoted text here:

Massa/Kuhl 3rd Debate Coverage || rochesterturning.com: turning the tide upstate

Obviously more coverage will come as the day goes on, but I feel safe in assuming, based on prior debate coverage, that this will be typical. Maybe this answers the question asked by the News8Now segment I was in? do the blogs affect races? They seem to be better able to document what?s going on, politically, since the blogging?s done on our own time, in our own time, and we can focus on a particular event without having to quickly move on to the next task.

More than that, the News8Now interviewer asked him if he thought that bloggers regard themselves as journalists.  To me, that seems more like a challenge than a question, but perhaps not.  Generally, news outlets have been pretty cool to the blogging community as an entity, and I’m actually rather surprised to see that a local news organization decided to pick up on the local bloggers.

So, are bloggers journalists?  Probably not in the strictest of senses, though that would depend a great deal on the blogger.  Many bloggers *are* in fact journalists, both in profession and in aquired college degree, others are actively involved in some specific culture for which there may or may not be any particular media outlet.  I don’t know that I think of myself as either a blogger or a journalist per sae, but I’ve gone so far as to do interviews and shoot video.  The simple monicker “blogger” is in fact insufficient to the task of definition. 

I might liken blogging to a sort of “Meta-Journalism,” in as much as bloggers rarely go out and collect the interviews themselves or do a lot of the field reporting expected of journalists.  Rather, bloggers tend to sift through the vast landscape of pre-existing journalism to provide some context and commentary to their specific niche.  In doing so, they can provide that “article A goes with article B and you get conclusion C.”  That is a thing that journalism rarely does in this modern era; journalists and news organizations are too preoccupied with being “objective” to notice that the word “objective” is inherently associated with the word “judgement.”

There’s also the question of what, exactly, journalism is.  The definitions are really quite vague.  These days, we associate journalists with a college degree, but such a degree is a relatively recent concept.  Meanwhile, I stated above that field reporting is one of those things you expect of a journalist, but what of Katie Couric?  No offense to her, but she was a weather girl in Florida before she was on the Today Show, and now she’s the anchor of the evening news?  Clearly, the Roland Hedley school of journalism hard-knocks does not apply, here.

It’s an interesting topic for which there is much to explore. . .  hmm. . . .

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Journalism, NY29, Massa, Kuhl

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