Newspaper reporters need to get over the snobbery

April 16, 2008 by Kurt
Filed under: general 

I was struck by this item, which I came across on the Romenesko blog. The item is a Q&A with CNBC’s Charles Gasparino, in which he says, “Most print reporters think TV reporters are idiots. But that’s usually before they go on TV for the first time and totally freeze up (as I have done more than once).”

In my experience, that’s been true. I recall being in my graduate school journalism program, in which I harbored a similar opinion, cracking wise about the fact that it didn’t matter whether broadcast journalists knew how to spell — nobody read their work anyway. (Note: I actually said that to a fellow intern on the TV side of the internship program — and she ended up marrying me anyway.)

It was after that internship, working side-by-side with television journalists, that I realized how hard they worked — much harder than print reporters. It was physically a bigger challenge, just lugging the equipment around, but also demanding in terms of editing and producing their work

As it happened, I read the Gasparino item and almost immediately came across this item: “New BlogHer Study Shows U.S. Women Increasingly Shifting to Blogs as a Mainstream Media and Communication Channel.”

The survey…illustrates several surprising new trends in social media, specifically that 36.2 million women write and read blogs every week and approximately half consider blogs a “highly reliable” or “very reliable” source of information and advice about everything from products to presidential candidates. Fully 24 percent of women surveyed say they now watch less television because they are blogging instead.

It made me think about the snobbery too many reporter show to bloggers — a snobbery that reminded me of the television news snobbery.

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Comments

  • It is interesting that often times bloggers are denied press credientials, but are still able to break news (Re: Huffington Post and Obama's comments).

    On a side note: Readers find blogs appealling because they offer a personal view of events and the writers bias is openly admitted and accepted by the reader, I wonder if that is the source of the snobbery? People don't want you to have an opinion and press credientials... but, as we all hear in our beginning j-classes it is impossible to be unbiased because your subconcious mind only registers events/actions/words that appeal to your biases. Just my 2-cents.
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