I am an IT professional and a blogger, but not a reporter. But as a blogger, am I playing a reporter? Am I misleading the public?
Read on for my story.
My story:
Recently my work in sports blogging led me to a gig where I wrote a freelance (unpaid) article for an online website. This website didn't pay me for my efforts, but they did publish my work on the internet. I also appeared on an online magazine that has a circulation of 0, but appears to me to be widely read on the internet.
From this, I got press credentials to sit in the press box for several games. From there, I delivered several pieces for this online website. Again, I didn't get paid for this. But I also wrote an article for their website concerning the game. I got to eat free food, and enjoyed better access to the game.
Does this make me a GannonGuckert?
I was in the press box. Was I a blogger/citizen, playing a reporter? Probably. Was my coverage of the games slanted? Probably - though I tried not to do so.
Does that mean I should be exposed as a fraud? I think I did a good job with my articles, and they're in the public domain should you care to judge them. I don't think I'm a fraud, and neither do thousands of other people who have gotten published online.
This leads me to GannonGuckert. Let me preface this by saying something shady is going on there, and I want to get to the bottom of it. But I can't help but see the irony of legions of bloggers, who would give their right testicle or their left breast for White House access, blasting GannonGuckert for his "lack of press credentials" and "lack of a journalism degree", as if having a journalism degree makes you Woodstein.
I mean, really, how many of us have a journalism degree? I never worked on a school paper my entire life. I certainly read a lot, but that doesn't make me a great author.
I think this debate needs to be better defined. I don't want the end result of this to be a minimum set of journalistic standards (BASED ON PRINT AND A JOURNALISM DEGREE) in order to get access to press rooms everywhere. I think there is a real danger here of this snowballing into a "keep the bloggers out" campaign in Washington and elsewhere. The irony is that it would be we, the bloggers, that would have called ourselves out.