If you're going to criticise bloggers, probably best to check whether you are one

Another day, another extraordinary anti-Internet rant by The Australian. Last week the Editor in Chief threatened to sue a journalism commentator for reporting on the proceedings of a public conference (accurately, as it turns out from tapes that have since emerged of the conference). Then the editor of the media section apparently asked the police to investigate an #iamspartacus tweet threatening to blow up the paper, which anyone with even a passing interest in recent media news would have recognised as a parody of the Twitter Joke Trial. Today the paper's war on C21st media takes the form of a blog post complaining that blogging isn't proper journalism, neatly summarised by Jay Rosen as "journalism is ours, you can't have it".

The post is phrased as a rebuttal, partly to two speeches recently made in Sydney by ABC's Mark Scott and the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger, but mainly to whichever straw man has allegedly claimed that journalism is so easy anyone can do it. Here's some snippets:

"The message...boils down to this: journalism need not be done by journalists. Journalism can be done by by Tweeters, bloggers and anonymous commentators, also known as trolls.

...To Diary’s mind, it is actually offensive for Scott to argue that anyone can practise journalism."

Take a look at the URL structure of the post ("blogs.theaustralian...etc"). Look at the page name ("Media Diary Blog"). This is a blog post complaining that blogging isn't proper journalism. Can I just say om nom irony? And though the post itself is such an impeccable example of the blogger's art that it doesn't trouble to link to either of the original sources it allegedly rebuts, here's a summary of Mark Scott's speech and here's an edited transcript of Alan Rusbridger's. Turns out that taken in context Rusbridger in particular says nothing of the sort and at one point says precisely the opposite:

"Of course, social media is not enough on its own. I'm not in any way trying to elevate it above traditional media. We should be pleased, not resentful, that Twitter is in some measure parasitical – that many of the referrals and links take people to so-called legacy-media companies, who still invest in original reporting, who still confront authority, find things out, give context and explain."

It is offensive for The Australian to imply that what its journalists are doing is proper blogging. Bloggers have links, and references to primary sources so our readers can check we're quoting in the proper context, and we read things before we criticise them. Oh, and we tend to at least have a clue that we're bloggers. It's not like just anyone can do this stuff merely because they've spent a year at J-school you know.

Update: Jonathan Holmes at ABC points out that while the tweets may have met casual standards of Twitter accuracy they might not have reproduced the conference sufficiently accurately to stand up in court.

(Photo from Pablo Costa's Picasa gallery)