The blogger will invoke the word “journalism” and call himself a journalist, but he has no understanding of what those words mean. It’s one thing to wax poetic about “hard-hitting journalism.” It’s another thing to use the Inverted Pyramid, develop and adhere to a style guide, work with PR people with some kind of integrity, develop features and breaking news stories separate from opinion and editorial, and generally conduct oneself as a journalist.After writing a weekly article on architecture and urban design for a national audience since 2009, I began writing daily Baltimore specific articles during the winter of 2015, just a couple of months before Baltimore erupted in what some call uprising and some others riots.
A blogger touting his love for journalism is like a high school choir girl saying she loves opera: She might be sincere, but she’s got a hell of a lot to learn. How to Tell a Journalist from a Blogger. J. O'Dell
H.L. Mencken as a SUN reporter: The classic image
Since then I have written 770 daily articles that garnered almost half a million page-views. The weekly columns have continued first every Friday and now about every two weeks. In spite of spanning now 8 years, there are only 420 of those more thorough columns, still they beat the daily posts by having with 1.1 million clicks twice as many "readers". (Of course, not every one who clicks actually reads, just like not every book or newspaper is read).
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| Lisa Snowden McCray, editor the Beat interviewed by Real News: the old media world is crumbling but a new one is emerging |
Interestingly, the most popular article of all times with 59,000 clicks is very Baltimore: The Anatomy of the Baltimore Rowhouse. The more esoteric question of "What has Architecture to do with Quantum Physics" made it to rank #6. Maybe the most satisfying moment of writing those more complex articles came in 2016 when I had written about the LIGO experiment that could prove gravitational waves as an architectural project and received an e-mail from the director of the project in response. (LIGO won the 2017 Nobel Prize). An article about the bicycle made it on rank 10 of the most popular articles.
The ten most popular daily Blog articles are all from this year, except one. The most clicked article was about tearing down Eddies in Mount Vernon with 7,600 clicks. CHAP agreed to the demolition of the ensemble of buildings in spite of the high interest. Articles on rank #2 and #3 also deal with loss, a pervasive Baltimore narrative, the one about the demolition of the McKeldin Fountain and the other about Governor Hogan saying No to the State Center Redevelopment.
How many people read an article depends on the time when it first gets published, how the title line is phrased and, of course, how relevant the topic is. The click numbers say little about how useful these articles are and whether they make a difference. All I can say with certainty, is that they are useful for me, the writer. They force me to stay informed, gather information and keep learning. The idea of being well informed vanishes each time another article has to be written that is more than just opinion and includes, facts and sources and creates a larger context.
To what standard should these blog articles adhere? Although I freelanced in journalism while I was in highschool and later as a student, I cannot claim to have been trained in journalism. I have worked with journalists, starting when I was school president, and journalists from the two local papers began writing articles about what was going on at our highschool. That was during the years that culminated in 1968, a year history now short-hands for a time of international revolt and unrest. It continued when I was a Borough Council and spokesperson for my social democratic party caucus. I always admired journalists, and in some ways, I maybe wanted to be one all my life.
I realized early on that many people hated journalists and that many of my colleagues in politics, let alone architecture, thought that they were forever misquoted. As someone who was still writing articles at the time and also was editor and publisher of a local party newsletter, I never felt that way. Today when the left and the right seem united in their bashing journalists and the media I still don't feel that most if the criticism is fair or factual. Journalists still belong to the group of best informed people in Baltimore.
Whenever I got in trouble because of a newspaper article in which I was quoted, I knew it was my own fault because I had not articulated myself clearly enough. In an interview, each sentence has to be able to stand on its own. If one makes an inflammatory statement in one sentence and takes it back in the next, it isn't a surprise what will get printed or broadcast in the end.
A real journalist tries to tell the objective truth, reports facts fairly, strives for balance, and discloses bias. Technology hasn’t changed the fundamentals.
Real journalists have opinions. Editorial writers and columnists are also journalists, not just reporters. But if it’s real journalism, opinions are framed as opinions, declared openly, and not masked as facts.
So I say lots of bloggers are journalists. And a lot of people writing for or appearing on mainstream news media are not. Tim Berry
The article How to Tell a Journalist from a Blogger conveys a few truths but also perpetuates the fiction about the journalist as being neutral and factual. This can be an aspiration, at best, but nobody can be truly neutral. Personally I have been heavily influenced by the German Weekly DER SPIEGEL. It is modeled after TIME but has advanced beyond TIME in terms of its scope and influence. As a weekly, it takes the news and puts them into context but also writes from a certain liberal perspective. It presents itself as factual but not as neutral. Germans either hate or love the magazine, it has been copied and maligned and gone through many shifts and facelifts. Still, its style presents a unique style of journalism that is well informed, thorough and fun to read at the same time. Its articles about America are always a revelation, particular for an American living here who happens to be able to read German.
“You can’t just sit on your computer all day. You need to get off your butt, go out there and interview sources, investigate the issue yourself and then write what you’ve learned.” David S. Broder, Washington Post White House Correspondent
Of course, DER SPIEGEL has only first rate writers like the New Yorker or the New York Times and like those it has an excellent network of resources. A blogger can't match that, no matter how hard one tries and how much one is "out there" trying to get the stories straight. As a blogger one doesn't even get the press releases sent except upon special request.
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| Journalism in the movies: Spotlight |
Baltimore has only one diminished daily newspaper that keeps being bought and sold and keeps shedding journalists. But it still has great devoted journalists. I still read it as a print edition over breakfast, even though the most important articles I had already seen online the evening before. Those journalists that left the SUN and now the City Paper provide the basis for other media such as WYPR, the Baltimore Business Journal, and the Daily Record. There is excellent online content such as the Brew, the new Baltimore Beat, the Baltimore Fishbowl, the South Baltimore News or the Maryland Reporter and many other regular online media, none of which want to be called blogs. My articles are a tiny puzzle piece that don't quite fit in with the old categories which are crumbling in front of our eyes.
“What we don’t need is for journalists to claim that they are the only useful… (writers) to be found. Yes, people do want the hard facts. And yes, they do want to know what they mean. That is where blogging comes in, we provide perspective along with the facts.” Alex Wilhelm TNW (The Next Web)
There will be a break in my writing due to travelling with Morgan Architecture students to India for a three week study abroad trip. But then, I think that in spite of still being a practicing architect, I will try again to keep up with the flood of events by writing about a "small" segment of them, those that deal with the built environment and what it has to do with people.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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