Earlier this week I put up a piece on science vs. journalism, in which I took Fiona Fox to task for failing to understand that blogging is a medium, not a style of writing, and that journalism is a style of writing, not a medium. Since then, Ed Yong, Quackometer and Jack of Kent have pitched in with their versions. One of those three are right, the other two are, I think, flawed.

Ed's take on this is brilliant (and hilarious), and he really seems to get it.

"Say I said to you that bowls weren't ice-cream. You'd look at me strangely, wouldn't you? You'd probably point out that ice-cream is a thing you put in bowls and bowls are things that contain other things, including ice-cream, and that, as such, comparing bowls and ice-cream is ludicrous. You'd probably point out that while ice-cream can be served in cones or on a stick, you could put it in whatever the hell you like and it'd still be ice-cream."

Which is exactly the point. Comparing blogging and journalism is daft because one is a medium (the bowl) and one is a type of content (the ice-cream). There is no such thing as a style of writing called 'blogging'. As Ed says: "All this sounds obvious."

Andy Lewis at Quackometer has his own take on this, which is well thought out, but which I think falls into circular logic, Andy says:

“Fox makes it clear that journalistic writing should be 'balanced, fact-checked, sub-edited and all those other peculiarities of good journalism.' In this definition, journalism takes place within a very particular context that is absent from blogs.”

The problem with this statement is that it just isn't true. Sticking just with science blogs and my personal experience, New Scientist, The Times and The Guardian all run blogs which are generally balanced, fact-checked, sub-edited, and subject to the 'other peculiarities' of journalism.

In response to this point, Andy gave the opinion that mainstream media blogs are some sort of twilight category between the two, rather than being 'real' blogs, but this is where the argument starts to fall apart, because on what basis is this distinction made?

The difference between an MSM blog and an independent blog isn't pay, it isn't that it's being run on an MSM website (as I pointed out last time, around 250 of the top ranked science blogs in the world now are run on MSM platforms like ScienceBlogs, Discover, and Nature). And we run further into trouble with blogs like Liberal Conspiracy, which aren't MSM at all, but have a degree of editing.

As far as I can see, this is dangerously close to stating that blogs aren't sub-edited, and that any blogs that are sub-edited somehow cease to be blogs. That's not a great definition - a bit "no true Scotsman" for my liking.

It feels as if Jack of Kent falls into the same trap with his post, in which, like Andy, he seems to lean quite heavily on the hidden premise that blogs stand apart from mainstream media.

This is betrayed in the latter half of the post, where Jack lists a series of things that bloggers do. The problem is, these are all things that I do, as a freelance journalist, when I write for somewhere like the Guardian Science Blog. I promote critical thought, engage as a citizen, explain key issues in depth, link heavily to outside sources of information like bloggers (you can see about 20 links in my last article). In terms of encouraging public participation, past pieces I've written for the Guardian include one piece on the 10:23 campaign advertising a public protest and generation 760 comments.

And of course there are many blogs whose sole purpose is to report what Kev had for tea and how Liverpool are getting on in their quest for footballing mediocrity. The point is, to quote Bill Clinton, "it's the writing, stupid." What Jack of Kent is describing in his post isn't blogging, it's literary activism, or general writing.

Although having said all that, Jack's final comment is spot on:

"So, for me, blogging is not the new journalism; but it is perhaps an emerging form of active citizenship."

Exactly. In this sense, blogging is like pamphleteering in the first centuries of the printing press, a new medium that allows ordinary people to share views and information to a previously unprecedented extent. But it is a medium, not a form of writing. As Ed Yong would say, it is a bowl.

So what is journalism, and who is doing it? The irony here is that the term 'blog' is a derivative of 'web' (as in 'interweb') and 'log', meaning a written record of stuff that happens, whereas 'journalism' is a derivative of 'journal', which is a written, er, record of, ah, stuff... oh.

Everyone who blogs about current events, or their investigations of the world, is essentially a journalist of one sort or another. When Jack of Kent blogs about events in the epic Singh vs. BCA battle, he's doing journalism. When Andy Lewis or Gimpy investigate and expose quacks, they're doing
investigative journalism. In many ways, it's a bit insulting to suggest that they're not, given what passes for journalism in much of the press these days.

So perhaps, for the sake of Ed Yong who is already rather bitter about being "constantly forced to read retrograde bollocks like this", it might be better to stop trying to perpetuate the myth that 'proper' journalism doesn't happen on blogs, and open a discussion about what the features of good science journalism - whether blog-based or inked on to bits of dead tree - actually are, and how the blogosphere, and the blogging medium can help to promote those features?