I Love Your Work is a weblog about the filming of Adam Goldberg’s film I Love Your Work. Alternatively, it’s a promotional piece. One of the burning issues of the weblog world is whether or not webloggers are journalists. Many webloggers are very indignant about the possibility that they aren’t journalists. Many journalists roll their eyes at the entire question.
Helen Yeager, who writes I Love Your Work, can’t talk about certain things she saw. She’s part of the promotional effort for the movie; she’s part of the crew (and says as much). It’s an interesting blog but I think that she’s damaged the cause of weblogs as real journalism; by allowing the medium to be coopted, she’s made it harder for other webloggers to be taken seriously. As Film Threat pointed out a while back, “the old press tends to be lazy and a little nearsighted when it comes to making distinctions between groups other than themselves…” Fair? Nah, but still true.
One Comment
I think that weblogs and the people who write them are as varied as the various “news”papers out there. Some are more journalistic (no pun intended) than others. Certainly, I think that the New York Times is a slightly more reliable source of information than the Enquirer. Well, usually anyway.
I’m certain that some weblogs and their writers are striving seriously for a journalistic caliber on par with the NYT, others for the Enquirer and still others have no intention to be taken as journalists at all. Which, of course, causes a problem when trying to solve the question of “are webloggers journalists” since I don’t think there is any one answer. Heck, I don’t think there’s any one answer to “are newspaper reporters journalists” since some clearly are storytellers (i.e. Six Foot Tall Baby Born To Four Foot Tall Woman In Cambodia, Excluse Pictures Inside).
It’s an interesting question, certainly, and I know that human beings have a tendency to lump similar things together all in a generic group. But I bet that the people who write for the NYT get their backs up when you compare them to the Enquirer, too. 🙂