7/27/04 - 5:15 PM - As part of the BBC's coverage of the Democratic National Convention, they've dispatched a reporter (Kevin Anderson) who will serve as their resident blogger for the event, posting about things he sees in and around the Convention and the city of Boston. His first entry, wryly, covers the "Bloggers Breakfast" that the Democratic Party threw on Monday morning.
Naturally, in the post-Hutton landscape, the article addresses the inherent stance and biases that the BBC presents when sending a blogger to the event:
"Even though I'm "blogging", Michael told me I wasn't a blogger because I was getting paid by a traditional media outlet, although he said that it was a matter of some debate in the blogging community."
Anderson, meanwhile, describes the divide between bloggers and the mainstream media by saying, "The traditional media and bloggers have a mutual distrust. Bloggers think the traditional media are tapped out, and the traditional media think bloggers are amateur pundits."
Why amateur pundits? One theory would be to point to the Blogging Iceberg -- with over half of all blogs being created by individuals under the age of twenty, and so many blogs being created and then abandoned relatively quickly, it is easier for traditional media to paint all bloggers with the same brush: after all, while blogging is just a habit for many, if not all bloggers, traditional media members devote their careers to the coverage of news.
Anderson also interestingly notes one of the more subtle differences between mainstream media and bloggers: the latter's interest in metajournalism, now filtering into the mainstream: "The Bloggers Breakfast was one of those surreal circular media events, where the traditional media cover someone who in turn covers the traditional media."
While metajournalism has always played a role in traditional journalism, this third level of convergence isn't something that's been seen very much, if at all before: the interviewer is speaking to the interviewee, who's asking the interviewer questions about what he's asking.