So, is Weblogging journalism? Yes, if you accept either definition, above. As the business of media has grown in the last 150 years, journalism has come to mean "The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts."

In that case, Weblogging is not journalism. But, what if you happen to be a newspaper reporter who keeps a Weblog? Is your work in print, journalism? Almost certainly yes. Is that same work, presented on the paper's Web site, journalism? If it's the same story, I would say yes.

So, what about a journalist who keeps a Weblog?

Good question: one other definition may help: "The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation."

So, in that case, the answer is 'it depends'. If the Weblog is just presenting straight reporting, it might be journalism. But, if the Weblog is offering analysis and opinion, it's probably not. And, most of the Weblogs I read offer a mix: pointers to items of interest to the 'blogger and analysis and commentary.

The reality is that I can get reporting - real, newsroom-standards journalism - from many sources: on big stories, there are literally hundreds of sources. It's rare that even arcane, tech-oriented stories are reported by a single source. I can often get enough details and sufficient perspective to paint a pretty accurate picture of the event.

What I read Weblogs for are pointers to the pieces I miss: Weblogs act like a giant, intelligent filter for me - I scan maybe 30 a day, and, if each of those scan 30, that means I have some 900 sources at my fingertips every morning - far more than I would scan when I worked the morning desk at the old S.F. Examiner

But what I love most is precisely the analysis and opinion: there are few things as much fun as Doc Searls or Meg Hourihan or Dave Winer or Natalie d'Arbeloff or Corey Doctorow or Susannah Breslin in full, informed, impassioned rant, each in their own way. They, and dozens of others, can really make my day.

And, newspapers and other media appreciate that people, readers, like that: they offer Op-Ed pages and similar broadcast segments. And some papers, The New York Times is one, offer analysis on the front page - suitably marked, of course. At most of the newspapers that I've worked at, the jobs of writing opinion and analysis, have been given to the most capable and thoughtful and experienced hands.

So are 'blogs journalism? Sometimes, but not often. The point is, they don't need to be journalism - that's available in a lot of places... they need to be Weblogs. And as Weblogs, they need to continue to work to define that which is very, very good about a new, and, for me, vital medium. Blog on...
Comments 9:45:02 PM    

OS X and Linux work very nicely with one another right out of the box: better, really than XP. OS X's BSD/Darwin underpinnings make it straightforward... so you could imagine the creatives sitting on 970-based OS X boxes while the render farm is dripping with 970 Linux boxes... From the conclusion to John Stoke's 970 article... I worked on the last Apple/IBM *NIX box, Shiner, in 1995...
Comments 5:46:19 PM    

" ...Apple needs to make a transition in its desktop line comparable to the transition from the 68K to PowerPC, or from OS 9 to OS X, and they need to make it soon.

"Many thought that such a transition would come with Motorola's long-awaited "G5," but though all signs point to the fact that such a project was indeed in the works it appears to have been axed. This leaves Apple's desktop and server lines with two options: 1) death, as Apple morphs into a gadget and/or media company, or 2) IBM. 

"As I'll argue later in the article, a close examination of IBM's PowerPC 970 reveals that it was made with Apple in mind as the primary customer. Furthermore, it's almost certain that Apple will introduce a new high-bandwidth frontside bus and memory subsystem design for towers based on the new processor. In a short, we now know what Apple has been up to for the past two years while their desktop line has languished." From long, thoughtful Ars Technica article by Jon "Hannibal" Stokes on the coming IBM 970...
Comments 1:38:55 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures