My guess is that journalists and scientists would say that what counts as journalism hasn’t changed. The process and the output is the same, regardless of the format it’s presented in.

However it’d seem fair if the general public tend to disagree. We’ve been hit with a one-two punch; the blurring of the line between news and opinion in traditional media, plus the online flood of new media.

Beyond infotainment, we are still wanting investigative journalism and knowledgable experts to help us seperate the facts from the fluff. It’s unclear who will get there first, established news organisations, or new media outlets?

Even if we were only using those norms for ourselves, let’s say with, in our journalist’s minds, the goal to help bloggers do a better job, in what way would that help? Would this change something in the behavior of scientists bloggers you and I already consider good ones?

Which brings me back to the paycheck. I do not think this would define good or bad journalists, but only that it would help some bloggers to keep writing in the long term (and this is a fact that, I feel, has been systematically under-estimated in the last 10 years). I sense that one day, some mainstream medias will pay scientists bloggers just as they are paying today experts columnists.

And that day, well, nothing will continue to separate journalists from bloggers. Because, as you say, even today, writing an opinion piece doesn’t transform the journalist in something else.

we can define a journalist in several ways.

1. we can define a journalist as a practitioner of certain norms–accuracy, balance, at least two sources before running a claim, etc. whether bloggers fit is questionable–they have norms (cf bora’s link) but they aren’t necessarily the same norms.

2. we can define a journalist by paycheck–do you work for a clearly recognized journalistic organization? here, bloggers often don’t qualify, but sometimes they do.

I *don’t* think having an opinion, vs trying to be objective, gets anywhere, due to the columnist/blogger comparison. I am often acting as an opinion journalist but I’ve never felt that makes me a non-journalist.

A columnist is also very much like a blogger: different “norms”. And yet, nobody would deny that a journalist is still a journalist when he’s writing a column.

I am not suggesting that any teenager blogger can be named “journalists”. On the other hand, I firmly believe that not any journalists in the “traditional” medias could be qualified as journalists, if there were stricter, mandatory, rules. That’s why I am not sure the right way of thinking is to try to talk about this by norms: since the media landscape is evolving, norms are evolving too. We just don’t know how for the moment.

For this topic, always good to revisit: http://pressthink.org/2008/09/if-bloggers-had-no-ethics-blogging-would-have-failed-but-it-didnt-so-lets-get-a-clue/

If all paid science journalists were somewhat replaced by unpaid science bloggers, would we not have lost something important? I think so.

Of course, one could reply that one day, many scientists bloggers will be paid too, by medias. That’s what I think. And when that day will come, nothing will differentiate them from journalists.