Illustration by Ben Palmer for MJR

When reporters, editors blog

by Collin Behan

The appetite for blogs among newspapers has exploded in the last few years and, while this increase in itself probably isn’t any great revelation, the sheer scope of the increase creates an interesting ethical dilemma for newspapers. The home pages of each of the top 10 U.S. dailies by circulation all have links to blogs, both by staffers and freelancers. In fact, it is difficult to find a daily newspaper that doesn’t at least link to a blog, if not actively support its own.

The New York Times has upwards of 60 blogs directly affiliated with its website. The Los Angeles Times has blogs on everything from the latest tech gadgets to celebrity gossip. The Billings Gazette has a blog offering tips on proper grammar, and the Boulder Daily Camera in Colorado runs a blog on local businesses by its vice presidents of marketing.

Blogs allow local newspapers to reach a national and international audience through the Internet. Gwen Florio, city editor for the Missoulian newspaper, sees this in how her blog on Native American news and culture, The Buffalo Post, reaches audiences the paper can’t. The Buffalo Post aggregates and distills news coverage dealing with Native Americans from across the country.

“I know that the blog is read all over the country,” Florio said. “So people who might miss our stories in the paper or who might not see them on other Native news blogs can see them that way.”

Reporters, editors and columnists for newspapers, as well as broadcast and radio news stations, have seized blogging as an opportunity to increase market awareness and expand their reader base. Blogs are certainly a part of new media but are now so prevalent they could generally be considered mainstream.

The question whether reporters should be blogging at all is moot at this point. The reporters are already blogging, whether of their own volition or after being ordered to by editors.

Niche blogs, which constitute the majority of general blogs, can be complex or flippant and dense or sparse, depending on what the writers and readers want, which is partly the point of blogs in the first place. Part of the great appeal of blogs for readers is that they are often less rigid than hard news stories, at least the broadly successful ones tend to be. Consequently, people can relate to blogs much more easily than to some news stories.

Blogs entice journalists because of their great appeal to readers. Some readers dive wholeheartedly into posting on their favorite blogs, writing their own opinions on comment threads nearly every day. Many bloggers frequently publish their own retorts to reader comments, creating a conversation that furthers the exchange of ideas.

But newspapers have a journalistic brand to protect. In print they follow certain ethical guidelines, guidelines which may stifle the creative integrity of blogs. Reporters writing blogs about the topics they are supposed to cover for their newspapers without bias run into a particular problem.

At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, local education reporters had covered a blog on education for years when columnist Maureen Downey became the main writer. The reporters who had been writing on the blog were using it as an extension of their news stories, posting dry news blurbs about upcoming stories, Downey said. Editors believed that she, as an opinion columnist, would be better suited to punch up the blog with personal perspectives.

“I think the opinion element, the personal element, sort of engages people,” Downey said, adding that the blog has close to quadrupled its daily hits since she took over in August. “But as a journalist, I will tell you that I wouldn’t want to do a blog on something I was doing straight reporting on.”

Similarly, Jodi Rave, a former staff writer for the Missoulian who covered the Native American news beat, started The Buffalo Post blog. Rave left the paper and the blog in the summer of 2009 and Florio took over.

But while Rave was working on it, she said she never found a particular conflict of interest between her reporting, column writing and blogging.

“I had a general rule that if I had reported on a particular issue as a news story, I tended to stay away from them as opinion pieces, but there was so much news and information that that territory was wide open,” Rave said.

At the same paper, a blog on city government has shown a differing viewpoint on this same issue. Missoulian city government beat reporter Keila Szpaller said the paper started blogs several years ago without any clear purpose after an outside consultant recommended it. The blog she started, Missoula Red Tape, quickly showed the benefits of covering the same issues online that she was writing about for the newspaper.

“My list of story ideas has always been way too long for one person to get to,” Szpaller said.

The solution for Szpaller was to put out small blurbs on her blog. Public documents and files that weren’t supported by the newspaper’s website, but that Szpaller still felt were important information to make available, could also be posted to the blog. The tone of the blog is also less formal than the articles she writes for the Missoulian.

Acknowledging that there is a rift between reporters who draw a clear line between hard news and blogging, and others who say that objectivity is impossible to begin with, Szpaller said she occasionally does write opinion into her blog.

“I’m sure that I veer into that and it’s really, really touchy; it’s an uncomfortable place,” Szpaller said.

The benefit though, Szpaller said, is that she can directly interact with readers and have a back-and-forth conversation. Generally, the most commented-on posts are the ones in which she offers an opinion, albeit lightly.

Szpaller said readers have accused her of being “snarky” on the blog when describing certain issues, but never of having an outright wrong or defamatory opinion, and editors have never asked her to take down a post. Whenever she feels she might be “putting even one little toe over the line,” Szpaller said she checks in with her editors.

At the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota, city beat reporter Tu-Uyen Tran follows city government on his blog. He said he tries to draw a clear line between taking a stand on an issue and giving his own tone for context on an issue. Writing on both platforms, he can be an objective journalist in the paper and let readers know that he is critically analyzing what the politicians he covers are saying. By giving his own interpretation in the first person, Tran said he can bring out the personality of the issues and put them in a context more people can identify with.

“With the blog you can do that. It’s sort of like having your cake and eating it too,” Tran said.

But there is a danger of alienating potential contacts in a blog or losing credibility as an impartial reporter in blogging opinion. Newspapers are trying to catch up to these dangers by creating guidelines for their bloggers.

Reporters and columnists do have the additional safety net of their news organizations behind them. But this also means they must protect the name of the newspaper when writing on their blogs.

The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, is one paper that has formalized its own set of guidelines for its reporters and freelance bloggers. The paper has staff and freelance bloggers write for its website. The Spokesman-Review published its guidelines online in 2008 to set a standard for blogs on its website, said Ryan Pitts, the newspaper’s assistant managing editor for digital media. But the paper wanted to set a formalized guideline for bloggers so editors would have something specific to point to beyond “be professional,” he said.

“We’d been operating that way for years, and that just seemed smart to have something that kind of codified it, and something that other people could look at and, like I said, call us out if we’re not meeting those expectations,” Pitts said. “We’ve had internal stuff of course before then, but I think that was the first time we actually published our ethics policy online.”

The paper doesn’t necessarily have a different standard for its bloggers as it would for its reporters or opinion columnists, he said. Rather, the same basic rules the Spokesman-Review applies to reporters and opinion columnists in the paper edition are applied to bloggers.

The Spokesman-Review blogging ethics guidelines, published on its website, reiterate this standard: “Blogs produced for the Web should be considered an extension of the printed brand — even as they embrace and invite more relaxed, casual discourse.”

This document does make a few stipulations for reporters who are also blogging. Reporters engaged in writing beat-specific blogs, such as sports or city council, “should avoid expressing opinions that compromise credibility and impartiality.”

The guidelines also expressly prohibit reporters from blogging personal views on matters they are currently covering professionally to protect the readers’ perception of the paper as being impartial.

These guidelines are a step toward protecting the paper. But the guidelines themselves make clear that editors can’t foresee and prevent all problems. The final paragraph on the blog provisions states, “Rather than engage in the futile task of listing what is and isn’t appropriate, we expect simply that newsroom staff don’t do anything that would embarrass or unpleasantly surprise editors or colleagues.”

At The Spokesman-Review, editing of blogs takes place after the blogs have been posted, a common practice at newspapers.The writer and the newspaper often lack the safety net of having mistakes or potentially libelous statements caught by an editor. The risk here is that by the time an editor finds the error or ethical lapse, the damage will already be done. “The editing standards are slightly different, of course, because blogging and reporting stuff online goes up there faster,” Pitt said. “And usually we tend to edit after the fact on the blog, whereas a (newspaper) story would make its way through the workflow differently.”

Sometimes, outside editing never comes at all. Florio said she is the only person to edit her posts to The Buffalo Post because of the lack of staff to review them. Florio said posting to the blog is more like what she was doing 30 years ago writing wire copy for the Associated Press.

“It’s like everybody talks about this like it’s something new. But I’m writing really short pieces really fast that have to be accurate and editing them myself,” Florio said. “It feels absolutely familiar to me.”

Viewed in this light, the blogs by reporters, who are writing without opinion as Florio tries to do, could be considered something that has happened for a very long time. The new addition is the use of opinion, but this is often tightly controlled.

Sometimes those opinions go up before a story is even released. Szpaller said a post she put up in November, directly quoting a city councilmember’s listserv about possible mistakes on a multi-million dollar construction project, angered a city official. The official, she said, was mostly angered because she hadn’t called him for clarification of the issue.

“So, I have to explain to him that I’m not going to call him every time I put a blog post up, and I will always call him when I’m doing a story that relates to him,” she said.

Publishing the information she gained from the councilman’s listserv was not inappropriate in her opinion, Szpaller said, because she cited the source correctly. Nor did she feel she needed to interview all the sources she would for a story since the blog post was short and purposefully punchy.

The small snippet she posted wasn’t the whole story, Szpaller said, but putting it up on the blog generated enough interest that she pursued it for an article. Two days later she published an article for the newspaper fully detailing what had started with the blog. The angered city official was interviewed and quoted in that story.