Expectations of straight-up newsies
(I say “newsies” because I don’t feel that “journalists” really cover news bloggers.)
A favorite site of mine is wired.com. I enjoy reading their articles. But in doing so, there are several expectations that I have of them, since that site consists what I would consider “straight-up newsies.” What do I mean by this? Well, they’re doing out-right news reporting, for the most part, on topics like you might find in the New York Times. Sure, they are bloggers, but they’re blogging about real news items (as opposed to bloggers like me who just say what’s on their minds) like the Somali pirates.
Anyway, on to the expectations
- They (now on referring to straight-up newsies) should get their facts right. That said, people make mistakes and if they’re correctly in a timely and reasonable fashion, then no harm done.
- They need to have impeccible grammar and sentence structure. On Wired, I rarely ever read a blog-article that doesn’t contain at least one grammatical error and that includes ones written by the editors of that blog, including forgetting punctuation and writing fragments. Again, peopel make mistakes, but because this is writing, I won’t excuse this. (Read up on Plato’s views of writing if you disagree with me on this.)
- They should separate personal opinion from fact. Again, I’m going to refer to Wired’s writers here. The fact is, most of the articles on the site are written by day-to-day bloggers, who, arguably, aren’t straight-up newsies, but they’re posting straight-up news so that qualifies them as straight-up newsies. But because they are bloggers, I always throw them a bone when they post opinion. That’s the bread and butter of blogging. I always see people bitching in the comments that an author added a pinch of opinion to the article soup. Well, suck it up. I think the authors should just separate it better or illustrate the fact that what they’re about to write is opinion.
Now, I’ll grant you that I probably have a few grammatical errors/typos in this blog entry, and I’m fairly positive that I have at least one fragment here. But I’m not a straight-up newsie: I’m a day-to-day blogger posting his opinions. Plus, this computer sucks so typing here is a little effed up.
