Eels—with their simplicity of form, their preference for darkness, their gracefulness—have helped me embrace the unnameable and get to the essence of experience, that which cannot be cataloged or quantified.
Journalism & Blogging
I’m going to tread carefully, as “What is a blog? What is journalism?” is the sort of path from which it’s easy to emerge hours later, all scratched up by thorns and directionally confused, and it’s past one o’clock and I haven’t crossed a thing off this damn to-do list … but, for practical purposes, think of Wired Science as a science section, something like an online analogue to a newspaper section, which contains a variety of writing, including journalism and blogging.
The latter tends to be found in the Wired Science Blogs section (which of course includes a number of very fine journalists, including Dave Dobbs and Maryn McKenna and Deborah Blum, and Brian Switek who started out strictly as a blogger) while journalism is usually found in the main page — i.e., it’s not specifically designated as a blog post. This isn’t an absolute distinction, as some of what appears in our main section isn’t journalism, while sometimes journalism appears in the blogs. But it’s a good rule of thumb.
As for the difference between journalism and blogging (how I hate that word; it would’ve been so much easier for everyone if the ‘blogger’ role hadn’t been named after a content-publishing platform that anyone could use) it’s twofold: process and presentation.
A journalist, or at least someone performing journalism, makes phone calls/sends emails/meets people/generally gets outside his or her head. There are other traits characteristic of journalism, but the basic act of reporting — and its implicit awareness of the limits of our own knowledge, of the importance of considering multiple perspectives — is fundamental. If there’s anything I wish I could see more of in what’s usually called blogging, it’s reporting.
Secondly, and less importantly, journalism is usually a self-contained story written to be broadly accessible. This isn’t to say a story can’t be complicated or written for a particular audience, but it needs to be a story, not a few paragraphs or captioned pullquotes. Journalism can generate blogging: On WiSci, Dave and Maryn and Deborah all routinely spin off posts from their reporting. But the final product is something different.
I also think blogging and journalism serve sometimes-overlapping, sometimes-different, and ultimately complementary roles in the public sphere … but I really should do at least *some* work today :)
