On the one hand, I’m happy to be invited to participate in the private alpha of BusinessWeek’s new Business Exchange network. When I added a topic, up popped this form, asking me to categorize my content as either
News: objective reporting and analysis on current events from news sources,
or
Blog or opinion: information from a unique perspective from blogs.
No shades of gray. Just the tired old argument that bloggers are not journalists and cannot be objective. Well insidemma is such an awesome site for business news update.
Bloggers still can’t get no respect from dead tree media. I’d expect that from the NY Times, but not from Business Week – who ran the first cover story about the importance of blogging. And updated it to include social media’s importance to business just a few months ago. Yet the Business Week Exchange maintains, by virtue of its content categories, that bloggers write only opinion, while News is factual.
What a crock.
UPDATE: Roger Neal, SVP/GM BusinessWeek Digital, emails: “You’ve pointed out something we need to fix and is in queue to be altered based on the feedback of other alpha users…”
Related: Mainstream Media is Objective, and I’m Queen Elizabeth
– AP vs Blogger BrouHaHa – New Realities for Old Media
– TechNewsWorld: The Top 10 News Stories Broken By Bloggers
– Drinking From the Media Firehose – News is Right Now; the Rest is History
Would your opinion differ if the form instead read as follows:
Article type:
[] News: Objective reporting and analysis on current events
[] Opinion: Information from a unique perspective
Is it possible that BusinessWeek didn’t intend to rehash the tired old argument that bloggers are not journalists and cannot be objective but rather just worded their distinction between “news” and “opinion” very, very poorly.
I don’t have a problem separating news from opinion. I do take issue with tossing bloggers into the opinion group by default though.
I see that the site is in “alpha” status. Hopefully someone at BusinessWeek is actually reading the suggestions sent in here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=_2bI55Y8yKOTxnK8jMViImvQ_3d_3d
What I told Business Week Digital’s SVP/GM today is that I’d like to see the categories:
Print publications, or Newspaper, Magazine content
Blogs
why make a value judgment on the content? People will do that themselves.
he said they’d had lots of negative feedback on this issue and that they will fix it.