What's a blogger, anyway?

Bloggers are digital-era sweatshop workers, according to a story last week in the New York Times. "They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece - not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop ... Some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly."

Two other things have gone very wrong. The first is that two men -- one in his 50s and another in his 60s, and each with advanced cardiovascular disease -- have fatal heart attacks, and the cause is diagnosed as death-by-blogging by the nation's most credible newspaper. No, it wasn't consumption of junk food or lack of exercise. It was their blogging that killed them. Does this sound like the conclusion of a professional journalist, or a blogger hack?

The other is that, once again, bloggers are stereotyped.

A lot of people have generalized about bloggers as if they're one, cohesive group of like-minded people. Bloggers are sweatshop workers. Bloggers are teenage girls. Bloggers are rappers. Bloggers are egotists. Bloggers are unhealthy. Bloggers are happy and educated. Bloggers are symbiotic parasites. Bloggers are liars. Bloggers are mostly jobless women. Bloggers are low-life losers. Bloggers are people. And the rebuttal: Bloggers are monkeys.

The most persistent misconception about bloggers, however, is that they're second-rate journalists. Though it's true that many bloggers are second-rate, most aren't journalists. And maintaining a blog is very different from a career in journalism.

Have you noticed that the news media tends to portray bloggers as flaky, hysterical or irresponsible journalists, but then they also participate in the blogosphere with both officially sanctioned and unofficial blogs? While on the air or in print, the media dismisses the blogosphere, but most journalists also blog themselves. Some do it because it's a quick and effective way to publish views and facts their media don't have room for. Others do it to publicize their professional work. Still others do it as a publicity stunt for street cred (I'm talking about you, Anderson Cooper). This slam-and-copy approach can be easily explained: The media view blogs as a threat to their business. An honest journalist unconcerned with revenue wouldn't work hard at categorically dismissing bloggers.

It's true that blogging looks a lot like journalism. There's typing involved. Bloggers write about public issues and comment on the media. But if you look at, say, the reporter-reader relationship, the blogger is more akin to the reader than the reporter. Newspaper readers pore over the paper in the morning, then discuss what they've read with other newspaper readers -- co-workers, friends, family and others. People form their opinions and learn both from the media and also other consumers of media. Many readers are motivated to read newspapers and converse with other readers precisely for this reason: So they can comment intelligently about the events of the day. This discussing of media reports is what most blogging is all about.

The main difference between bloggers and newspaper readers is that bloggers write, rather than speak, their commentary. They link to, rather than reference, the newspaper (and other) reports. And they put their comments out there for anyone to read, rather than just whoever happens to be within earshot.

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Some bloggers are more brilliant and provide far more insight than others. This is the case with newspaper readers, too. The difference is that the Internet gives us all access to the best "readers" (as well as the worst, but we can ignore those).

Confusing a blogger with a journalist can be like confusing a football fan with a player. Hey, they're both wearing a jersey. They're both in the stadium. They both say "we" when talking about the team. As in sports, where some "fans" go pro and work as announcers, some bloggers go pro, too, and educate people with their knowledge and insight.

But even that is yet another stereotype that proves false in some cases. For example, many bloggers write about their own experiences, rather than about what has been reported in the press or on other blogs. And some of the better blogs do employ some skills and practices developed over the years by journalists. Some journalists become full-time bloggers, and some bloggers become full-time journalists, so there's a revolving door.

The main danger with the media misconstruing blogs as second-rate media is that they seek to compete with blogs and the attention and traffic they get by becoming deliberately second rate themselves.

The cable news channels, for example, have discovered that hiring someone full of opinions (and other things), and plunking him or her on the air to argue and agree with unpaid "pundits" is way cheaper than hiring reporters, researchers and mobile camera crews to go out into the world and actually do journalism. It's also, in their view, both blog-like and link bait. They want it both ways: They seek to sponge off the cheap, blog-like outrage and attention from the world of blogging and also feed off the credibility developed over the years by the professional media.

This is the wrong direction, and it's bad for everybody, especially the information consumer and the media themselves. Rather than frittering away too many of its resources on things blogs can do, the media should in general focus on things blogs can't do, such as investigative reporting, long-term beat following, real fact checking, the cultivation of sources, and the breaking of news.

The trail of links through the blogosphere usually terminates at stories produced by professional journalists. So if the media wants eyeballs, they'd probably get more of them by doing better journalism, not aping the sensibility of blogs.

And they should stop stereotyping bloggers. The truth is that every kind of person blogs. Some of them reflect insightfully on media reports. Some don't. And some even die of heart attacks.

But that doesn't say anything at all about the general state of bloggers or blogging. Bloggers are everybody, so stereotypes don't work. And if the media did a better job of editing and fact-checking, such stereotypes in the press would be far more rare.

Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture. Contact Mike at mike.elgan@elgan.com or his blog, The Raw Feed.