David Sarno on blogging and “performance journalism”

A few months ago, Emily Gould wrote a well-discussed cover story for the New York Times Magazine that poked and prodded at some of the issues that journalists are beginning to face as they dip their toes into the blogosphere.

How much do you post about yourself? Can you adopt a colloquial approach and maintain journalistic standards? What are the consequences of doing so? If you succeed, will it be worth it?

David Sarno is a writer for the Los Angeles Times who covers entertainment and internet culture on their Web Scout blog, and one of only a few level-headed voices that weighed in on the firestorm that sprouted up behind Gould’s article.

I sent him an e-mail and he was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the tensions I see between the personal nature of blogging and the journalistic standards of the institutions now trying to incorporate blogs. Hit the jump for the QnA.

Jason: Blogging, more than breaking news or even writing a column, seems to play on the writer as a subject. Do you think this is inherent in the medium, or will it pass?

David: Blogging started out as a way to keep a personal journal online—a medium for the individual, by the individual. That’s a lot different than the way the mass media were created—where the info flows (for better or worse) from the few to the many.

The personalized roots of blogging explain why we’re seeing so many growing pains as certain blogs converge with, compete with, and or become mainstream media outlets (c.f. the BoingBoing controversy of last week).

I actually wouldn’t mind if the term ‘blog’ were retired. It’s terribly undescriptive and narrow, and has long outgrown its etymology of “web log.” In the media world, “blog” is now a shorthand for a frequently updated online publication — a nearly real-time, specialized news outlet.

Most of these kinds of blogs have moved away from a writer-centric model, towards an info-centric one. So no, it’s not at all inherent in the medium.

Jason: What has your experience been like at Web Scout — do you find yourself drawn to sharing personal experiences in your posts?

David: Ideally, Web Scout isn’t about me. It’s about web culture. Maybe if I found myself more interesting, I’d make me a character more—but I don’t. Using voice is a different matter—first person writing is a way to overlay the topic with personal color, humor and opinion.

That’s not the same as the writer becoming the subject, which I think is okay in certain kinds of magazine writing and memoir, but distracting in most other kinds of journalism.

Jason: Do you think that it’s possible for a journoblog to rely successfully on a combination of writer-centric and info-centric posts? In other words, can there be a magic balance between personal posts and news posts in a professional, journalistic blog? Or is that a format that has no place in a newsroom?

David: I see where you’re going. The question being, can there be any value to posts that are about the writer rather than about the subject? And the answer has repeatedly proven to be yes.

There are a lot of bloggers, like Gould, who create their narratives and their journalism by living through it—insinuating themselves into the story and becoming part of it. It can be entertaininig and fun to follow the exploits of your favorite personalities—that’s what celebrity is all about.

My guess is that readers can tolerate some of that for lighter topics—entertainment, culture, lifestyle—but that ‘me journalism’ can seem self-indulgent and unserious when it comes to areas where lives and welfares are at stake. On the other hand, maybe we just haven’t seen a good example of it yet.

Jason: Would you rather have fewer people well informed by good, classic journalism, or far more people reasonably informed by “performance journalism”? In other words, is the trade-off worth it?

David: I don’t know if I quite buy that dichotomy. I’d rather have more people informed by good journalism, period. I like to think that journalism is going through a kind of transition phase, where the stuffier, older ‘professional’ style—where any hint of a first person is/was considered taboo and even biased–is getting phased out.

To appeal to people online, you need a hook to get them reading, and an edge if you want them to finish. There are just too many other shiny objects to compete with online—so if you’re going to try, you have to be a little shiny yourself. The key is that you can make the journalism tasty and appealing without sacrificing quality. One is in the writing. The other’s in the reporting.

Jason: How would you advise reporters who are just starting blogs to approach “personal touches?” Obviously the blog-reading public expects a certain amount of human connection, but good reporting demands an amount of objectivity as well. Assume the paper has not issued any guidelines.

David:: Arianna Huffington often notes that over time, the idea of impartiality has become warped and burdensome for journalists. You’re always supposed to show “both sides,” even if one side is obviously bogus.

But why? If you believe that at the center of every situation there’s something approaching an objective truth, you shouldn’t need to show a side you feel is meritless. What you show are all sides of the truth.

And it’s not a matter of political ideology—it’s a matter of facts. What you want to avoid is allowing your innate preconceptions and prejudices to get in the way of your quest to get the story right in the first place. If you don’t dig deep enough, you risk mistaking the bad guy for the good guy, or a lie for the truth, or an absence of information for a surfeit of it. That’s always a danger.