Blogger Or Journalist, Understanding The Difference

Friday, November 2, 2007 - By: Rick Grant

Most executives are pleased to hear that their companies, people or brands have been featured in the press. In fact, the old adage has it that “Any news (carried by the press about our company) is good news.” But there is a new breed of writer loose on the Internet and what they might be saying about you and your brand might not be all that good. Pitching your news to bloggers is quite different than pitching to a traditional media outlet’s reporter or editor. Some definitions and generalizations will help you know how to treat these important audiences.

A blogger is writer who is generally working for free on a special website known as a Web Log, which is characterized by short posts with comments from readers. Some well-known bloggers have sponsors that buy ads on their sites. An even smaller set is paid by companies to write about them or their brands. Some of these writers are doubtless posting information about your industry, and perhaps even about your company.

Most bloggers specialize in information about a particular topic. In fact, to become successful bloggers must attract a critical mass of readers who are all interested in their topic, which leads them to focus on a specific industry, interest or geographic area. They often become recognized experts on their topic.

Bloggers are not required to be professional writers and need not spell correctly. They are not held accountable to an editor, in most cases, and are free to write whatever they feel, whether it is objective or not. In some cases, bloggers are guilty of writing posts that are not factual, but that happens in the professional press as well.

Because bloggers are often industry insiders turned rogue copywriters, they can attract a large audience of loyal readers. Their readers tend to value there opinions more highly than those of most professional journalists and appreciate the ability to provide feedback to their stories, making it important to appeal successfully to bloggers if you want to get your story told as effectively as possible.

Journalists, for the most part, are professionally trained writers who make a living reporting on the news that affects a particular industry or geographic area. There is typically a chain of command that is leveraged to keep reporters writing objective, factual stories that have a real impact on the subject in question. Most media outlets have copyeditors and fact checkers, tasked with making sure the stories are both factually and grammatically correct.

While journalists are unlikely to write something that damages a company without facts to back up their reporting, thanks to libel and slander laws, they are likely to overlook a good story in favor of an easy piece to file. Trade journalists, in particular, are famous for writing their copy to pay the bills while they secretly work to sell their best writing to other markets.

I have been both a trade journalist and a blogger during my career. Strictly speaking, bloggers are not journalists, though they may take offense at that. Many like to think of themselves as “citizen journalists” and prefer to be treated exactly the same as professional journalists. In most cases, this is a good standard to set. It will do you no harm to treat valuable bloggers (defined as those writers that have a substantial following in your market segment) with the same respect you would show someone who attended journalism school.

One notable exception: While a good reporter reads everything he can about his area of expertise and welcomes press releases and other information that may be of only tangential interest, bloggers tend to be very particular about the material they are asked to review. Sending a blogger a news item that clearly falls outside their area of expertise may cause them to write negative things about you and your company, even if they know nothing about your industry at all. That’s a good reason to research the bloggers that cover your market and form working relationships with them.

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