Having recently joined the National Amateur Press Association as a trial member to find out what the group was all about, I received their regular bundle of amateur journalists’ publications. I read through a few to get a feel for the organization’s ideals and goals, and one of the ones that caught my eye was The Prickler, published by Barry Schrader of DeKalb, Illinois.
Schrader asked the question, “Will blogging doom ‘Amateur Journalism’?” in a single-fold pamphlet, and I found myself curious.
After reading his June 2010 installment of The Prickler, it seems that Schrader believes:
“… this new age of computing and online expression has had little or only marginal effect on the AJ groups. They continue in decline and seem to have lost their attractiveness to young people…”
According to Schrader, young people have little interest in the “old-timers” that make up the NAPA, and thus their club will eventually have to look to failed or thwarted “real” journalists to swell their ranks—people who “intended to become newspaper reporters, graphic designers or creative writers but were forced into different careers for economic or other reasons.”
This, to me, misses the whole point of blogging and digital publishing. After all, blogging is often referred to as “citizen journalism” by mainstream news media (who also, in my opinion, largely miss the point—but that’s another entry for another day), and bloggers are often afforded the same rights as “real” news media outlets, and then some. Odd, then, that Schrader would consider bloggers not to be amateur journalists, presumably because they do not pay dues to the NAPA (or the American Amateur Press Association, its more modern counterpart), or print their works on dead trees. If one sends out e-newsletters rather than “tree-newsletters” (as Sy Safransky of The Sun might call them), does this make one less of an amateur journalist? I would think not. But then, I suppose the entire argument really hinges on the definition of “journalism,” and the ways in which writers for the web currently perceive themselves.
Prior to my discovery of the NAPA, I never would have described myself as an amateur journalist. A journalist, perhaps, having at one point written a column for a newspaper, but certainly not an amateur. The description does, however, make sense. One who does not work for a professional publication but instead publishes for personal reasons, without formal training or schooling is, effectively, an amateur journalist. Bloggers, then, are for the most part amateur journalists. But if I publish a blog, and have never been to J-school, does this make me an amateur journalist by default, even though I have previously published a regular column in a newspaper? The distinction seems, to me, irrelevant, and by default casts aspersions on the whole concept of “amateur journalism” in our digital age.
Ultimately, I feel that blogging and amateur journalism do not compete for the same audience. Blogs are for those who enjoy reading or browsing material online, whereas amateur journalism is the type of hobby writing that appears most often in the form of annual holiday newsletters printed on special stationery. Is one better than the other? No, although one is certainly more easily accessible by strangers. Both may be home to great or terrible writing, and both may have their audiences and their detractors. I suppose, as a child of the Internet, I simply don’t see much attraction to spending my hard-earned money on printing things up for a limited audience when I can just go ahead and press “publish” on my blog for free.
In the end, I doubt I will end up joining the NAPA as a permanent member, not because I do not appreciate their efforts or enjoy their work, but because I prefer to join virtual communities as a blogger. I enjoy the ease of communication that the Internet affords us all (even when many of those easy communications turn out to be spam). I appreciate the comments readers leave on my blogs, no matter how few and far between, and I like being able to reach all of my friends at once with a few clicks of the keyboard and a post on Twitter that is instantly cross-posted to my Facebook account, spreading my work throughout the English-speaking world in a matter of nanoseconds. This instantaneous access is, I suspect, what originally drew most of us to the Internet, and what continues to hold us hostage to it. Can we really close the browser for good, when everyone is so effortless connected? It seems sacreligious to even suggest it.
And while I may occasionally wish I were a bit more inaccessible, taking a media holiday just to escape the inescapable, I really do love the Internet’s ability to bring people closer together through words and pictures and endlessly propagated memes. It’s quite amazing, really, when you stop to think about how it all works, and how my fingers typed these words only to transmit them directly to your brainpan a few minutes later. Sure, printed pages are nice, and I do hope to publish a real live book this fall, but blogging isn’t going to stop that from happening. (Well, not unless I never end this entry, anyway.)
What do you think? Are blogging and amateur journalism the same thing? Compatible? Incompatible? Friends or foes?
