As described by Andy “Waxy” Baio in an excellently reported roundup of the brouhaha, the fuss seemed to start with comments from Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thompson about how Google and other aggregators of news are “parasites” in the intestines of the Internet, because they republish the content of others and then make money from it. Pretty soon, some bloggers were pointing out that All Things Digital did exactly the same thing in a section called Voices — namely, published long excerpts from a variety of prominent bloggers, displayed in exactly the same way as the rest of the site’s content, and surrounded by ads.

Josh Schachter, founder of Delicious, noted this behaviour in a Twitter message, and Metafilter founder Matt Haughey said that “apparently The Wall Street Journal’s All Things D does a reblogging thing. I sure wish they asked me first though. That’s a hell of a lot of ads on my ‘excerpt’.” Merlin Mann, who blogs at 43folders, said on Twitter that “republishing online work without consent and wrapping it in ads is often called ‘feed scraping.’ At AllThingsD, it’s called ‘a compliment.”

(please read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab)

You can read Chen’s post for the full list, but among other things, she suggested that bloggers should:

• Use partial or fake names because “there are times on a blog that what a person says as an indication of public sentiment is more important than who said it.”
• Tell only part of the story because “the beauty of a blog is you can update immediately as more details become apparent or earlier reports are disputed.”
• Insert an opinion because “I think readers appreciate knowing that journalists have feelings, opinions, lives that shape how they view the world.”
• Link to the enemy because “with blogging, you can give your readers the best — even if it’s not from your staff.”
• Get personal because “you’re creating a community; that community wants to know you’re a person, not a robot.”
• Answer your critics because “blogging is a conversation with readers. If someone criticizes your post or raises an opposing point of view, you should respond.”
• Fix your mistakes because “I still don’t want to make any mistakes, but if I do, I can fix it in real time, not just run a correction the next day that few may see.”

So is this list an invitation to be careless, cut corners and risk your credibility as a journalist, as my colleague suggested? Hardly. I would argue that nearly every suggestion on Chen’s list makes perfect sense. Breaking these so-called rules not only isn’t bad, it could improve the practice of online journalism.

Linking to reports or releases, and to competitors, is a service to our audience members, and I wish newspapers of all kinds (including mine) did it more often. Chen’s point about linking to the enemy is very similar to Jeff Jarvis’ mantra to “cover what you do best, and link to the rest.” Getting personal or inserting opinion just makes bloggers a bit more like columnists, who do that routinely in print and other traditional media. They’re still considered journalists.

My favorites from the list are telling part of the story and fixing your mistakes. I agree that bloggers should get away with telling part of the story. In fact, journalists of all kinds need to get used to doing that more.

We need to realize that journalism and the telling of a news story is a process, and we don’t have to wait until we have everything before we publish. That doesn’t mean we should stop at telling just part of a story, of course; but it is fine to publish something short, then update, edit and correct. That’s what wire services do, after all.

The rule about fixing your mistakes is a particularly interesting one. Newspapers, of course, don’t like to admit they’ve made mistakes. They have half a dozen editorial checks to prevent that from happening, and running a correction is an admission that those various defenses failed. In blogging, however, there is an understanding — readers know that a blog is just one person, and that in return for getting faster information, they may get less accurate information. But they also know that a good blogger acknowledges mistakes and corrects them.

The one bit of advice that I take exception to is the need for full or verified names. It’s useful to quote people (without knowing their real names) from a social network or site such as Twitter, but I would still prefer to have an actual, verified source. Chen advises bloggers to only do this sparingly, but not doing it enough could lead to significant gaps in credibility.

Mulshine’s piece (which is here) has the troll-ish headline “All I Wanted For Christmas Was A Newspaper,” and segues from a heart-warming anecdote about old-style reporters throwing copy out the window of the campaign bus into a discussion of how the Internet is “killing old-fashioned newspapers.” The passive-aggressive tone of the piece is somewhat understandable when you realize that Mulshine is an opinion columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, a paper that recently laid off almost 50 per cent of its editorial staff. As a fellow journalist, I can sympathize with the writer’s desire to find a villain somewhere — but as Jay and a number of others have noted quite well since the piece appeared, focusing on the Web and bloggers is not only wrong, but dumb.

The easiest way to ensure the continued decline of newspapers is to see the issue in black-and-white terms — the way Mulshine appears to — as an “us vs. them” battle between traditional journalists and blogger pundits who do no original research and simply recycle the news they get from newspapers. That simplistic portrayal may get lots of fists waving at the next meeting of the Union of Unemployed Newspaper Workers, but it does no one any real good whatsoever. The reality is that the Internet and the Web — and yes, even blogs — are among the best things that have ever happened to the news business (notice that I didn’t say the news*paper* business), in the same way that the Internet is one of the best things to happen to the music business, even as it is killing the business of selling shiny metal discs.

I have no doubt that newspapers that see the potential of the Web and blogs and other interactive forms of media will be able to use them to enhance and improve the practice of journalism (as many already are) and will ultimately succeed. It’s possible that Mulshine is right, that the Internet is killing “old-fashioned” newspapers, and if we restrict that prediction to simply the old-fashioned ones, then I think it might actually be a good thing.

This is something that most of the blogosphere, or at least the part of it that cares about accuracy and integrity, does pretty well. Sites like GigaOM and others update their posts when information is added or corrected, and in many cases link to critical or differing opinions (and if they don’t, they should). In that sense, truth — to use a loaded word — is not absolute, nor is it something that a single entity has a monopoly on, particularly around a developing or complicated issue. The most we can hope for is that an outlet of any kind, whether it’s a blog or a traditional newspaper’s web site, does its best to represent an issue fairly and completely, and that requires additions, updates, links and discussion.

The WSJ arguably failed that test on Monday, with its story on Google (s goog) and how its position on “net neutrality” had allegedly softened.

read the rest of this post at GigaOm

The central thesis, as I see it, is that there are already enough sources of instantaneous information, whether it’s Perez Hilton and TMZ or the Drudge Report (which 37signals recently posted a nice analysis of). Competing on that basis, the author says, isn’t the way to add long-term value or to create a successful new media industry, nor is simply scrambling for as many eyeballs as possible in order to sell them to advertisers. Instead, media outlets should be trying to find ways of adding more context, analysis and tools that help readers make sense of the information around them.

“The greatest hope for a healthy news media rests as much on their ability to filter and interpret information as it does on their ability to gather and disseminate it. If they make snippets and sound bites the priority, they will fail. Attention—our most precious resource—is in increasingly short supply. To win the war for our attention, news organizations must make themselves indispensable by producing journalism that helps make sense of the flood of information that inundates us all.”

Towards the end of the article, the author quotes Michael X. Delli Carpini, the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, saying: “I think in some ways, we need a better metaphor. The gatekeeping metaphor worked pretty well in the twentieth century, but maybe what news organizations should be now is not gatekeepers so much as guides. You don’t want gatekeepers that can say you can get this and you can’t get that. You want people who can guide you through all this stuff.”

Read the whole article.