Tag Archives: fiona fox

Layscience.net: Bloggers vs journalists – a response

Martin Robbins, editor of Layscience.net responds to Fiona Fox’s recent piece for the BBC College of Journalism, in which she argued ‘blogs are not real journalism’.

The immediate comments under the BBC CoJo article are worth a read, but also this lengthy response from Robbins, who demonstrates that boundaries between the mediums aren’t clear cut. An extract:

I defy Fiona Fox – or any readers here – to come up with any meaningful way of partitioning bloggers from journalists. I don’t think you can, for two reasons:

  1. Increasingly the distinction between the blogosphere and the mainstream media is becoming fainter and fainter, such that it has already reached the point of irrelevance.
  2. Blogging is simply a writing platform, just like the printing press, and arguments about blogging vs. journalism are as daft as talk of journalism vs. paper.

So when Fiona Fox talks about the distinction between bloggers and journalists, her argument is already obsolete (…)