The argument here, made in January 2008 against the standard objection that blogging is not journalism, is that the objection confuses form with content. A blog is a publishing platform, like television or radio; what appears on it may or may not be journalism. The useful question is not whether blogging counts, but what blogging conventions do to journalism when a journalist adopts them.
Some of those conventions are cosmetic — newest post at the top, a blogroll of related sites. Others are not. Blogs are characterised by a conversational tone, often a personal or subjective voice, short posts carrying links to their sources, published quickly and frequently without editorial oversight. Put a blog in a journalist’s hands and it will not yield a traditional print article, and on this account it arguably should not.
Uses already visible at the time fell into three groups: news outlets running blogs as a transparency tool to explain editorial decisions, reporters using them to reach out to audiences, and journalists covering a conventional beat in the blog format. Each was treated as an early experiment rather than a settled genre, with the conversation between writer and reader described elsewhere as an imperfect one.
The post closed on a teaching note: students on the multiplatform journalism course at the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism were about to start blogging as part of the course.