Steve Outing, who writes a column on media criticism for Editor and Publisher, takes up the issue of journalists blogging here. It’s a worrying article, and not just because I still toy with the idea of a career in journalism (and write a very opinionated blog).

Here’s the gist of the piece: As a general rule, editors and publishers don’t like journalists to have blogs. There are two main worries. First, by containing sensitive material or scurrilous gossip, blogs can damage the reputation of the news organization. Second, by providing evidence of a journalist’s personal views, blogs can compromise the news organization’s independence and impartiality.

According to Outing, the NYT has the strictest blogging policies. The passage on this from his article is quite illuminating, and worth quoting at length:

Of the companies I surveyed for this report, the Times was the most restrictive, by far. NYTimes.com Editor-in-Chief Len Apcar puts it bluntly: “I don’t like the concept of the personal blog in terms of The New York Times.”

Blogs are a fine medium, says Apcar, and he’s been introducing staff-written blogs to NYTimes.com in recent months — and hints that more experiments are to come. But in terms of a staff member writing a personal blog: forget it, for the most part.

A Times reporter wanting to write a personal blog on bee-keeping might be allowed to do it, but the paper’s policy is that even such an innocuous blog must be approved by newsroom management. The same goes for a family blog. A Times correspondent in Iraq might introduce topics or opinions on his family blog that if disseminated widely — always a possibility online — could call a reporter’s objectivity and credibility into question.

“We’re The New York Times,” says Apcar. “With our leadership position in the industry comes a burden of complete transparency.” When the Times makes a mistake, lots of people write about it, so the company tries to avoid putting itself in a position of potential conflict. “What makes us uncomfortable is getting into a situation where people erroneously divine motives for our coverage,” he says — something possible when a reporter speaks too freely on a personal blog and those words inadvertently reach a wider audience.

This is, frankly, a crock o’ you-know-what. We’re all human. We all bring potential conflicts and biases to work with us in ways that are unavoidable. But the best way of dealing with this is try to make reporters’ personal views on subjects more public, if in fact they’re willing to share them. If this were the norm, I expect we would be less surprised by the ways that bias influences reporting, often in subtle ways, and probably a lot more savvy about detecting and correcting for it. (Apcar might ask himself whether he has a better or worse sense of a story’s import if he is well acquainted with the reporter who wrote it.)

Anyway, reporters’ baises are often clear enough, even without a blog. During the buildup to the Iraq war, for example, I knew perfectly well what Judith Miller thought about the war and its justification. There would have been no harm, and no little illumination in learning more about her personal views on that and other matters. The shame in that case was not having a reporter who was biased one way or another (though she clearly screwed up). It’s the complete failure of the NYT as an institution to take responsibility for its role in passing along distorted intelligence. It’s both troubling and revealing that Apcar feels comfortable dictating the out-of-work behaviour of his reporters while presiding over a newsroom that has completely failed to take this responsbility seriously. (But then perhaps I’d have a better sense of Apcar’s decision if he had a blog.)

Apcar is right about one thing: people have extremely high expectations for the Times, and accusing the Times of bias is a hobby of cranks and sceptics the world round. But this crank thinks that legitimate concerns about objectivity and bias would be diminished by greater openness. I think the Times is moving in this direction, with the appointment of Daniel Okrent as public editor. It may well annoy Apcar to have Okrent poking his damn nose around the newsroom, double-checking and second-guessing his decisions, and then – shock! – writing about them. But every time I see Okrent question the Times in the pages of the Times, I feel a little bit more respect for the newspaper.

Openness can sting. But it works. I think blogs would be similarly inconvenient, since they would probably expose the Times to more legitimate questions about its reporting. But in the end, legitimate questions are interesting and good, and besides they’re the sort of questions that were there all the time, whether you realized it or not. If I were in Apcar’s position, I would encourage my reporters to blog. In the long run, despite the embarrassment and the awkward questions and the accusations, I think I’d have a better newsroom. (People might complain even more, in spite of a gain in quality. But the point is that over time there would be less legitimate complaining. And anyway, they’re big boys and girls at the Times. I’m sure they know how to take criticism by now.)

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