The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) put on event tonight entitled ‘Freelance Journalists and Blogging’. Laurel Papworth spoke on the topic in the glamorous surrounds of the Orient Hotel in the Rocks, Sydney.

Papworth’s presentation provided an overview of well known social networking sites and blogging platforms and instructions on how bloggers and content creators can promote their product via social media. It dealt with some of the implications for the freelance journalist community.

The content was relatively rudimentary but well matched to the level of knowledge and experience among the audience of freelance writers.

I have seen Papworth speak a few times. Tonight, I again learnt about some new stuff, fact and figures:

• The biggest concern for 50% of the journalists that participated in a PEW survey (State of the News Media) ranked economic concerns as their biggest professional issue  
• MySpace = the third largest country in the world
• More on corporate activity within Facebook: Salesforce has created an application that links Facebook activity with its CRM application. More on this here.
• Glassdoor: A site that provides an environment for employees to anonymously rate their employer. More from Ms. Papworth here.

The take away was basically: Freelances need to get theirs head around social media and learn how to use it to their advantage because in the future an editor is just as likely to commission a blogger with a ready made audience and some degree of authority on a specific topic.

I don’t think there is any doubt that this is true.

The evening got me thinking about journalism and how this compares to blogging. Surely good journalism is mainly but not totally about objectivity, as defined by Yahoo! Education:

The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.  

Clearly, journalists and publishers have biases and political leanings but famous papers got that way because they were objective. The skill in journalism comes from researching and understanding an issue before gathering credible sources together to present a balanced analysis of that topic.   

Bloggers have an agenda. They shoot from the hip and more often than not they promote themselves and their point of view. There is no requirement for objectivity. They know that their audience either already has an interest in their favoured topic or agrees with them or just finds their personal going-ons interesting. 

They operate within echo chambers (at least to some extent) and their success and the degree to which they entertain and inform is rarely determined by their ability to deconstruct relevant and topical issues.

This begs the question: Is it better to have an understanding of what’s going on or to know what somebody else thinks?

A combination of Opinion and Objectivity would be ideal but as Papworth said during her concluding comment the US newspapers are placing more and more blog content on their home pages and she expects this trend to be repeated in Australia.   

The last questioner of the night pondered the issue of time; where might freelance writers find time to blog and manage and extend their social networks? A valid question because now it’s my bedtime.

You’ll find the presentation from tonight’s event here (soon).

Tags: Blogging, facebook, freelance, journalism, MEAA, Media, myspace, Papworth, PEW, Saleforce.com, social networks