Can bloggers be journalists? It’s a debate that raged for years in the U.S. (far too long if you ask me), and it can still raise hackles. In Baku, Azerbaijan, it could mean the difference between having a free press or not.
Visiting Baku this week and speaking with different groups of journalists and journalism students, the question whether bloggers can be journalists surfaces time and again. In Baku, where newspapers must be granted a media license from the government to publish, blogging is one of the only outlets for truly independent journalism to reach and audience. It’s so important to emerging democracies like Azerbaijan, formerly a part of the Soviet Union, that President Obama signed the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act this week, hoping to promote a free press around the world.
Rashad Shirin translates what I had just said for a group of journalists at the American Center, University of Languages, Baku.
“One important thing you should be teaching them is to check facts and to write balanced pieces, not propaganda which can easily be discredited,” advised Onnik Krikorian, an editor for Global Voices Online in the region, by email. “There needs to be some journalistic skills introduced into their blogging to make it more effective, especially when it comes to checking facts or identifying what is speculation, gossip or rumor and what is fact.”
The debate is different than in the U.S., where access to prominent events like the Winter Olympics seems to be the last battlefield for bloggers. Here, bloggers who would like to produce independent journalism are fearful of being misunderstood and silenced by the government. The mainstream newspapers don’t do any blogging on their websites either, so it remains a this-or-that situation, much like we had in the U.S. before about 2006. (In my presentation, I show the NY Times blog page, which has dozens of blogs, and explain how dismissive most American newsrooms were of blogging just five years ago.)
Mark Briggs 
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