Starting Monday, Yahoo News will publish work written by bloggers side by side with news from professional journalists.
Yahoo said its move to combine professionally edited news alongside the work of grassroots commentators promises to enrich the sources of information on breaking news events.
“Traditional media doesn’t have the time and resources to cover all the stories,” Joff Redfern, product director for Yahoo Search said. “It really does add substantially to what you are looking at when you are looking for news.”
The Reuters story quotes blogdaddy Jeff Jarvis who argues that sites like Yahoo and Google patronize bloggers by treating them like second class citizens.
Jarvis, who is a former TV critic for TV Guide and People magazines, mocked the notion that journalists live by a shared set of professional standards, that they are better trained or more trustworthy than the anyone-can-join blog movement.
“What made the voice of the people somehow less important than the paid professional journalist?” he asked. “You don’t need to have a degree, you don’t need to have a paycheck, you don’t need to have a byline,” Jarvis said.
“If you inform the public, you are committing an act of journalism,” he declared.
Indeed.