Intellectual Property Law

Blogger Wins Top Journalism Award

By Cynthia Brumfield

This past weekend an unbelievably uninteresting debate gripped a select group of bloggers, triggered by a post from uber-VC Fred Wilson. Wilson, upset with what he considered to be low caliber blogging by what he calls "journabloggers," or well-funded bloggers who skirt the line between journalism and blogging, called for, well, better journalism by bloggers.

I tuned out much of the debate (see Techmeme for some of the salient back-and-forth), but a lot of the grey areas centered on that perennial question: are bloggers journalists?

Well, one prestigious journalism awards program, the George Polk Awards, seems to think so because today, for the first time ever, a blogger, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, won a George Polk Award for uncovering the politically motivated firing of State Attorneys General by the Bush Administration.

Marshall is a bona fide blogger. He started Talking Points in his apparently tiny DC aparment back in 2000 and now employs a half-dozen full-time journalists. And now he's won a major journalism award. As the Daily News' Will Bunch says, "This is a landmark day for bloggers."

Full post as published by IP Democracy on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).