WSJ story on SiliconBeat

Today’s WSJ piece about SiliconBeat is an example of balanced reporting about a controversial issue: blogging and how mainstream media is dealing with it. We’re thankful for the internal support we’ve had for the blog here at the Mercury News. A snippet from the story:

I could definitely see how in journalism circles people could look at what we do and be a little bit nervous,” Mr. Bazeley [SiliconBeat co-author] says. But “when we sit down to write news stories, we put on a totally different hat.”

SiliconBeat (www.siliconbeat.com) and other blogs like it represent a departure from the just-the-facts tradition of mainstream news reporting. The Mercury News’s push into blogs — the Knight Ridder Inc. paper publishes a half dozen in addition to SiliconBeat — comes as U.S. newspapers are wrestling with whether it is appropriate for reporters to be opining in such forums, and how much, if at all, their posts should be edited. To date, it is relatively rare for newspapers to sponsor reporter-written blogs…

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