Journalists who blog under the aegis of their media outlet are lent an authority they would do well to live up to. Any journalist who is blogging about subjects they have no real knowledge of is breaching a trust, in my opinion, or, at best, wasting my time.

If they do have a particular interest in or understanding of their subject, replying to comments should not be a problem. If they don’t, they should never have been given the blog in the first place.

No.

I think it would be like an editor of a newspaper or magazine responding to each letter or post on the “letters to the editor” page. Usually there is a response only if the person writing in is completely wrong about some facts and the editor wants to make sure that the original story is understood by both the one who wrote in and the general public.

The person writing the comment should have the last word as he or she sees it.

If you compare the blog posts from the paid bloggers on the Chow side, to some of the unpaid forum posts on the Chowhound side, it becomes very obvious that the real writing, the real, knolwedgable content is produced by the “civilians” in the forum community. The content produced by the bloggers on Cnet’s payroll is laughable. But perhaps that is the way Cnet wants it, to not produce quality editorial content, just editorial content that will appeal to the lowest common denominator, largest potention ad audience.

Of course, maybe Cnet is being really smart, and their directive to their paid bloggers is not such much to engage the readers, but to secretly educate their paid bloggers who would be required to read the readers comments.

No.

Because I have dealt with pressmen more than any other grad-student in my university, and I dare say that sometimes journalists don’t even know what they’re writing about.

I prepare press releases in detail because I know journalists aren’t experts. And we want to make sure that they write the correct thing, so my press release usually contain background information to help the journalist understand more about our turtle work.

A journalist, however, may comment on our turtle projects after he has visited the project site and listened to our briefing. Otherwise it’s just not fair to both parties.

How often do you read a story that you know something about where the journalist got it completely right? How often did they get it terribly wrong? I saw stories time and time again on the industry that I retired from where there was information that was stated in a way that made no sense at all or was just flat out wrong. Last night I read an article in a magazine on recreational vehicles that stated in the first paragraph that most RV owners had generators. That was SO wrong, I don’t think this guy ever went camping in his life. I wouldn’t want these guys commenting on their own stories.