To those who dismiss bloggers

From a speech, delivered on Monday 11 December 2006 in Tel Aviv, by Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters:


So what does the Hajj incident tell us? There are three key lessons:

The first is accountability. The upside of the flourishing blogosphere is that beyond our own strict editorial standards, there is a new check and balance. I take my hat off to Charles Johnson, the editor of Little Green Footballs. Without his website, the Hajj photo may well have gone unnoticed.

The blogosphere provides accountability. They’re not always going to be right. Indeed, many of the accusations levelled at traditional media are partisan in nature – but some are not. We have to listen to the bloggers – we shouldn’t ignore them.

The second lesson is about the trust of our audience. We learned at Reuters that the action of one man – a man who wasn’t even a full-time staff member – could seriously hurt the trust in our news, built assiduously over 155 years. His stupid decision to clone smoke cost us.

We learned that your reputation is only as good as the last photograph you transmit, or the last story you file.

The final lesson we learned was this – more than ever the world needs a media company free from bias, independent, telling it as it really is, without the filter of national or political interest...

...Telling the story truthfully is more important than ever. Reporting it without spin and without editorializing is critical if history is to accurately record events.


To the blog detractors:

Keep sitting on your ass all day, waiting for your welfare cheques, surreptitiously reading blogs, and trolling anonymously cowardly in your wifebeater.

Let the rest of us who can write write.