Beyond the blogwagon: ABC News and Mark Foley

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 October 2006 at 12:32
Tags: ABC, Blogs, Journalism

Andrew Grant-Adamson struck a chord with his question a few days ago about what purposes are served by newspapers’ blogs — and, by extension, those being run by other major news organisations.

While many big media blogs are truly examples of “jumping on the blogwagon” in a rather sad attempt to appear hip to the latest buzzword, there are also plenty of good examples of how a blog can be a valuable journalistic tool.

Take the sex scandal that gripped America last month before leading to the resignation of Republican member of Congress, Mark Foley.

Representative Foley’s strangely personal e-mails to a teenage Congressional page were known to a number of Beltway journalists, but it was thanks to the blog run by ABC News’s investigative unit that the television network was finally able to break a story that the others had long failed to stand up.

Brian Ross broke the story of on the blog, The Blotter — but not until he had obtained confirmation of the e-mails’ authenticity from the Congressman’s office.

It wasn’t enough for the evening news bulletin, but it was plenty for a quick blog post. In addition to hundreds of often-dismissive comments, the post attracted new sources to contact Ross with sexually-explicit instant messages which ultimately lead to the congressman’s downfall.

Speaking to Mark Glaser of PBS’s MediaShift blog last week, Ross described the blog’s role in the story as “a kind of watershed moment for ABCNews.com”.

The story, said Ross, “broke because it was online and we got the feedback from those who read it and gave us more.”

The Blotter has caused a fuss at least once before: In May, Ross and Richard Esposito used the blog to break the news that the FBI had used anti-terrorist legislation to obtain journalists’ telephone records in the course of a leak investigation at the CIA.

Tags: ABC, Blogs, Journalism