This isn’t the BBC’s editors’ blog, although that will launch in the next few months so I’m not going to overstep my bounds. I’m not writing this blog for the BBC or as a BBC employee.
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But I will say this as a journalist, sometimes we think of balance in terms of the entire body of work we do, not just individual articles. That’s not to say that balance itsn’t important in individual articles, but especially in online journalism where we tend to write slightly shorter articles, we have to keep the articles pretty tightly focused. We might write a story on one subject, in this case, the expanding market of low-cost carriers, while dealing with the economic impact or environmental impact in another story.

For instance, on the BBC News website, we have other articles such as this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4266466.stm

that talk about how the carbon emissions due to aviation will make it difficult for the UK to meet its Kyoto targets.

As for why the links only refer to airline companies, I just checked the story, all of the airlines are mentioned there. I do agree that links should be included in assessing the balance of a story, but I can understand the journalist’s decision to link to the airlines mentioned.

However, if you have some links of groups that talk about the environmental or economic impact of low-cost airlines, please send them along.
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Thanks for the comment,
k

Jill Walker is blogging less, or so she says - this wouldn’t be newsworthy if Jill wasn’t a genuine A-list academic blogger, and (I suspect) an inspiration for many an academic, and others in what we might laughingly refer to as the real world, to st

I don’t disagree with you about outside perspectives being valuable in journalism. The Washington Press Corps and a lot of other journalism is crippled by being too inside the story instead providing some kind of critical distance.

But I’m not talking so much about citizen journalism as I am about journalist bloggers.

A small but growing part of our audience expects a right of response. Some journalists see this as a threat. Personally, I love it.

It’s like what I’m doing right now. You had some questions about what I wrote, and I get to refine, clarify and reconsider what I said. Brilliant.

As Hodgers says, “accepting the input of others made him a better blogger”. Accepting the input of my audience and now having the technical means to easily get that input, makes me a better journalist.

Oh, and BBM, I work for the BBC. We don’t do advertising (well there are parts that do). I don’t have to bring eyeballs to adverts, just do good journalism, which increasingly as my boss Richard Sambrook says, is about the global conversation.

Thanks for those comments. Back to the day job,
k

Those with whom he came into contact read what he had to say, submitted their comments and left him trackbacks - all of which brought him to the conclusion that his original posts were a little off the mark.

Realising this and accepting the input of others made him a better blogger… and his Technorati rating soared as a result!

That may be the job of some journalists some of the time, but if that is the job of journalists boiled down to its essence, someone is really missing the point.

Much of the most compelling journalism comes from journalists taking a completely outside perspective. You think the best journalism on Scientology is by Scientologists? The best journalism on the Jim Crow south by the KKK?

If this is the thinking of the citizen journalist movement “it” could do well to take some journalism classes. (I’m a big fan of citizen journalism, I just want it to not suck.)