One in three bloggers regard their work as journalism according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Although Apple has now dropped its law suit against Think Secret et al., one of the key issues was whether bloggers are journalists and enjoy the same rights as more traditional media.
Pew Internet’s ambitious study which covers the demographics, motivation, activity, audience and technology of bloggers found that most bloggers write to be creative or express themselves. (Apparently journalists don’t do this).
Only a minority engaged in what the survey called “journalistic activities”:
Oddly, several important journalistic activities are missing. On the one hand there’s nothing about a thirst for the truth or a commitment to the public interest. On the other, no mention of a knack for pounding out product placements as if they were reviews, taking care not to upset companies that advertise in the same enterprise and writing whatever the editor serves up whether they know anything about it or not.
It is unfortunate that the survey is not very reliable. While the survey concludes that 12 million people in the USA maintain a blog, it only conducted telephone interviews with 233 of them and the self-declared margin of error is +/- 7%.
It also seems untroubled by the semantic can of worms opened up by words like blogger and journalist open up.
Still, if you are interested in the snapshot of bloggers that the survey offers, you can download a 33 page PDF summary 
of its findings.
I’m reminded of the statistic that more than 50% of drivers in America consider themselves “above average” drivers.
“Yeah, I think I’m a journalist” doesn’t mean diddly.
I downloaded the 33-page report and went through it quickly. I didn’t see how they extracted their statement “34% of bloggers self-define as journalists.” Was it a direct question or was it computed from the barrage of related questions about checking facts, etc.? If the survey simply asked “do you consider yourself a journalist” it leaves the definition of “journalist” open to the respondents’ interpretation. That would qualify as a flaw in the survey’s methodology.
I took a semester of “opinion poll methodology” when I was in college, so I am always skeptical over polls and surveys.
Nick, that’s partly my point, of course. The survey seems very light-weight to me both in terms of research design and in sample size. A shame really.