Past performance is no guarantee of the future, but it’s better than anything else that we’ve got. And a weblogger’s body of work is dramatically different than a journalist’s body of work.

Webloggers spend their formative years in the first person singular. We value their unique voice and their ability to speak from the heart. Journalists spend their formative years in relative anonymity, their voice muted by editors. They’ve been writing for years before we know their name.

At an equivalent point in their careers, the journalist’s body of work is an order of magnitude greater than the weblogger’s body of work. It’s the difference between a career and a hobby. A prolific weblogger may have a thousand original posts, but a prolific journalist will have tens of thousands of articles.

Every writer has their own perception of the truth. Looking at their body of work reveals their biases and the variability of those biases. I think that journalist’s have a smaller bias because their more extreme views are challenged and moderated by an editor, and a more predictable bias because they have a greater body of work on which to be judged.

Series Index at Blogging and Journalism.