What is journalism?
John Hiler is obsessed with weblogs lately. In Borg Journalism, he seems to represent his views rather well on the subject of sharing information. Like many traditional journalists, he doesn't want to just report the story, he wants to report each facet before anyone else and thus become bigger than the story (the [famous] story teller).
Radio and later television, made it hard for print media reporters to hold back and accumulate information to spring the big story. It also had the unfortunate affect of making more complete print reports useless if not delivered in a timely manner. The Internet news channels have had a similar affect on television (radio journalism is now measured in a span of 20 minutes -- incredible) with a caveat. You'll often find the rumor online first, hear some talking head babble about it later on TV and then find lots of great analysis on the Internet.
Internet journalism in general, and weblog journalism specifically has no bounds on content or timeliness. Hot new stories will be pecked at everywhere, which seems to be good because it generates a lot of ideas that can be used in researching a story (all the same, I wonder how the Watergate investigation might have gone down in this age... only time will tell.) However, old stories get picked up and analyzed in a way that didn't happen except in books. I've found myself getting quite caught up in this phenomenon. Go out and look for commentaries about the New York and Washington bombings and the subsequent actions of our nation, our allies and the declared enemies. The depth and breath of analysis and opinion is staggering and often thought provoking. Could I get this from the media which existed as little as 10 years ago? Perhaps, if I owned a library and had a darned fine research assistant.
What makes Internet journalism work is the mostly open source nature of it all. I can quote some of an article by someone because of fair use. With some exceptions, I can link to articles by others. If it's an original work, I guess I can use the GFDL and force it into the public domain, giving the right of modification to anyone who happens by. All Mr. Hiler really needs to do to scoop most of his print cousins is simply pay attention to weblogs as an additional source. Scooping weblog folks who go from concept to publication in 5 minutes without any of the traditional journalistic controls just isn't going to work, ever. Get over it. [Doc Searls]
8:28:12 AM 
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