Friday, February 7, 2003Way West Radio agrees with Chris Gulker about amateur (blog) vs. professional (press) journalism.
Chris starts by quoting the Washington Post and Scripting News:
Post (Leslie Walker): "While blogs are a significant publishing phenomenon, I see them as entirely different from professional news organizations, which have paid staffs that ferret out and vet information according to established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth."
Scripting News (Dave Winer): "...if the pros are so good at "established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth" why do they get the facts wrong, and skim the surface and repeat what has already said so many times? These pieces always set up the same question -- will weblogs replace traditional media, and they always conclude that it'll never happen. Somehow I wonder if that's not the purpose of these pieces. Don't the editorial people at the Washington Post care about this clear conflict of interest?"
Leslie actually has two points. One is about resources: big news organizations have people and money to pay them. The other is about standards: big news orgs have "established principles," yada yada. Dave is absolutely right to nail her on that last issue. This hauteur about standards was ludicrous decades ago, and it's an absurd anachronism today. Newspapers and magazines get stuff wrong all the time. They're on tight deadlines. Copy editors miss subtle details or just plain screw up. Reporters have axes to grind. Sure, everybody does the best they can; and sometimes it's fabulous work. Does anybody really believe everything they'll see on the front page of tomorrow's paper in any city is entirely fair, accurate and true? Come on.
In my writing for Linux Journal, I expect to be wrong less than I am on my blog; but that's because I know my readers will correct me faster here. I can change "the record" in a few keystrokes. I don't have that luxury for something that's going out in print three months from now. But careful as I may be, I still make mistakes. And I'm not fair, accurate and truthful anywhere close to 100% of the time. My point: I have the same standards whether I'm blogging or writing for print. And I think they're pretty darn high, frankly. But the medium is different. So are the relationships ? both with readers and with the subjects I write about. A key difference is the "open source" issue Chris brings up below. The advantage with blogs is a "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" kind of thing.
Here's Chris' own take on the argument:
I think Weblogs represent a distinct break in the nature of authorship. The surprise is that there is a large number of people who don't happen to be professional reporters or writers who have a lot to say that is valued by some group. This isn't to say that there is not a lot of crap on the Web and in blogs: there is. It's also not to say that 'blogs are likely to maintain the editorial standards that you see at the Washington Post: the vast majority don't have the resources (but see 'Open Source', below).
But blogs are enormously valuable, IMHO. They allow thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of domain experts to converse, debate and discover new and better ways in fields as diverse as software and politics. The very stuff that makes blogs possible, and easy, things like HTML, XML, RSS were largely driven and developed by debates that raged on Web sites and Weblogs. Until we humans evolve telepathy and can find souls with like interests by closing our eyes and thinking warm thoughts, blogs are a good proxy.
In the same way that television went from 3 networks to 500 channels, blogs represent the next evolution: hundreds of thousands of channels are now avaiable, and they've formed themselves into communities that make finding the channels 'just for me' relatively easy.
The other disruptive change here is that prior media forms, from billboards to newspapers to TV, were one-to-many, or broadcast media. The 'ones' were expert writers, reporters, photographers, TV personalities et al., whose only job was to tell the story. The feedback mechanisms, i.e. 'letters to the editor', were feeble.
Blogging is many-to-many: there can be, and often are, as many authors as readers. The conceit that 'the pros' are on some higher playing field is just that: few legit media types get that point as well as Dan Gillmor at the Merc.
Will blogs kill newspapers and journalism? I don't think so. Will blogs change journalism? Already happening. Will blogs change the economics of, say, newspapers? I think so.
I agree with all of that. I think we also need to credit blogs with an advantage in respect to the all-crawling 'bots of Google. Name a subject with more than a few blogs on the case, and you'll have much better luck getting answers on the Web from those blogs than from newspapers.
As long as the papers continue to see yesterday's news as a vital revenue stream rather than a way to expose their knowledge and authority (that all-important "record") on the Web, they'll continue to get waxed (a bit worse every day) by blogs in subject searches.
More interesting commentary (with lots of good links) at Open the Pod Bay Door.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
- Posted by William A. Riski - 8:06:36 AM - comment []
