Blogs, Papers and Irony

by Kent on 15. Oct, 2006 in Tech

Nick Carr and Dave Winer are arguing about something having to do with bloggers, Iraq and murdered journalists.

I think blogs are important ways to distribute certain kinds of information, but they are not even close to being a substitute for traditional media for certain news topics.  People have a distrust of old, established media when it comes to political topics- do you really think people are going to embrace a bunch of online diaries by people they don’t know as a reliable substitute for the Washington Post and CNN?  Of course not.  It’s farcical to suggest they will.

I think the idea that blogs, as important to a few of us as they are, will replace traditional journalism is straight out of Monty Python.

“Go away or I shall blog about you a second time.”

I also think it’s ironic that Dave is taking the role as the champion of citizen media.  One of the oft-cited benefits of citizen media is the interactive nature of blogging.  Dave rarely engages people outside of his inner circle, which makes him more like the old media he is trying to replace than the new media he claims to embrace.

The other fact that seems to be overlooked here is that people who risk their lives going to Iraq to write news are generally getting paid for it.  There is an assumption by some of the blogging evangelists that making a living is less important that spouting off about the latest Google acquisition.  It is a whole lot harder to make a living blogging that some people want to admit.

Which means that most of us who blog don’t do it as a living.  As Nick points out, it’s one thing to toss up a post or two about Iraq from the comfort of our living rooms, but it’s another ball of wax to risk your life in the name of a blog post.  I wish more people read my blog too, but I’m not quite ready to risk my life to make it happen.

Blogging as a content management platform may, in fact, be the future of news distribution, but it won’t be guys like Dave, or Nick, or me writing the content.  It will be the same journalists who get paid for doing it now- they’ll simply be doing it in a different, more immediate way.

Technorati tags: , ,
  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,

  • as a former journalist (as of last week), most people are missing the point about bloggers vs. journalists. for the most part, bloggers opine on the news or trends, while journlist cover the news. take a look at how often blogs cite the new york times. bloggers will not replace journalist but journalists will have to act more like bloggers by writing on the fly and engage in a two-way dialogue. a more accurate scenario is the two worlds will co-exist, although i suspect journalists will have to change a lot more than bloggers.
  • Anonymous
    One issue I don't see written much about in this conversation is the organization of information. Let's say we get 10,000 citizen journalists to blog about an event. Assuming these people are primary sources for information - perhaps they live within the event as it unfolds - how to we make sense of all this data.

    Organized news media collects all this data, and filters it down into digestable chunks.

    If you want to learn about gardening, do you go to the library to read every book, go online and read every blog, and then do an expansive Google search?

    Or, do you go to Wikipedia, select two blogs from a Google search, and buy one thin book from Amazon?

    - Dan Blank







  • Certainly there is a collective coverage via blogs that have great advantages. I completely buy that.

    My point is that the average American is a long, long way from looking to that collective process for news about certain news topics.

    Right now, there is a lot of criticism of traditional media- that it is too liberal, too conservative, etc. These are major networks with household names writing, editing and delivering the news. It's a big step from that to some possibly anonymous blogger with who knows how may biases writing about what is happening half a world away.

    Would I read such a blog- absolutely. I have. But would I look to that blog in lieu of CNN? Not a chance.

    Blogs and traditional news serve similar, but distinct, purposes. I don't think blogs can replace traditional news formats, and I don't think they have to to be indispensable.

    As more and more papers embrace the blogging platform, the line between old and new media will certainly blur.

    But the blurring force will come from traditional media coming our way by distributing its content via blogs- not from bloggers pretending they are the AP.











  • >>> It will be the same journalists who get paid for doing it now <<<

    Nope you are really missing the point. It's not 1 journalist vs 1 blogger, it's 1 journalist vs 10,000 bloggers.

    The journalist:
    1) Needs to sleep. Expert bloggers are collectively around 24/7/365

    2) Makes far more than is needed to get quality informed commentary from bloggers

    3) does not live in the affected areas. This personalization is why blogs are already replacing mainstream.

    4) Is not even remotely as good as people like you think. My god, are you suggesting the jingoist FOX babes or even the very competent CNN world reporters can match thousands of citizens who speak the language and are in the line of news fire? Sure, I'd take an Ed Murrow in New York City over Joe Sixpack in New York City, but not reporting on Berlin, or Kabul, or Tashkent, or Baghdad, or ...










blog comments powered by Disqus