Thoughts before BloggerCon 2 — Blogs and Journalism

Tomorrow’s agenda for Blog­ger­Con calls for a dis­cus­sion of blog and jour­nal­ism. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been read­ing what other peo­ple had to say, syn­the­siz­ing it in my own head and try­ing to fig­ure out what it all meant. From there, I came to a cou­ple of conclusions:

• Blogs are not journalism
• Jour­nal­ism hap­pens on blogs
• Blogs are the sin­gle biggest threat to the online pub­lish­ing indus­try and the print pub­lish­ing industry.
• Blogs are the sin­gle largest oppor­tu­nity to the online pub­lish­ing indus­try and could rep­re­sent a big oppor­tu­nity for the print industry.

I know it sounds like 2 sets of con­tra­dic­tory state­ments but I’m really not hedg­ing my bets here. What is hap­pen­ing is that blogs are rep­re­sent­ing such a rad­i­cal shift in online pub­lish­ing that what the response is from jour­nal­ists and other con­tent pub­lish­ers will either increase or decrease the impact of the blog­ging phe­nom­e­non. What is hap­pen­ing is not so much a rev­o­lu­tion as a con­tin­u­ing evo­lu­tion of the trends started with the rise of the com­mer­cial Internet.

Look­ing back, look­ing forward

Let’s first take a step back in order to bet­ter under­stand the blog­ging phe­nom­e­non. They year is 1994. At that point, the world is riv­eted by thoughts of the infor­ma­tion super­high­way, or as we now know it Inter­ac­tive tele­vi­sion. Mean­while, in par­al­lel, the real rev­o­lu­tion is hap­pen­ing, enabled by the inven­tion of the world wide web. With­out much notice from the tra­di­tional media, hob­by­ists are set­ting up web pages and hav­ing dis­cus­sions out­side of the tra­di­tional media. Over time, so much of this hap­pens that peo­ple start tak­ing notice. Over the next cou­ple of years, the explo­sion in num­ber of pages gives some sil­i­con val­ley a few ideas about how this could be used as a new com­mer­cial vehi­cle. Netscape goes pub­lic and cap­tures the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion, show­cas­ing kids barely in their 20s with for­tunes in the mil­lions or bil­lions of dollars.

Well, the same thing is hap­pen­ing with the rise of the blo­gos­phere. It’s 1994 again. The peo­ple that are mak­ing their way to Blog­ger­Con are the same kind of peo­ple that made their way to the first Inter­net World con­fer­ence, a con­fab with only a few hun­dred peo­ple held in one hotel con­ven­tion room more used to see­ing Bar Mitz­vah and wed­dings than con­fer­ence atten­dees. I believe that we are on the cusp of a major rev­o­lu­tion, pow­ered by what we now know as blogs. In the future, com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als will not only have web sites (some­thing now de rigueur, whereas it wasn’t so in 1994) but also have weblogs. The rea­son for the future rise of weblogs is two-folds: first, the tech­nol­ogy is cheap, cheaper even than set­ting up a reg­u­lar web­site. Nowa­days, pack­ages are either free or in the low $100s range. How­ever, the power of a blog is hard to mea­sure. Because blogs allow for a direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion, they cut through the exist­ing media model of “talk to the press and then we will pick up some quotes to fit our story” (more on this in a minute). The sec­ond part is the imme­di­acy of blog pub­lish­ing: push a but­ton and it’s out there, with­out any edit­ing. RSS makes it easy to then dis­trib­ute this to the new class of tools knows as news aggre­ga­tors. This direct­ness is an impor­tant fac­tor because it allows some­thing new: the pos­si­bil­ity to take one’s case directly to the peo­ple with­out the extra fil­ter of the press. For exam­ple, why would I want a reporter tell me what Mark Cuban, owner of the Mav­er­icks, thinks when I can go and find out by myself by read­ing his blog.

Blog as Threat to Journalism

This is where blogs can be a threat to the tra­di­tional media. Jour­nal­ism, as an insti­tu­tion, is about to change in a rad­i­cal way. Whereas before, one had to have a good rela­tion­ship with the press, blogs sub­vert that. This can be a force for good (allow­ing peo­ple to cor­rect wrong impres­sions cre­ated by the press fil­ter dis­torted) or a force for evil (allow­ing to bypass some of the crit­i­cism that the press can cre­ate when it does its job prop­erly and side­step­ping del­i­cate issues.) The impor­tant ques­tion here in terms of the impact on jour­nal­ism is in the value-add. As a for­mer reporter in the tech field, I grew dis­gusted by some of the more lazy mem­bers of our indus­try who felt that just rewrit­ing a press release was suf­fi­cient (though I have to admit hav­ing suc­cumbed to that ten­dency myself at times).

Value of journalism

The real value of jour­nal­ism is in doing the research, get­ting the larger pic­ture, and wrap­ping it in an easy to under­stand and easy to read pack­age. That takes some real work and that cre­ates some real value. Often­times, reporters become experts in a par­tic­u­lar field, some­times know­ing more about the indus­try they cover than the indi­vid­u­als they inter­view. The best ones use that knowl­edge to chal­lenge their inter­vie­wees, to get the bit of infor­ma­tion that no one else could get to. How­ever, the truth of the mat­ter is that this kind of exper­tise is one that most can get, pro­vided they do the work. Already, we are start­ing to see the rise of expert blogs. In the case of most tech­ni­cal sub­jects, the blog­gers are win­ning because they are gen­er­ally geeks, peo­ple with such detailed knowl­edge of the intri­ca­cies of code that they can go beyond any­thing that a jour­nal­ist can offer. A few excep­tion, like Jon Udell, are jour­nal­ists who actu­ally do the geeky research and work like devel­op­ers before writ­ing their stories.

Read­er­ship Erosion

Already, com­put­ing mag­a­zines are see­ing an ero­sion of their read­er­ship, as web sites like Internet.com and News.com have got­ten read­ers of those pub­li­ca­tions to expect a more imme­di­ate fix. At the same time, I’ve heard anec­do­tal evi­dence that some of the read­ers of tech­nol­ogy sites are start­ing to turn to tech­nol­ogy blogs because they can, in the words of one of the peo­ple who told me about this stuff, “get it from the horse’s mouth.” If you con­sider the back­drop of scan­dals about fab­ri­cated sto­ries at the New York Times and USA Today, it starts mak­ing sense so what’s the pub­lish­ing indus­try to do in that case?

Blogs as Jour­nal­is­tic Opportunity

Well, as pub­lish­ers gen­er­ally do when adver­tis­ers are flee­ing, clean house and get new blood in at a cheaper rate (because why not kill two birds with one stone by low­er­ing costs). This is where blog­ging can come in handy. Some blog­gers, like Eliz­a­beth Spiers, have already man­aged the move from blog­ging to tra­di­tional media. I’m pretty sure that more will join her in the ranks of blogger-turned jour­nal­ists. The blo­gos­phere should be used by tra­di­tional media as the new tal­ent pool.

How­ever, this will hap­pen only in areas where leg­work is actu­ally being done by a reporter. In the case of Spiers, she was cov­er­ing enter­tain­ment and made the tran­si­tion only as a blog­ger for a pub­li­ca­tion, still cov­er­ing enter­tain­ment and still in a blog for­mat. Some­how, the tra­di­tional press does not yet trust blog­gers to write for “the main product”

This is because, in many other areas, much of what is going on in the blo­gos­phere is opin­ion, not actual report­ing. For exam­ple, in the polit­i­cal realm, blog­gers on the left and right opine on the pol­icy of the day but few actu­ally do the leg­work of polling the pub­lic, read­ing through com­plete leg­is­la­tions, asso­ci­at­ing those parts to other exist­ing laws, or going through the fed­eral bud­get line by line (unfor­tu­nately, few in the press do this either. The odd thing is that Paul Krug­man, a colum­nist, is one of the most thor­ough eco­nomic ana­lysts at the New York Times.) In those areas, much dis­cus­sion is held in the blo­gos­phere as to whether Bush is right or wrong but much of it is tainted by clear par­ti­san­ship and does not go into as much fact find­ing. Yes, jour­nal­ism can some­times be a bor­ing job (as any jour­nal­ists who has ever sat through a year’s worth of water com­mis­sion meet­ings can tell you) and that’s why it’s a job.

Many peo­ple say that the imme­di­acy of blog­ging means that there should a lower thresh­old in terms of fact-checking but if that’s the case, explain how wire reporters like the ones work­ing for the Asso­ci­ated Press or Reuters get their facts right? The chal­lenge of good report­ing is in get­ting it right and get­ting it fast. Speed is not the only fac­tor in a story and some­times, speed can be a detri­ment. For exam­ple, the best (most reward­ing and also often most dif­fi­cult) type of report­ing is inves­tiga­tive report­ing. It takes time to build a story. For exam­ple, Wood­ward and Bern­stein took almost two years build­ing their sto­ries up in the Water­gate inves­ti­ga­tion, even­tu­ally lead­ing to the big story. Once again, this can be either an imped­i­ment or an oppor­tu­nity for the blo­gos­phere. Ear­lier this year, mem­bers of the blo­gos­phere united in build­ing a story that even­tu­ally led to the res­ig­na­tion of Trent Lott. While the story of the ini­tial racist remark was reported by the reg­u­lar press, it is the blo­gos­phere that put it in the greater con­text of a his­tory of sim­i­lar remarks. In this case, the chat­ter­ing class put together a case that the main­stream media could no longer ignore. A col­lab­o­ra­tive effort by tens, hun­dreds of blog­gers helped speed up the data gath­er­ing and pro­vided a com­plete pack­age to the press, pre-chewed and pre-digested, hence giv­ing a lot of free inves­tiga­tive report­ing back to cor­po­rate media. Lott would not have resigned if the story had only made the rounds in the blo­gos­phere but once the tra­di­tional media attached their seal of approval, his fate was… well… sealed.

This last part rep­re­sents an impor­tant con­cern for mem­bers of the blo­gos­phere. How do we achieve legit­i­macy? Unfor­tu­nately, in this case, the answer is that legit­i­macy is only some­thing that comes over time. It took almost a decade for reg­u­lar peo­ple to start trust­ing online pub­li­ca­tions as legit­i­mate (and a rel­a­tively large seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion still does not). Can we do any­thing to accel­er­ate the accep­tance of blogs? I don’t know but I hope that it will be a sub­ject of dis­cus­sion at the conference.