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Relax - Blogging Isn't What's Killing Journalism
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A mystifying and rather astounding op-ed piece in this morning's Times called bloggers "the sizzle, not the steak."
Fun, feisty, interactive and news-rich bloggers - some of them credentialed for this year's Democratic and Republican National Conventions - should never be mistaken for journalists, warns the piece by Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Jones eloquently points out that blogs - while engaging, raw, catalytic and even needed - just shouldn't be allowed to replace fact-checked, "impartial" journalism - particularly since they are based on passion more than facts, and are naive and ripe for manipulation ...
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Yet for some 14 column inches or so, Jones basically dances about, making exceedingly broad generalizations about blogging without mentioning a single site: ... bloggers, with few exceptions, don't add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar. It's an interesting acknowledgement of the power blogging seems to have gained over online audiences, tinged with the same frightened, insular, Luddite loathing heard during the mid-90s when print publications weighed in on (then-new) online journalism's relative worth.
Sean Bonner replies with equal eloquence:Attention all Journalists - Bloggers are NOT trying to be journalists. They are trying to be bloggers. Journalism is not blogging, blogging is not journalism. They are too different things, and reading this same drivel day after day is starting to make all these journalists sound like a bunch of insecure cry babies. Both have their own set of merits, and everyone has their own opinion as to which has more value. Blogs are getting attention because they are just that, blogs. Stop patting yourself on the back by assuming someone else is trying to be you, they aren't. I'd have to agree, but I'll parse Jones' emotions a bit more bluntly. Journalists - specifically the print media - are worried about the Internet's (and, by extension, blogging's) erosion of their audience.
They should be.
I'm not proclaiming superiority for bloggers or the Web, nor extolling the heat death of the print universe. I don't wish for it - I spent 17 years as a daily newspaper reporter (7 at the Times) before switching over to online, and I still believe it to be the better of the two for sorting out that elusive chimera, the truth.
I'm merely pointing out that the cruel demographics that have been gnawing at daily newspaper circulation since the 70s have grown a new set of fangs - not just in blogging or the Internet, but in every other media distraction given birth in the past 20 years.
Videos, cable TV, online gaming, chat rooms, forums, RPGs, MMPORGs - all have conspired to divide our attentions, splinter the mindshare we have available for the handful of newspapers, magazines and radio programs we consume every week.
Voters will draw on more media than ever this fall to develop opinions that guide their votes in the presidential race - and may draw on blogs more than ever. But Jones' position seems born in the paranoia that bloggers will somehow "displace" traditional journalism as a source of information for those opinions.
What's more, he warns that blogs will be "exploited" by manipulative contributors, and adds: Blogging is especially amenable to introducing negative information into the news stream and for circulating rumors as fact. Blogging's fact-checking apparatus is just the built-in truth squad of those who read the blog and howl loudly if they wish to dispute some assertion. It is, in a sense, a place where everyone has his own truth. QED.
The fault in that notion's attempt to be a portent of doom is that most people are smart enough to sort out opinion from fact - and those who have not already made up their mind and begun gleefully agreeing with the dittoheads or the MoveOn crowd just as a matter of course - will generally work carefully to do that.
As an advocate for journalists, Jones might better spend his energy and influence proposing some future plan for traditional journalism that acknowledges shifting audience needs: Simply putting news stories on the Web is not going to satisfy an audience that has tasted interactivity.
The future success of traditional journalism lies in the ill-explored territory of convergence - something as simple as offering polls or message boards for people to comment on every news story and thus add to the greater societal understanding of What News Means - or as complex as a complete digitizing of the medium and blending it with television. (But that's another post entirely).
People are just a wee bit smarter than Jones gives them credit for being.
His piece comes off as an embittered slam by an embattled, established medium against another that's gaining popularity and has yet to be properly vetted, appraised or shaped by its audience; It was a wounded cry from a water buffalo sinking into quicksand alone, rather than the image he seems to want to convey - that of a noble lion surrounded by mangy, ravenous hyenas.
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Sunday, July 18, 2004 - 11:21 PM
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