Are Blogs the New Journalism
The way TIME magazine saw it in December, 2004 was the start of a "golden age" of blogging -- the rapid-fire web publishing scheme where anyone can publish their rants, photos or detailed reporting on the web in a matter of seconds. While blogging has been around for four or five years, the combination of the hotly contested election and the growth in popularity of blogging tools meant that blogging had hit critical mass.
Before this year, says writer Lev Grossman, "blogs kept a relatively modest profile, and the mainstream media could comfortably treat them like amateur productions that could never compete with real news organizations." But their power has been growing. In 2002 a liberal blog called Talking Points Memo pushed for Trent Lott's resignation as Senate majority leader. In 2004, Russ Kick obtained photos of US soldiers' coffins coming back from Iraq. "The next day they were on the front pages of newspapers around the world," says Grossman.
But the event that pushed blogs into the bigtime, if not the mainstream, was the 60 Minutes debacle, in which a blog called PowerLineBlog suggested that documents presented on "60 Minutes," which seemed to show that President Bush reniged on his National Guard service, were in fact frauds. The post was famously called the "61st Minute."
Half an hour after posting, "there were 50 e-mails in [PowerLine contributor Scott Johnson's] In box from readers offering further arguments and evidence disputing the CBS documents' authenticity. Johnson sifted through the comments and added some of them to his original post. This created a feedback loop. The more comments he posted, the more e-mail he got, which he then posted, generating even more e-mail, and so on. The process turbocharged itself. In all, he updated the post 15 or 20 times over the course of that day. ...
"By 10:30 a.m., Power Line had an arsenal of arguments attacking the memos-typographical, logical, procedural, historical. The three bloggers put up genuine National Guard documents from 1973 so that readers could compare them with the 60 Minutes memos. The Drudge Report, the Mondo Cane grandfather of all right-leaning news blogs, linked to their site about midafternoon, sending a torrent of traffic their way and promptly crashing their Web server. By the end of the day, about 500 sites had linked to Power Line. 'I think it's fair to say that that post that Scott began is probably the most famous post in the young history of the blogosphere,' Hinderaker says proudly. "
What's interesting about this story is not so much that there are "citizen journalists" out there, doing the job that "real" journalists are not doing. In fact, there was no reporting or investigation to the original post -- just a bit of reasoning and reasonable suspicion. It was the flood of posts from readers that created a virtuous circle of other people's ideas, documentary evidence, and widespread dissemination. It is this ecology of facts, opinions and linking that is best described by the term"blogosphere."
Dan Gillmor, who recently left his beat as technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, notes in his book "We the Media": "If my readers know more than I do (which I know they do), I can include them in the process of making my journalism better." Journalism, Gillmor suggests, is moving from a broadcast to a conversation. "The first article may be only the beginning of the conversation in which we can all enlighten each other."
Since he wrote those words almost a year ago, Gillmor's thinking has evolved -- so much that he has left his job at the Mercury to start a nascent company to take citizen journalism in new directions. Currently, Gillmor is thinking a lot about what he calls distributed journalism. On his Grassroots Journalism blog, Gillmor credits two sites -- Talking Points Memo and Daily Delay -- with putting the pressure on the Republicans to drop the rule change that would have allowed House Majority Leader Tom deLay to keep his position even if he were to be indicted.
"Something especially important occurred with these two blogs. They asked readers to call their Republican members of Congress and ask how they voted on the original secret vote to give DeLay a break. Readers responded in droves." They reported the responses back to the bloggers. The results were posted. Did you learn how Republicans voted from NPR or Fox or the New York Times? No. But the blogosphere has ways of finding out.
This is just the start of the new journalism, Gillmor thinks. "Suppose, for example, that we assemble a nationwide group of volunteers -- lawyers who are familiar with statutes -- and ask each of them to take a small section of one of those immense congressional bills that the members of Congress don't even read themselves. Suppose, further, that we could get this analysis posted before the House and Senate did their final votes. We might catch a lot of sleazy stuff before it became law. Today we're lucky if we know about any of it before it actually passes."
This blogging thing is starting to look interesting.
Adapt, improve ...
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Re: Retification
I have a rather detailed response to these complaints at
my blog but I did find buckethead's original post, which is not reporting but rather suspicion. The blogosphere's response is where the journalism comes in.
Rectification
Koman's post needs a bit of rectification:
(1) Koman suggests that Powerline did not engage or fuel "reporting or investigation" on CBS' fraudulent memos. Not true. The initial reporting started with a comment by one guy named "Buckethead" at freerepublic.com who opined that the type used in 60 Minutes' alleged memos could not exist in 197x. littlegreenfootballs.com picked up the story, and that blog's Charles Johnson provided evidence (as in evidence) that the memos were indeed created using Microsoft Word. Powerline Blog gave the story momentum by spreading word, and citing typography experts (as in experts) who without doubt proved (as in prove) that CBS' documents were forgery (as in forgery). If this is not "reporting or investigation" then I wonder what "reporting or investigation" means to Koman.
(2) TalkingPointsMemo is mentioned two times in the post, each time with a proper link. However, Koman fails to mention that more often than not TPM is simply sticking to (a) the Democrats party line, and (b) the drift of each days New York Times articles. I agree that if you were to believe that FCN mind-controls a majority of Americans you'd believe TPM were an outpost of resistance, however, given circulation numbers and market share, TPM is simply a shill for the very same ideas which are put forth by news outlets such as CBS and NYT each and every day.
(3) Koman further suggests that it's mainly Republicans who have to fear the power of blogs. Not true. All real-world surveys (as in surveys) put out in 2004 show that it was Democrats, major papers like NYT and WaPo, and liberal network anchors who lost credibility due to relentless scrutiny as was on display by your hated "right-leaning blogs". You may wish to ride that deLay horse dead, but time will show again and again that it's the liberals who are getting nervous about the rise of blogs, not Republican politicians and partygoers. But then, it's almost a given fact that Koman and friends will spin that very same fact as "evidence" that right-wingers control US media, and that it were for that reason that we hear so little about Republican scandals exposed on hard-left blogs.
(4) If you need further proof for the latter fact take a look at the Howard Dean bubble. From broadband to dial-up. Dean and his followers in the blogosphere did nothing to help the Democrats cause via blogs because it's not a winning turf for the left. I've still to encounter a fresh story in leftist blogs that's not been covered on A1 in NYT, WaPo, LAT, and assorted papers. However, you may want to visit Instapundit any time of the day, and you'll most certainly find a fresh angle that you did not see reported in any mainstream media. That's the very reason why the Deaniacs failed. They've been told in the beginning that they're alone in America, sole voices of resistance, but found out that the whole editorial staff at NYT and friends agreed with them (not to speak of seriously deranged Paul Krugman or Mrs. Dowd), and that it's pretty uncool to keep company with "corporate media". Soon the Deaniacs' movement collapsed, giving less than single-digit gains to John Kerry from that base. However, there is a resisting base, the real base, and these people find their anchor not at TPM, not in Dean's movement, not in the Gray Lady, but in the large corner of the 'sphere Mr Koman so greenly ignored. And, no, these are not die-hard Republicans as suggested by Mr Koman, but swing-voters, democrats (as in democrat), libertarians (as in libertarian), people who seek information, not repetition of propaganda. The former they won't find at TPM, just as a majority of voters did not find confidence in Mr Kerry.
changing the world - detecting bullshit
Craig Cline:"This is how we take back the country." I hadn't quite thought about it that way, but yes. The problem with the mainstream media is not that its liberal -- it's that it requires a proprietary attitude towards newsgathering. The thing about group blogs like PowerLine is that they have no huge pride of ownership. The result is a fast-moving, massive news collection and analysis engine. Thus the entire construct is turned upside down. It is a universal. motivated fact-checking machine. I'm thinking about the story in Dan's book where some corporate exec is on the stage at a conference lying abouth his company and everyone's online and a Yahoo news story about the company comes out, which everyone starts blogging. In the course of the talk the audience turns hostile. Later in the book, Dan tells about Howard Rheingold being asked if this has a chilling effect on such presentations. His response, "No, it has a chilling effect on bullshit." Ditto for Dan Rather, Tom deLay, George Bush.
Blogosphere: Ecology of ideas
I recently expressed similar views on the blogosphere being a ecosystem.
To quote one of my post:
"Blogosphere is not about expression. It is not even about publishing. It is a giant leap in the direction of getting ideas together so that they evolve and reach adulthood much faster."
Mostly here and to some extent here.
Manas Garg
http://manasgarg.blogspot.com