While leafing through an AM New York paper on Friday (yeah, yeah, I do that sometimes when riding the subway), I saw a short opinion piece by Ellis Henican that resonated with me. It’s one of the “old vs. new” debates, which are often controversial, and we often tend to either embrace the side of “the old” because of some sentimental feelings, or dismiss it as the bickering of the people who don’t understand how great “the new” is. But sometimes the arguments of “the old” are rather reasonable and shouldn’t be discounted right away.
Henican is quite bitter in his piece, describing blogging as “some self-absorbed nitwit sitting in front of a computer in his bathrobe, stealing the facts that some hard-working, low-paid newspaper drone just spent hours collecting,” but he has a point: bloggers do often get their facts by reading some other sources, be it newspapers or websites, because they often don’t have the time, the resources, or maybe even the desire to go out and do all the “dirty work” of going to crime scenes, sitting through court trials, reporting from war zones, doing the fact checking. Almost inevitably, if you get the facts that have already been retold by someone to their liking, you get a skewed picture; then you add your angle, and it gets even more skewed. And while this is good for something like philosophy, for news reporting it doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Of course, there are biased reporters and diligent bloggers, and sometimes a witness who has a blog can undermine a corrupt newspaper’s official point of view. But still, the overall state of affairs seems to be correct. And this is one of the reasons that it’s so upsetting to see the newspaper industry in such bad shape, and it would be a shame if the disappearing newspapers are replaced by nothing other than the “Bathrobe Boy” bloggers.
Yana,What’s odd to me about this post is how loaded it is. What is at stake is not that some new breed of writer called the blogger magically showed up on the scene and sunk the newspaper industry. Rather, the very means of publishing, sharing, and communicating have been in the process of changing radically over the past 15 years, and several newspapers–like the Chicago Tribune, for example–paid little mind to this reality. More than that, however, is the fact that good investigative reporting is an important and rare thing, especially given the media conglomerates most newspapers have been sucked into. And while “bathrobe boy” may not be helping the overall state of news and media (which I don’t necessarily disagree with by the way), I would argue that news and media has been in the state of rapid decline for decades, and finally their stranglehold over the distribution of information has vanished, newspapers–and media companies in general—took their monopoly on distribution for granted and they are ultimately paying for it now. The decline of media has little to do with the bloggers, it has everything to do with a future that most of these companies were too short-sighted to acknowledge–yet the NYT has managed this gracefully understanding the power of opions, data visualization, and allowing people to decide what they want to read and when rather than locking them into an outdated model (and this took them a long while to figure out). There will always be a market for good inverstigate reporting, but the same can’t be said of 99% of the schlock most US newspapers print on a daily basis.
A few points… even though the Times has elegantly evolved the way it serves its content, it’s still suffering. See here and here.
No one has really figured out a business model for new journalism yet.
And, more than some imprecisely described bathrobe blogger, this deserves more blame for the state of newspapers than anything else.
Jeff Jarvis, while a bit of an asshole, provides a good window into these debates.
Finally… as Jim says, good journalism is good journalism, no matter the form. Josh Marshall runs a blog, complete with crowd sourcing and other Web 2.0ish experiments, and he’s pushed and broken news in important ways. There’s some talk that web journalism is replacing the fourth estate– the press– with the third estate– the people. I’m not so sanguine as that. I still think we need fulltime watchdogs. This is a painful transition, and I think it’s fair to fear that some investigative journalism will be lost in the process. One potential result is that foundations may provide the funding for investigative journalism rather than newspapers.
Jim, my post wasn’t meant to be as loaded as it seemed to you. I don’t believe that blogging is the reason that the news industry is going down. I think Luke’s point about free online advertising is a very good one, and the loss of advertising is definitely hurting the newspapers more than other things. What I meant was that it’s now easier than ever to just steal other people’s work, regurgitate it and get credit for it. There is plenty of that going on online, and it’s generally easier to fill the Internet with junk and with plagiarized or fabricated stuff because the laws are still evolving and because of the sheer number of people who can do that. I’m not denying that there are some good blogging news sites, but many of them are linking to other people’s work a lot. The transition from traditional media to its Web2.0 or 3.0 version is probably going to be difficult indeed, and at some point, before the foundations pick up the tab for the investigative reporter’s expenses (if they do), I think there will either be a lack of good quality reporting or it will be up to the conscientious reporters to do such work pro bono.