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September 17, 2006BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Blogs And The Future Of Journalism
From July through earlier this month, the Project for Excellence in Journalism held a series of nine online discussions about the future of journalism. The last of them, conducted Sept. 8, focused on the online revolution, and the role of blogs was one element of the forum.
The experts who participated were: Robert Cox, founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association (of which I am a member); Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media; James (Jay) Hamilton, a professor of media and public policy at Duke University; blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine; and Lee Rainie, the founding director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Click to the extended entry to read excerpts of what each said about blogs in response to a question from PEJ.
PEJ: Now moving specifically to blogs: Blog readership, according to survey data, seems to have stalled in 2005. Content analysis also shows there is little of what we most would think of as original reporting in blogs. Yet they often write about events outside the purview of the mainstream press. How ultimately do you think blogs and other citizen media will affect news reporting in America? Will we ever see them as a more significant, or even equally important part of the mainstream American news diet as traditional journalism?Cox: I do not accept the premise of the question. I believe that blog readership has increased dramatically each year and continues to grow. ... I would guess that the actual number of readers of blogs is up dramatically but that it is masked for several reasons. First, most active blogs cover politics and as 2004 was an election year, it should be no surprise that there was a spike in blog traffic between the Conventions and the Election. Second, going into 2004 few news organizations had their own blogs and since then, many of the most widely read blogs are now contained within sites run by news organizations and they do not break out their traffic numbers. Third, the widespread adoption of RSS among blog readers, the integration of RSS readers into the latest browsers has meant that an increasing number of blog readers need never visit the site and so are not counted as “unique visitors” by tools like SiteMeter.
Gillmor: There may not be much original reporting in blogs as a percentage of all blogs. But given the enormous number of blogs, it takes only a small percentage of them to do original reporting to add up to vast new amounts of original content. The most common kind of reporting is in niche topics that are too narrow for the traditional media and people who care about those subjects are finding some excellent journalists. Professional journalists, meanwhile, are constantly using blogs as tip sheets, much as they've used trade journals in the past. The best way to begin to understand the blogosphere is to join it, of course. When journalists use blogs (and other conversational media) they start to realize that the conversational aspect of this medium is the key. Remember: The first rule of a conversation is to listen -- and listening has not been professional journalists' most notable trait.
Jarvis: On blogs, you are concentrating on the wrong statistic; you continue to look at media as an act of consumption. Media are acts of creation. Except now, we’re not the only ones creating; our public, too, has the benefit of the printing press and the broadcast tower online. And the truth is that the number of blogs created has continued to explode, doubling every six months. Those people are not just readers, listeners, viewers, users, or consumers. They are speakers. So are we listening to them? That is the real question. If you are a journalist, a company, or a politician and you are not listening to your public, your customers, your constituents, then you are a damned deaf fool…
The right question to ask is how blogs and mainstream media can work together to improve journalism and an informed society. You should be asking how any mainstream journalist could possibly imagine not doing his or her job without the help of the public through blogs.
Rainie: First, reporters will increasingly feel compelled to read blogs to take the temperature of the public on issues, as a source of inspiration for story ideas, as good substitutes for man-in-the-street interviews, and for feedback on their own work…Second, blogs will probably introduce new subjects for news organizations to address. Third, the most important power of blogs is that they allow millions of niches to bloom. Fourth, blogs could become a standard source of information on big breaking news stories. Fifth, bloggers will continue to play the role of forensic analysts and dissectors of mainstream news coverage. Sixth, bloggers fill the inevitable gaps in news coverage and add perspective to news commentary ... I think bloggers in most circumstances will continue to be seen as supplementary contributors to MSM news work rather than as substitutes for MSM activity.
Hamilton: … Blogs do possess the ability to remedy some failings of market-driven news outlets. There are specific circumstances where you can expect for-profit media outlets to get stories wrong: if situations involve repeated interactions with government sources, which causes reporters to pull punches or act as transcribers; if an information cascade starts which generates a prevailing view of a story, which makes it difficult for a reporter to go against the grain; or if information is costly to pry out of organizations but bloggers have knowledge because of their work.
The topic of citizen journalism (specifically user-generated political content) arose again a week later at the George Washington University Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.
According to Howard Mortman, one of the more impressive presentations was by blogger Michelle Malkin, who discussed the phenomenal growth of her fairly new Internet video venture, Hot Air.
Posted by Danny | 07:52 AM
