Don't Believe the Hype

Jack Shafer makes a terrific point in his solid Slate deflation of the overhyped bloggers vs. journalists battle (on one blogging platform, known as the Thrilla Using Manila - ok, that's a little inside). Shafer's point is this: modern journos are - in general - incredibly blog-savvy. Sure, they get busted by bloggers; but the good ones use the blogosphere as a Candyland of rumor, data, and story leads. Moreover, and I've said this before, it's not so much than bloggers are changing journalism as it is that journalists are changing blogs. The best bloggers are journalists! Or professional writers and commentators, at the very least. To quote Thomas Jefferson: "citizen's media, my ass."

Along with Anil Dash - who has a vested interested but stands by his intellectual honesty - I agree with Shafer's take:

With the exception of the "metro" section reporter covering a 12-car pile-up on the freeway, I think most practicing journalists today are as Webby as any blogger you care to name. Journalists have had access to broadband connections for longer than most civilians, and nearly every story they tackle begins with a Web dump of essential information from Google or a proprietary database such as Nexis or Factiva. They conduct interviews via e-mail, download official documents from .gov sites, check facts, and monitor the competition—including blogs—the whole while. A few even store as a "favorite" the URL from Technorati that takes them directly to what the blogs are saying about them (here's mine) and talk back. When every story starts on the Web, and every story can be stripped to its digital bits and pumped through wires and over the air, we're all Web journalists.

The premature triumphalism of some bloggers indicates that they haven't paid attention to how Webified journalists have become. They also ignore media history. New media technologies almost never replace old media technologies, they merely force old technologies to adapt and find new ways to connect with their audiences. Radio killed the "special edition," but newspapers survived. When television dethroned radio as the hearthside infobox and cratered the Hollywood box office, radio became a mobile medium, and Hollywood devoted itself to spectaculars that the tiny TV set couldn't adequately display. The competitive spiral has continued, with cable TV, VCRs and DVDs, satellite TV and radio broadcasters, and now Internet broadcasters entering the fray. The only extinct mass medium that I can think of is the movie house newsreel.

The backdrop for Slate's blogging riposte was an invitation-only conference at Harvard to explore the revolutionary nature of blogs. (In sanity's lexicon, "invitation-only conference at Harvard" is a synonym of "jump the shark"). I waded into the transcript: much arguing over the New York Times and its $180 million reporting budget versus an army of un-paid bloggers; who covers Fallujah better? (Hint: I gladly pay for the NYT on my doorstep each morning). But that hot air misses the point, and it took a while to find someone on the panel who, in my mind, got the middle ground. The honor goes to Howard Dean outcast Joe Trippi:

"It's clear the media and bloggers can't replace one another. We've been really looking into ways to [collaborate];  it wasn't just the 19k film clips; I was reading this guy from malaysia witnessing the use of offroad vehicles, in a daybyday blog about what it was like to try to get by along roads washed out...places we couldn't have sent reporters to, frankly you wouldn't waste the resources,
but they were amazing stories ... It seems to me a lot of stuff going on with blogs has always been there."

Well, yeah. With all due respect to blogstars Jarvis, the starboard Captain, and Reynolds, no one is rushing to the barricades to destroy mainstream media, fellas. Ain't happening. This is not a revolution. It's part of the evolution of media, and having lived through the hype of 1995 and '96, I'm not having it again. It's silliness - exactly, as Shafer says, like John Perry Barlow's ludicrous and elitist tracts about the new Internet world order (ah yes, remember the cyberlibertarians fondly).

Here's what Anil said, and he's right:

Pitting blogs against any other medium is the same reductive, zero-sum, overly simplistic irrationality that many bloggers like to ascribe to the alleged mainstream media. To reiterate: Any institution which you might consider to be a "media outlet" is actually comprised of many individual humans. Some of them will be flawed and make mistakes, and most of them will probably be alright. I'm fairly positive that there's no "Associate Editor of Blog Elimination" at any periodicals that are being published today.

That doesn't mean I don't love blogs and think they're going to have an important impact. It just means I love magazines and books, too. (Newspapers are okay, as long as they're online.)

UPDATE: Jay Rosen from NYU's journalism program, a participant in the Harvard conference, pointed me to his own thoughtful and balanced piece on the blog/journalism argument. He has a good point: that the bloggers versus journalists argument is both absolutist and stupid. Read it.

Comments

[Jay Rosen]

Dear Tom: Try to imagine being the author of this, and being the foil for the author in this. It might bother you too.

"No one is rushing to the barricades to destroy mainstream media, fellas." I completely agree.

[Tom W.]

Jay - that's a terrific piece - I'll add a link up top. And I can understand how you got sandwiched. (That said, Shafer's article was on target in certain areas).

But here's my warning label on this blog stuff: follow the money. There's always, always been an under-employed class of writers/journalists who want their voices heard. Blogs make it possible; heck, I'm in this class myself! We make small change at the bottom of the media pile - journalists mainly do. Blogs account for even smaller change - and it's no surprise that the best-read blogs are by those with at least semi-professional journalist status.

[Jay Rosen]

I agree with that. But I didn't get sandwiched. Shafer decided to use me as an example of over-the-top blog enthusiasm so he could be the clear-eyed debunker. I didn't appreciate it. It's intellectually dishonest-- that part of it is. He makes many good points, though, about Big Journalism adjusting to new media.

And yes, journalists have gotten Webby, as Jack says. Bloggers should note that. But did Shafer have the "Web integrity" to link to that balanced essay I just told you about? Nah, he didn't. Because he isn't that Webby.