Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Some say this is a "Dutch tulip moment" for bloggers, and they won't be around for very long. Others predict quite the opposite, and that it is the MSM that won't be around very much longer.
Let's collect some quotes here, and please add your comments below.
QUOTES FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE:
1. "Journalists from the MSM are slow to wake up to the fact that there are tens of thousands of people worldwide who know far more about any particular subject the journalist writes about than they do, and who can identify error and spin. That didn't matter so much in the past, because the MSM controlled the feedback (such as letters to the editor, the publishing of contrary views). Now that control is lost, and the MSM find it very difficult to cope with competition for ideas."
2. http://kottke.org This could be the beginning of something big. Will the MSM take notice?
3. TERRY CARTER: "I'll try to briefly synthesize some recent postings here. Blogs are for real and, as far as journalism's measure by pelts on the wall is concerned, getting very real. Journalism, qua journalism, is dying at the hands of bean counters and interior decorators. The result of this clash is open-source journalism, which we are already seeing.You can look it up. The possibility of mainstream journalism surviving, keeping its juice, is the push from bloggers. They're not the bane, they're the salve. At some point, the bean counters and even the interior decorators will see that and respond. That may come a bit late, but that's also part of the evolution."
4. HANS EISENBEIS, editor-in-chief, The Rake:
"Ugh, can we stop with the "will bloggers bury journalism as we know it" meme? I'm beginning to believe what I read about the "MSM."If no one else will do it, I guess I will. Let's finally and conclusively clarifysomething, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to raise my voice a little to do it: BLOGGING IS NOT JOURNALISM. People, stop equating the two, you are making me crazy. Also, stop indulging these bloggers by putting them on the air and turning them into experts merely as a defensive reaction to being aspersed as "MSM." At the very least, make sure you permanently dismiss one pundit for every blogger you hire.And another thing: Get Frank Rich on the Op-Ed page, or fire him. I am half convinced that global warming is a result of all the hot air beingemitted by self-evident experts in all quarters. In a newspaper, particularly one that aspires to be the paper of record, opinion belongs on the opinion page. Even if I agree with Rich, which I do with alarming regularity, I still don't much appreciate the ammunition he -- and a hundred other professional soap-boxers -- have given to all the belligerent wingnuts who have managed to spread skepticism about the world's authoritative news sources because they cannot or will not see the difference between one person's passionately expressed beliefs and another's reported observations and sourced quotes. Ever notice how National Public Radio does not broadcast any opinion -- except as rare, carefully isolated, and identified "commentaries"?Blogging is media criticism, it is cross-referencing and self-referencing, it is exegesis, and it is frequently a form of over-amplified soap-boxing. It does not typically involve any reporting, and if it does, it stops being a blog and becomes a news dispatch. The only blogs that even remotely qualify as journalism are blogs that involve a writer getting off his or her duff, observing real-world incidents and interviewing real-world people, recording the results of this information-gathering, and submitting the results to a skeptical editor whose job it is to make sure you're not making any of it up or picking any private fights. Reading another persons' news reports or blogs does not qualify as reporting. It qualifies as criticism and opinion-and in rare cases, entertainment. Phew, I feel better now, thank you."
5. MARK LEWIS: "Byline counts? That's yesterday's issue. In the online journalism world, management not only knows exactly how many stories a writer is churning out, but exactly how much traffic those stories are generating. Increasingly that information is being shared with the writers, who naturally feel pressure to produce the sort of piece that will generate the most hits. The good news is that we'll know just what our audience wants to read ... and that's the bad news, too, since we'll have no choice but to tailor the product (yes, that word again) to fit what the audience wants. (Traffic equals money.) As journalism completes its migration to the Web over the next several years, the impact of traffic counts will be enormous. All writers will know exactly how many (or how few) people read a particular piece. All editors will know exactly how to cater to a given audience. No more guesswork involved, and (I would guess) not nearly as much creativity, either. With such knowledge pressed upon them, writers may find themselves pining for the good old days when the only quantitative measure of their output was a byline count."
6. Editor's Note
February 25, 2005
A CJR Daily Glossary
It occurred to us recently that we've been remiss in adopting, without sufficient thought, certain out-of-date but widely-used terms to describe the shifting media world arrayed before us.
Example:
Mainstream News Media, a.k.a. MSM: Usually used by blogosphere zealots on the right and the left as a disparaging reference to a handful of large and supposedly influential newspapers, magazines and TV networks. (And, oddly, enough, a term adopted by those it is meant to describe -- who are fooling themselves, as we shall shortly show.)
But in an age when overall newspaper circulation has been inexorably leaking away year after year for more than 20 years now; when the major network news operations draw barely 50 percent of the nightly audience they once had; and when general interest magazines have been elbowed aside by niche publications, the tag "mainstream" to describe a bunch of bewildered guys 'n dolls who find themselves slipping daily down the razor blade of life seems not just quaint, but missing the point entirely.
We prefer the more accurate term Corporate Media, or CM, since paradoxically many of these floundering outfits are owned by monster corporations whose senior executives must wonder, as they stare at the ceiling at 3 o'clock in the morning, "What was I thinking?" (See Consolidation, Media.)
So is the very term MSM -- meant to describe dinosaurs -- a dinosaur itself?
Not at all. In a nation in which political and cultural conservatives occupy the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and most statehouses, MSM strikes us as a dead-on description of a more recent phenomenon: The avidly partisan right-wing press, represented in the swelling blogosphere, the small-magazine world, radio networks such as Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel, newspapers such as the Washington Times and the New York Post and, perhaps most importantly, any number of cable television outlets.
So here's our new glossary:
Corporate Media: The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Network, and any other entity owned by Dow Jones, Gannett, Scripps-Howard, Newhouse, Tribune Co., Cox Newspapers, News Corp., Knight-Ridder, Hearst, Conde Nast, Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Disney, Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel. (Apologies, bigtime CEOs, if we left anyone out.)
MSM: See above. The newly triumphant, and most of them quite giddy about it at that.
Loyal Opposition: Any newspaper, blog, website, small magazine or other news/opinion outlet that tries to make its way in that increasingly embattled spectrum that ranges from slightly-to-the-right-of-center to way-left-of-center.
Obviously, there's some overlap. Fox News, for example, is both Corporate Media and the MSM -- the most potent blend of all. The Washington Post, by contrast, is both a Corporate Medium and the Loyal Opposition, a far less formidable combination.
But for the most part, the categories hold up. So we'll try to break old habits, and remain true to the glossary. Let us know when we don't.
--Steve Lovelady
