About the MSM/DNC

[Annie]

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http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB111749856898346629-IhjfINmlaZ4np6pZYGJcaaIm4,00.html

We the (Media) People

By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
May 31, 2005

The news business is in trouble. Readership and viewership are declining, public trust is plummeting, and advertisers are beginning to wonder whether they're getting their money's worth. This has led people to think about what blogger and tech journalist Doc Searls calls business models for "news without newspapers," an approach to reporting and disseminating news that doesn't depend on layers of editors for publication, and big ads from carmakers for funding. Nobody's sure just how to do that yet.

That's likely to change, though. Already we're seeing a lot of reporting from non-journalists, where the "reporter" is just whoever happens to be on the scene, and online, when news happens. Given the ubiquity of digital cameras, cellphones, and wireless Internet access, that's likely to become more common, making the kind of distributed newsgathering seen during the Indian Ocean tsunami the norm not the exception.

Quite a few bloggers are moving beyond opinion journalism into firsthand reporting. On my own InstaPundit.com weblog, I feature firsthand reports, often with photos, from places like Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. My "correspondents" are correspondents in the original sense -- people who correspond -- rather than in the modern sense of people with good hair and a microphone. Other bloggers have broken stories from Iraq (involving both alleged war crimes by U.S. troops and large anti-terror marches left uncovered by American media), from the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and from Canada's government corruption scandals.

Multimedia coverage is taking off, too. At the BlogNashville conference last month, I demonstrated the power of quick-and-dirty digital video by putting together a 15-minute Web documentary on the proceedings and posting it the next day, all done with the video-camera feature on my under-$300 Sony digital still camera. Now San Francisco blogger Bill Quick is using the same sort of equipment to cover local crime and politics. Outside the U.S., such efforts on the part of Chinese and North Korean independent journalists are threatening tyrants in a way that traditional journalism (which, as CNN demonstrated under Saddam, often swaps softball coverage for access) doesn't. But who will pay for it?

Like a lot of blogs, my site, and Mr. Quick's, generate a modest amount of revenue from ads. Most blogs don't attract the traffic that newspapers do (though some blogs have higher readerships than quite respectable newspaper sites), but Henry Copeland's blogads.com combines thousands of blogs to deliver large numbers of eyeballs to advertisers. The next step, though, will be collecting all that independent reporting into something easier for readers to find and navigate.

Some people are working on that, too: In fact, Pajamas Media, a blog-news venture I'm involved with, is recruiting a network of independent journalists around the world (and especially in less-democratic countries) and working on ways to support them financially, legally, and technologically. Others are working on news-aggregation technology that will automatically gather blog posts on particular topics, allowing people to customize their news.

Of course, when you take content from correspondents around the world, organize it in an easy to navigate form, and deliver the eyeballs that it attracts to advertisers, you've created something that looks rather a lot like . . . a newspaper. But it's a very different kind of newspaper, one that takes advantage of the big-media capabilities that, thanks to technological progress, are now in the hands of individuals worldwide. Will traditional newspapers be able to keep up?

Even if they don't, they'll benefit. Because with mainstream media losing credibility through scandals like Easongate, Rathergate, and Newsweek's latest, free-press protections are likely to come under fire. The best defense will be a public that sees free speech as something it participates in, not just a protection for big corporate entities. What some are calling "we-dia" may wind up saving the media

 

[Adam's Apple]

The revolution on news reporting is well under way, and the sooner it gets here, the better. Personally, I just scan newspapers for what I am interest in, then I hit the internet to fill in the details. There are so many sources available on the Net, including opinion and commentary, that you can't help but get a fairly complete picture. Beats regular newspaper coverage by a lot shot.