Watch Out, Traditional Media!

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Watch Out, Traditional Media!

The collective intelligence and power of the blogosphere are bringing accountability and competition to broadcast news and journalism.

BernardMoon | POSTED: 01.06.05 @00:30

Call it The Year of the Blog: As broadcast news and mainstream media lost their luster and newspaper circulations dwindled, eyeballs turned to the Internet increasingly in their quest for content with substance. With blogs leading the way, old media was blindsided by the likes of Power Line (Time magazine's Blog of the Year), Engadget, and others, which broke news days before their more traditional counterparts on everything from false documents used by "60 Minutes" to faulty Kryptonite locks. It's no wonder then that a report from Pew Research Center for People and the Press revealed that in 2004 only 24% of CBS News viewers believed "all or most" of what was reported (down from approximately 32% in 1996)—and that viewers of NBC and ABC News responded similarly.

Of this phenomenon, Power Line co-founder (and blogger) John Hinderaker says, "Whenever I look at one of those newspaper dispensers, I look at the headlines, and I'm always kind of surprised because they seem so out of date. Blogs, and the Internet in general, have accelerated the pace of the news cycle. In the blogosphere, there are really two or three news cycles within a day. If something is more than six to eight hours old in the blogosphere, it's part of a former news cycle. The speed has really changed how people view information."

But from another standpoint, time isn't a factor at all in the blogosphere, where posts are just part of a greater, continuing conversation on the internet. As president and creative director of Advance.net (and BuzzMachine blogger) Jeff Jarvis states, "We used to think that the news was finished when we printed it, but that's when the news now begins."

What I see, however, as the most important aspect of this year's shift to what I call "reality media"—and Tony Perkins refers to as open-source media—is the way it illustrates the power of collective intelligence. AlwaysOn members and visitors see it every day, since no article or post is complete without community members adding comments, corrections, or additional information. But the most significant example of this in 2004 came in the lead Power Line took in proving that Dan Rather used false documents to support his "60 Minutes" story on President Bush's Texas National Guard service.

As a reader of Power Line, the most amazing aspect of watching "Rathergate" unfold was that it wasn't just that blog but actually several-dozen blogs collaborating with hundreds of their readers who emailed information validating the forgery of the documents.

Although "Rathergate" represents the most notorious example of the power of collective intelligence in the blogosphere, it's far from the only example.

Says Hinderaker, "For years, people have been predicting that the internet would be a significant political medium, but until this year I didn't think it happened.

"The thing that I thought put the whole medium over the top was the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story. When they started out, they only had $200,000 and enough money to buy advertising on three TV stations in Ohio. Kerry's advisors told him, 'Don't respond, and don't mention it. The media is not going to cover it. They can't hurt you because they have no money.' The group put the ad up on their website, and we and many other blogs and websites directed traffic there. Two weeks after that ad came out—even though virtually no one had seen it on television—somebody did a poll in which 57% of all respondents knew about the ad, and a lot of them had already seen it. What the vets had done was circumvent the traditional media and use the Internet to get the message out."

Yet still there are doubters—those who pooh-pooh the collective intelligence and power of the blogosphere.

A few weeks ago, I was reading a USA Today article on AlwaysOn's own Tony Perkins and came across the following statement by Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of MIT's Technology Review: "The blogosphere doesn't have the capacity to produce analytical, well-researched journalism."

To get some perspective on that view—which I assume is shared by many journalists and much of the mainstream media—I talked to Simon Waldman, director of digital publishing for Guardian Newspapers and a blogger himself. Here's what he said:

"I think the issue is a lot less about the merits (or otherwise) of bloggers' writing and research and much more about the impact bloggers—both as individuals and as a mass—are having on the shape and structure of the net.

"On one level this is about the impact individual 'power bloggers' can have on bringing a particular story or issue into the limelight. On another level it's about the impact bloggers en masse are having—either through aggregation services such as Blogdex and Technorati or through their impact on Google.

"Overall, I think that the combination of blogs, RSS, and the ongoing integration of news readers into browsers and email clients is starting to lead to a real change in the way people find and consume information. And no media organization, traditional or otherwise, can afford to be ignorant of that change and/or to think that it won't affect them."

Adds Hinderaker, "The blogosphere has made them [mainstream media] pretty nervous. I know many journalists read Power Line. I think that the knowledge that there's a whole army of people out there fact-checking them has undoubtedly caused a lot of journalists to be more careful—I think that's good."

The ironic aspect of this anecdote is that Pontin contacted Perkins the next day and told him that the USA Today reporter had quoted him out of context. If only USA Today were set up as a blog (or a blog/social network like AlwaysOn): That reporter would have gotten an earful from people like me, Hinderaker, Waldman, or even Pontin himself.

 

[Bonnie]

Gotta love those bloggers, especially now that they are so irritating to the liberal mainstream media :read: