With the layoffs in MSM and the decline of journalism will the blogosphere mature enough to help fill the gap? Most political bloggers I know do it for free...not without bias - but that is usually obvious and stated up front.
We bloggers don't usually break news. We respond and comment on the stories in the MSM for the most part. Can bloggers become more like professional journalists? Should we? I think No and No!
Blogging is not professional journalism...but could it be an alternative in the hands of some well trained and dedicated folks? But doing it for a living? I admit blogging is good for business but my business is not blogging. I don't see an workable business model for blogging...or am I missing something?
That said, where will be get authoritative, authentic and informative news if the MSM as well know it disappears?
That said, where will be get authoritative, authentic and informative news if the MSM as well know it disappears?
Both companies mentioned (CanWest, Sun Media) as in trouble are ones I rarely visit (unless I pick up a link through a google news search) because I do not care for the right wing bias in their reporting. Seems it's like the car companies. Change or die. If you won't change...kinda hard to blame anyone but yourself.
ReplyDeleteHey Ken,
ReplyDeleteI think there would be a lot of people who would argue that more and more bloggers are starting to break news, especially in the U.S. There would be even more people who would argue that blogging is professional journalism, or at least changing what it means to be a journalist.
As a case in point, Joshua Marshall, who started Talking Points Memo, won a Polk Award for legal journalism in the U.S. for breaking the scandal in the U.S. Attorney General's office where they were firing lawyers that leaned to the left and replacing them with staunch loyal Republicans. A blogger who broke news and who received a very prestigious journalism award.
And what of professional journalists who are also quite prolific bloggers? I'm thinking of Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish. Quite a few of the NY Times columnists also have their own blogs. There's also Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair, who runs The Daily Beast. The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast are examples of how MSM and blogging can intersect in a viable business model.
The Huffington Post's Complete Guide to Blogging has some really interesting commentary on the evolution of blogging and how it relates to MSM. It basically says that you need both to get to the truth, given the political bias' of most MSM outlets anyway.
Hi Ken,
ReplyDeleteI think that a lot of people would argue with your position that blogging is not professional journalism. At the very least it is changing what "professional journalism" means.
This is especially true when you have people like Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo winning the Polk Award for legal journalism for breaking the story about the U.S. Attorney General's office firing left-leaning lawyers and replacing them with Republican hacks. I believe it was this scandal that eventually cost Alberto Gonzales his job. So you have a blogger breaking news and winning a prestigious journalism award for doing so.
And what of journalists/writers who are also prolific bloggers? I'm thinking of Andrew Sullivan whose Daily Dish blog is associated with The Atlantic Magazine, or Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair who recently launched The Daily Beast.
I think we're going to see more blogging/MSM combos like The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast.
The Huffington Post's Complete Guide to Blogging has some interesting commentary on this subject too.
Morning Erin- thx for your comment and welcome to the Blogosphere.
ReplyDeleteThere are lots of professional journalists who are blogging but I don't think there are many bloggers who evolve into professional journalists.
BTW in Q4 of 2006 blog posts by language - 37% Japanese and 36% English and 8% Chinese. Intereting
The sheer magnitude of the blogosphere in all its serious and superficial glory overwhelms the efforts of those professional journalists players. Last figures I saw were from 2007 and only those tagged in Technorati. David Sirfry said "The State of the Blogoshper is strong, and maturing as an influencial and important part of the web."
Between March 2003 and March 2007 Tenchorati traced over 70 million blogs with 120,000 blogs being created everyday. The big traffic blogs were all MSM dominated, with the NYT and CNN leading the way.
So professoinal MSM journalists are blogging but the reverse of bloggers becoming professional journalists is still not hapening siginficantly. If we lose the MSM will the professional journalists bloggers survive?
The MSM will never dissapear, it's their traditional business model that is dissapearing. I think that some of them will succesfully transform their business models to include new technology, and the ones that do it well enough, will build a subscriber or advertising model online that is successful. It will be integration of blogger's, opinion and even micro-blogging into their offerings that will make them more relavent.
ReplyDeleteIMHO of course.
An interesting article in The Atlantic this month to add to the discussion (although this is pretty exclusively about MSM rather than blogging): http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/new-york-times
ReplyDeleteOne of the most compelling features of virtually any new media - whether it is corporate/for-profit or whatever it is I do - is that the traditional ways of revenue simply do not apply. Advertising on the web - be it on a MSM news site or embedded within an SNL clip is never going to generate the impact that a television commercial or newspaper ad did in 1992. Then again, the traditional model of relying on user-pay didn't make the television and radio industry of yesterday either. We need a model that allows for quality information transfer and pays the bills. I do think citizen journalism will be an important part of that model, but of course I have no idea what that model is.
I see the Globe and Mail is laying off 10% of its workforce...announed today.
ReplyDelete