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Revenge of the Blog: Blogs and Journalism Panel
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Friday, November 22 @ 16:18:03 EST Legal Technology
Revenge of the Blogs concludes with our Blogs and Journalism panel, moderated by Caio Mario de Silva Pereira Neto, and featuring:

Bring it.

First up is John Hiler. He starts by telling us that in the last few years, he's discovered that weblogs are pretty damn addictive. He takes a quick straw poll: there are ten times as many bloggers in the room as there are smokers. Blogs are holding their own against a controlled substance. John likes to think of them as a new form of media that happens to be deeply addictive. Even for media, where the baseline is television (7 hours a day in the average U.S. home! More popular than parents!) and getting lost in a book.

This loss of all sense of time -- the state of "flow" -- is deeply addictive; it's what puts food on the table of media people. He describes the experience of posting (in his early days), waiting for the responses expectantly, and IMing his family and friends to tell them about his posts . . . until the day when he got a flood of responses. Every blogger has had one of these experiences; it's an incredible rush.

There's another entire industry built on the same concept of unpredictable feedback creating feelings of exhilaration: gambling. If you increase the odds so that a gambler is predictably winning, they'll be less interested. The unpredictability is central to the addiction. But he wants to portray blogigng as a good addiction. It's a way to tap addictive powers to do good things. And blogging cuts into your consumption of other kinds of media. You watch less TV, read fewer books . . . but you read more on the Web. Blogging is duking it out with some of the most addictive forms of media we know.

But blogging is different: it's the first form of media that truly closes the loop. It's not just bloggers addicted to blogging; it's also readers addicted to blogs. Addicted writers feeding addicted readers' habits. Addicted readers providing the feedback the addicted writers crave. It's a fully-closed media ecosystem. An "engine of addiction."

So, to blogs and business. The addictiveness of blogs is something that business doesn't get. But just because you're using a blog technology doesn't mean that you're tapping the full addictive power of blogs. Face it Bloggers are hooked. You can pay them pennies; they'll write anyway. Businesses are going to have to make this transition; they haven't made it yet.

David Gallagher is second chair at our panel. He thinks of himself more as a reporter than a pundit; he's going to share some anecdotes. He starts with a Slashdot tale. He wrote an article on in-car navigation systems for the Times that could receive messages from the car company. The Slashdot headline involved "on-car spam," even though the article ran against this characterization. He was massively flamed by people who hadn't read the article. The moderator at Slashdot defended the title because he didn't believe the GM execs quoted in the story.

Weblogs are both opinion and news. They can foster a shallow understanding based on few facts and a lot of spin. There's lots of spin on spin on spin. Somewhere in the food chain, someone needs to make the phone call to get the quotes.

The second story: political bloggers pushing aside technical bloggers. While he was writing the story, he realized that his sources were blogging about his story before he filed it. Further, they claimed he was trying to whip up a war between warbloggers and techbloggers. The mess shows how the dynamics of journalism change when subjects have their own media outlets. He pleads with bloggers not to write about stories in progress: it's really nerve-wracking.

Final story: he worked at an English-language paper in Italy, emailing with a friend in Greece about the human-interest aspects of the Euro switch. They made a weblog about it, called Eurotrash, with nine contributors from across the continent. His favorite posts were the ones in which non-journalists were making their own news. For a story like this, peer-to-peer journalism works just fine; it might not work for the war on terror.

Jeff Jarvis steps up to the plate. He says the Internet is the first medium that is only by the audience. Finally, the audience has a voice, and it's not all about politics. Food, music, technology, the concerns of people's lives. What excites him most is that he has terribly interactive sites, at which people talk about their kids' soccer games. 250,000 page views on New Jersey boys' wrestling, with thousands of posts. This is the audience speaking about what they care about, and you have to love it.

He brings this populist philosophy in. He defended the tastes of the audience as a TV critic. We have taste, dammit. The Nielsens, in the long run, are dominated by quality shows. If you don't have faith in the taste and intelligence of the audience, you don't believe in democracy, capitalism, or reform theology. This medium belongs to the people who use it.

He spent yesterday with lawyers; it was an unhappy place. Lawyering is a profession about trying to protect us from a bad behavior of man. He's populist partly because of ego: he likes the gratification of hits. The audience pleases us. The weblog is the highest form of this interactivity. They add something. They add a sense of quality. There's a blogger branding it. It adds value with link. The incoming links let the cream rise. Bloggers are the soul in the chorus of voices that are the internet.

The weblog doesn't replace journalism. So far, they're pundits, philosohers, and editors, but they're not gathering original facts. In an age when Danny Pearl died in pursuit of these facts, he thinks its hubristic to say that we who sit and comment can replace journalists. But they should affect journalism. Editors don't like to listen to the audience. He's tried to push fora and weblogs on editors without much sucess. Like going to Denny's without the heartburn. But they'll learn. One editor will discover a story from a weblogger, will reveal the source, then everyone will pile on. It's a mob media. Bloggers haven't been discovered yet.

Editors shouldn't think that things in blogs are representative of the audience. But you can listen to the buzz. (Hence the name "BuzzMachine"). What has he learned from his blog? He didn't have much to say until September 11 -- he was at the WTC that day and couldn't let the story go. He had more of a report, more to link to and comment on, so he started the weblog. But once he got the feedback, it was goosebump time. It led to "truly a community." You end up liking these people. It is a community with a collective voice.

He'll end by saying why he doesn't do weblogs at his day job. Well, partly because he can't spend another penny on content. He does have a libel problem. He also doesn't know how to do it in the newspaper/magazine context. (Digression: he's going to put the computer he loaned to Glenn Reynolds on EBay). He was IMing with Nick Denton and mentioned that Glenn had plugged Nick's sites; Nick said he already knew it (thanks, bloggers!) and came back with some facts for Jeff to tell Glenn. The speed is amazing.

Josh Marshall rounds out our day. He starts out with some observations from being a journalist and doing a blog (he hates the term). He likes not being confined to the traditional formats of journalism (columns, features, long investigative pieces), each with its own fixed format. Frequently, you have a point you want to make, but you have to do extraneous work to package it for a particular article type or outlet.

Are bloggers reporters? Can they be? Definitely not. Relative to a lot of political blogs, he has a fair amount of reporting, but that's because he does reporting for paying publications. So he'll be working on an article, discussing things and figuring them out; all things he can milk for his weblog. The reporting subsidizes his weblog. The kind of reporting he does is highly time-intensive. Without a trust fund, you couldn't do it for a weblog. Weblogs are permanently going to be a churn medium. Journalists aren't experts. They get up to speed. Weblogs have a role to play in letting people who know something on a topic jump in.

A lot of political journalists read his site. There's a lot of stuff that gets talked about only in the background; vague accusations and other things that wouldn't make the publishable grade in newspapers and magazines. Some of the most interesting discussions about politics only happen at that level. In his site, he tries to get into some of this stuff.

If you're a working journalist, you bring your reputation to your blog. There may not be formal constraints on what he writes, but there are profound professional constraints. He can't say he's a crank online but respectable in his day job. When he started the site two years ago, the readership was so small that he could treat it like a circular email. As the traffic has increased, that's changed. At a certain point, he could no longer pitch things he'd run in his blog; the blog was big enough that papers treated it as old news.

The transcendent rule is fundamental honesty with your readers. When your sources are questionable, you signal your uncertainty to your readers. You try to indicate your particular doubts. But because blogs don't have established ground rules yet, he has more freedom to negotiate this. In practice, he draws the line almost exactly where he'd draw it in conventional journalism.

A note about libel. He wrote an article in The New Republic about the current U.S. Envoy to Taiwan. It was pretty hard-hitting. (Josh says something I shouldn't repeat, because it could get him and me in trouble.) It was quite clear to Josh that if this guy was sharp, it would be convenient to nail him for something innocuous said in his blog. So he (he failed to consult a lawyer at the time, even though he was dating a YLS student at the time) touched the subject extremely gingerly in his blog.

Question (Caio)about trust, how do bloggers get their trust, and how about the rating systems of collaborative sites? Josh says he'd never write something in his blog he wouldn't put in a magazine. Jeff says you have a relationship to your audience and that's what you have to come back to. At papers, they "fact check your ass" and this is known, and that's what makes you do it right. Weblogs and their links are a better rating system than karma (and he was at Plastic, so he knows). John is fascinated by collaborative media. For some stories, it does a tremendous job. He wrote an article on "why Google loves blogs," but the blogiverse managed to write his follow-up article before he penned it. He did a complex piece on Google and Scientology, and collaborative media basically failed to understand it. You couldn't filter to make the discussion good.

Question can we create communities around blogs that allow people to create together? Can these communities become reporters? Jeff states that reporters do more than point out facts. There's legwork; there's the calls, there's the investigation, there's the experience and craft. John calls reporting a skill set. More people are going to learn this skill set. The bad reporting we see in blogs will be superseded. And reporting is different from explaining; blogs are also about the transmission of already-possessed knowledge.

Ernest Miller talks about LawMeme and how the hits we get for long stories give us an incentive to do more original reporting. He also says that one of the questions editors will start asking "where did you blog?" Blogging could be a stepping-stone towards full reporting. John talks about bloggers realizing that their actions have consequences.

Glenn deals with journalists a lot. The J-school stuff people say about what journalists do doesn't track what journalists actually do. He was misnamed in a New York Times article; no correction, no nothing. Various stories about carelessness on the part of reporters at major media outlets; bloggers aren't so bad in comparison. David sees that blogs add accountability, because the individual author is contactable. Josh says that it's not the skill set that matters; it's just a matter of time. Question:Old media has a front page. What happens to traffic on the front page vs. deep links? Do good reporters get more hits? Jeff calls it the Drudge rule. They have to add server capacity when they get Drudgedotted.

Jeff answers another question about news and blogs by saying that the killer app for news is local. useful news. The AP covers the press conference for everyone. In terms of magazines, it's the niche-i-fication of America. But now you're coming head-to-head with blogs again, since blogs aggregate the audience's content.

 
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