“The technology — that is, the software is democratic in and of itself. What were witnessing is a shift of power and prestige. Journalists have been accustomed to being powerful. Most people don’t like giving up power. It used to be cool and MEAN SOMETHING to be The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or NBC or CBS or CNN … now it means less and less.”
Category Archives: Blogging
Mainstream media suffers from “freedom envy”
Peggy Noonan (WSJ.com) wonders if mainstream media suffers from “freedom envy” where bloggers are concerned:
Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge to be necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: “Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report.” In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that’s new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That’s not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn’t carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago.
This is a really good piece on blogging that –once upon a time– I might have forwarded to the reporters working in our newsrooms. I’ve stopped doing that. With one or two execeptions, our reporters are clueless and/or threatened by the whole notion of blogging. Don’t get it. Don’t want to get it.
Three years blogging
On Thursday, I will have been “…writing some of this down” for three years. More than 1,000 thoughts, notes, links, rants, reviews and random ravings. I couldn’t have imagined sticking with it this long and I can’t imagine ever stopping. I’ll be 57 next month so I could easily have another 25 years of blogging ahead.
I tell new bloggers that the first 48 hours will tell the tale. If you’re gonna get the bug, you’ll get it within those first couple of days. And if you’re not hooked by then, it’s probably not for you. M
FarmPolicy.com
Keith Good solves the “not enough hours in the day to blog” problem by getting up at 4:00 a.m. I talked to him this morning (10 min) about his blog, FarmPolicy.com, which deals with U. S. agriculture policy. A really good example of the kind of citizen journalism (or publishing, if you prefer) that’s transforming and challenging mainstream media.
New news network?
“As the network anchors drummed their manicured fingers, waiting for correspondents to parachute into position, the sketchy wire reports were supplanted by real-life, as-it-was-happening stories by bloggers who penned moving first-person accounts. This is as real-time as news can get. Weblogs, which started out as online diaries, have morphed into reporters’ notebooks. The information is raw — and perhaps unpolished when compared with news from more established outlets — but it is nonetheless news.”
— Article at Business 2.0