The Great Media Revolution

This may come as a surprise to some people, but I love to write. First livejournal and now Wordpress have given me a platform to self-publish just about anything I want.

This is called blogging. And Oh-My-God, blogs will destroy the media.

Except they won’t. Blogs are already an integral part of the way people interact throughout the online world, and are becoming increasingly better business tools—I had the good fortune to work with the Blog Business Summit team over the summer, and they’ve got an amazingly good grasp of how blogs are going to become the business tool of the future.

But I don’t buy into blogs replacing media; the New York Times is not on its death bed, and I’ll give you three reasons why:

• Reliability

• Resources

• Accountability

Reliability is extremely important. Not only are humans incredible creatures of habit, but reliability is the bedrock of trust. We look to the major media organizations to collect and disseminate, most classically on a daily basis, a reliable collection of news and information. The newspaper is probably the most reliable source of news in the world, and this type of mail-delivery familiarity is why Fred Wilson uses e-mail subscription on his blog. People just like it.

Some of the most popular bloggers—Jeff Jarvis comes to mind, write prolifically on a daily basis. Whenever I open my newsreader, I’ve come to expect three or four new posts…but it’s not a commitment. Jeff can take a break whenever he wants. Remember when Scoble took some time off? The Wall Street Journal doesn’t afford itself the same luxury. Blogs are by nature personal outlets, and at the moment at least, it’s largely an unpaid profession.

Of course, blogs aren’t purely personal journals. Jason Calcanis is the high-profile creator of Weblogs Inc., the company that runs a number of “newsy” blogs like Engadget, and Autoblog. They make over a million per year in Google ads—and you might say they’re pretty reliable.

But they aren’t making a million in profit, and they don’t share the Resources that major media does. And because they don’t have the deep pockets that established news does, they don’t so much report the news as they do collect it. Sites like Boing Boing are essentially online collection points for the more interesting bits of gossip, news, or products. They work really well at what they do, but they don’t replace the purpose of the classical media.

Investigative journalism, despite its film noir sound, is not out of style. It’s easy to imagine a world of “citizen journalism” in which the important details about Enron would never have seen the light of day. The existing weblog companies (and certainly the average blogger) don’t have the resources necessary to replace the traditional media in their search for news.

The blogosphere is a big place though---and surely, bloggers were responsibly for discrediting the false documents about Bush’s military service? Yes, blogs had a hand in that. The amazing resources of an entire population individually picking apart the same, poorly wound story were quite amazing.

But what the blogosphere lacks as a whole is Accountability. When the Bush documents turned out to be falsified, the media did an amazing thing: they said we’re sorry. We got it wrong.

The only blogger I’ve ever seen with accountability like that is Theferrett. Bloggers individually are great, but as a whole the blogosphere is proud and a bit petulant—I’ve seen a lot of bloggers get things wrong. I saw plenty of posts about how the Bush documents were quite real, and oh, I know this person who knows something about documents and I’ve been assured…

But I never saw them say “whoops, I was wrong.” When the note about Terry Schivo showed up…the blogosphere sung with unjust criticism and many cried foul on the note itself. But sure enough, this time the note was legitimate…and still no retractions.

It’s not really an insult. I hate to say I’m wrong, too. I’ve probably misspelled something or used a comma incorrectly somewhere in this post. I don’t have an editor who I submit to, nobody fact-checks my articles, and quite frankly the cursory Google search is usually as far as my research goes. That kind of work would be unacceptable at the Seattle Times, and if you picked up a newspaper to find that someone wrote a restaurant review without bothering to go to the restaurant, you’d probably be upset.

We hold the media to higher standards than we’re willing to hold ourselves---and that’s why the media is here to stay.

In fact, it might be even simpler than that. Blogs are wonderful tools for dissecting a story or an event, but in the end, CNN still decides what we blog about, and that’s the true power of mass media.