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Blogs grow journalism

Ed Cone compares traditional journalism in the age of the Internet to a building, in C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, "that is bigger inside than it is outside."

"Whenever I think I've mapped its new contours," Ed says, "somebody shows me another wing."

Ed's talking about the recent Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility conference at Harvard, where journalists and bloggers were jamming about the relationship of the two approaches to publishing, and the evolution of the weblog as a citizen journalism. Reputation and credibility are key issues for journalists and bloggers both, and organizations are emerging (e.g. Center for Online Investigative Research) that hope to explore the relationship between bloggers and professional journalists and the issues of ethics and credibility they have in common, especially as journalists begin more and more to incorporate intelligence from within the blogosphere. As Ed says,

This idea that there is more knowledge outside the newsroom than in it, that as writer Dan Gillmor puts it, "my readers know more than I do," is of course the point of bothering to report stories in the first place. What's new is the ability of individuals to publish their own words, as well as audio and video, cheaply and easily on the Web. Experts and eyewitnesses are no longer consigned to audience status. They don't have to wait to be interviewed by professionals but can push information out at their own discretion.

What media organizations, including the News & Record, are trying to figure out is how to add value to this flood of personal publishing without being drowned by it. Even as the new media enhances the old, it has some very disruptive possibilities. While Rick Kaplan, president of MSNBC, said at the conference that Web logs actually increase the ratings of his programs, online services such as Craig's List and Monster are already eating away at the ad revenue that pays for things like that Times bureau in Baghdad. Meanwhile the new media players are trying to figure out revenue models of their own.

jon posted this at 10:27 AM
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