December 4, 2007
Blogs and newspapers: a sort of consensus
Making comparisons between the output of old media journalists (such as me) and bloggers (such as me, I suppose) is a risky business. Anyone who does so, from either side, is prone to get his head bitten off by people from the other.
But my eye has been caught by the coincidence of views on the topic between Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times and Nick Denton, proprietor of the blog outfit Gawker Media and my former Financial Times colleague and book co-author.
In his Hugo Young memorial lecture, delivered at Chatham House in London last week, Mr Keller said that he was, in some ways, a convert to blogs:
But most of the blog world does not even attempt to report. It recycles. It riffs on the news. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Not nearly enough.
Now consider the advertisement on Friday on Gawker for a new managing editor (several of its employees are leaving at once, saying they are tired and disillusioned):
It’s no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers . . . Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site. The right candidate will oversee Gawker’s evolution.
If they seem to be saying the same thing, that is not surprising. The boundary between old media and new is falling and the distinction between blogs and print publications is eroding. There will always be a large population of blogs that are observations by individuals for themselves and their friends. But there is a growing segment of professional online publications.
As traditional outlets including the FT gear up with blogs, online publishers such as Gawker are investing in more original reporting. I imagine the two sides will eventually meet in the middle, even if it is not clear where the meeting-point will be.
editorial net notes: Leave it to the American business blogger for a major English newspaper to note that even the US MSM, neither main stream, nor rightly anymore the media, is being dragged, inexorably back toward, if not actually into the tenets of journalism, which have been parked at the door of all big money American declinist rags, for decades. Competition is good for us all, and even the Quean of the America hating declinists, the NY Times, can watch my favorite poetically named Put Option, -Zhomb NYT $10, Jan 2009, as it swings up 29 percent in a day, and see the writing on their great pile of dead trees. My heart leaps, in time with my profits, as I watch the icons of the imperial tree killing closed shop print media go down with their sinking ships. As set out in the FT business blogs introduction, it is fact, that comment, which we upstarts call peer review, is often more interesting than anything that the originator writes. After Murdoch won the battle for leadership of the American press, I noticed a well organized Market Watch web site, now owned by Murdoch, with a comment section that might even possibly be better than the FT comment section. I cannot speak to even handed treatment, of both sides of all issues, as the FT is famous for. That will remain to be seen, but, the Market Watch site appears to offer instant comment, on any article, without the absolute censorship offered by the Washington Post, or even the snide monitoring used to exclude any sane conservative writing from the few US media sources that provide even the usual stilted hard to use comment sections. As I have read little, from any US newspaper since discovery of the www.artsandletters.com NZ website, and the joy of the largely uncensored English speaking press, I cannot discern if the arrival of Murdoch caused the even handed excellence of their benchmark commentary section, although I would love to know. If we are to be treated to a new world of big money press acceptance of user created journalistic freedom, and real peer reviews, instantly, by truly independent journalists, after the constant pillorying of Murdoch, predicting his heavy handed editorial interference with the far too precious family run target newspaper he snapped up for peanuts, and if his arrival caused the wonderfully developed and potentially even handed web site, that is as foreign to US MSM media as a conservative journalist not locked up in a mental institution, I will be tickled pink. Do not rush to read the general run of US papers quite yet. The Market Watch website is one of very few, strangely including, CBS and ABC where any conservative writing is tolerated in the US MSM. This benchmark free press website is a good start, like 5000 criminal lawyers chained together, in the bottom of the Marianas Trench, it does not clear the remaining 98 percent of the big money US MSM from the reality that no conservative opinion bit ever gets air, or ink, unless it is tinged with something nutter enough to insure nobody reads, or watches it. Thanks to the FT, you helped to set the pace, let us hope the entire US MSM returns to the journalistic fold, and comment becomes free on both sides of the Atlantic.
Posted by: Franklin D Lomax | December 4th, 2007 at 4:53 pm | Report this comment