The traditional media has been in a tizzy ever since the rise of the blogs. We’ve all heard the same complaints from them, over and over again, that we’re not “real journalists”, that we are parasites on actual news sources, and so on. But at root, what’s happening is that a class of professionals, previously safe in their ivory towers, is feeling threatened by people they don’t respect and who do not show the expected deference encroaching on their territory. Much the same thing has been happening in the much smaller encyclopedia market with the rise of Wikipedia.
All of the complaints are, of course, nonsense. While not every blogger is a paid professional, most of the prominent ones are, earning their keep by attracting visitors and selling advertising, which is exactly the same way the traditional media makes its money. A modest number actually do original research, and though there is definitely room for improvement in that area, it’s also fair to note that many bloggers are essentially editorialists, and traditional editorialists aren’t usually beat reporters themselves.
When Wikipedia rose to prominence, there was a similar outcry from the publishers of traditional encyclopedias, especially Britannica. All sorts of equally unsupportable allegations were made, most notably that without restricting content production to a closed community of academics, accuracy would suffer. No one — least of all the regular contributors to and consumers of Wikipedia content — would say that Wikipedia doesn’t have room to improve, any more than there are very many bloggers who would argue that the blogs are ready to completely replace the traditional media. But numerous independent studies have found that the error rate in Wikipedia is the same or lower than in Britannica.
And that, really, is what pisses off the traditionalists: people from outside their profession are demonstrating that they can do the same job as well as, and sometimes better than, the traditional authorities. And worse, they are able to do so on a more or less level playing field where the traditionalists have no special advantage and, thanks to their disdain for the new media, may be working at a bit of a disadvantage.
Back when print was king, it took money, and a lot of it, to publish books and periodicals. The mimeograph and the photocopier did nothing to change that: while small print jobs suddenly became possible, their per page cost was higher, and then the distribution problem was entirely beyond the reach of ordinary people. The people who had their voices magnified by the media therefore had a powerful defense against would-be challengers: when they spoke, everyone could hear them, but when we spoke, it was to a handful of people at most, and we were lucky to be heard over the sound of the TV. There were no dissenting voices loud enough to disturb the complacent self-confidence of the professional journalistic class.
The web changed all of that. Today, everyone with access to a computer can reach a global audience. There is no barrier to entry — at least in the prosperous countries — and there are no gatekeepers. And while the overwhelming majority of web content is proving Sturgeon’s Law to have been wildly optimistic, it is also the case that lots of good material is out there, and the ad hoc social networks that arose spontaneously in the blogosphere have insured that if what you are writing is worth reading, people will find it, and if you can keep it up, your audience will grow.
The bottom line — and the thing that the traditional media still does not get — is that on the web, the only difference between the major traditional news outlets and the blogs is the number of daily visitors, and much of that difference stems from having television networks and newspapers to drive traffic to their associated websites. The newspapers are dying, and all indications are that the web is taking an ever-larger number of eyeballs away from TV.
Predictions of a meritocratic utopia are, as always, overly optimistic. But the momentum has definitely shifted in the direction of meritocracy and away from the old press oligarchy. I suspect that there will always be somewhat traditional news bureaus out there with resources that the blogosphere cannot easily match — and that’s a good thing. For them to survive and prosper, however, it is no longer enough to simply own printing presses and television towers. They have to be better than the blogs. The panicked sounds you are hearing from the industry come from the realization that their current product is, in many cases, inferior to the blogs, and their audience is leaving them almost as quickly as they discover the existence of alternatives.
Some news bureaus will adapt to the new reality, others will perish. Some new ones will undoubtedly rise from the blogs sooner or later. The Huffington Post’s effort to hire investigative journalists may or may not pan out, but similar efforts eventually will.
We still have a long way to go before a new stable state emerges. The new reality is already here, but the old media is still too deeply stuck in its outdated mindset to fully appreciate it. The latest example — and what set me off this evening — is Maureen Dowd’s plagiarism of Josh Marshall and the dizzying speed with which that plagiarism was discovered, Dowd was forced to make excuses, and those excuses were largely debunked. In another age, hardly anyone would have noticed. The impropriety would have been the same, but the difference in scale between the two parties would have obscured it.
As Ms. Dowd is discovering, that is no longer the age in which we live. We face each other now as equals, and the adjustment is bound to be an unpleasant one for those whose former stations were based on something other than merit.
