Premise: bloggers are to big media what Open Source and shareware coders can be to Microsoft and Intel. They can be brilliant, they can be right, and they are often a hell of a lot quicker. [Elizabeth Osder's comment in Wired prompted me to write down something I've been thinking about for a long time.]

When blogging was very young, it was hard to see anyone except Dave Winer hereabouts who was doing it. It was also hard to miss examples of those few early bloggers saying and doing things that would have gotten a journalist fired from a daily newspaper or wire service. Things like publishing opinion illustrated by self-serving 'facts' and not checking and double checking sources and the information they published.

Journalistic organizations tend to do these things: the bigger and more influential they are, the more of this that gets done. It's partly that serious journalists come up through a system that holds that people won't believe you for very long if you play loose with facts and sources. It's partly that big media companies are juicy targets for libel lawyers if they don't carefully check their stories and sources.

But it's also partly that the metier of journalism, in my experience, is a knock-out game. People can rise through the system by not making mistakes (or, at least, by not being caught). So even as great editors, and great mentors, become scarcer at budget-conscious publishing concerns, journalists self-organize around standards: how far one can go to eek a story from 'the facts'. The problem is that 'the facts' are what others say they are, in many cases, and how much credence can you place in other people, particularly when you may have all of say, 21 minutes to make a decision to publish, or not?

The good news in the blogging world, is that it, too, has started to self-organize around standards. Bloggers who used to just state what amounted to hearsay as plain fact, now tend to cite and check. It used to be "Microsoft steals ideas and crushes companies"; now it's "Scott McNealy says Microsoft steals ideas and crushes companies". There's a big difference.

This is not to say there aren't plenty of bloggers who don't just shoot from the hip: there are legions of gun slingers out there. Worse, there are lots who will 'print' something just to get attention, and to hell with ethics and fairness.

But, the same mechanism is operating that has operated for 500 years on the print side of the media equation: readers aren't stupid. They really don't believe everything they read. And once they know an observer is a poor reporter just trying to get attention, they won't often go back.

Most high-traffic blogs belong to tech 'celebs' of one sort or another. But there is a small category of blogger whose fame and traffic have risen on the strength of their ideas and the quality of their reporting and writing.

They succeed, in true Darwinian fashion, by drawing readers in and back again. They do this by being interesting, and believable even though they lack the credibility and marketing budgets of big-brand media .

It's true bloggers lack the resources of news organizations - vast, decades-spanning archives, fact checkers, keen-eyed editors et al. But they also lack the inertia and tunnel vision of big news organizations. Bloggers are to big media what Open Source and shareware coders are to Microsoft and Intel. They can be brilliant, they can be right, and they are often a hell of a lot quicker.

But, how do I really feel...
Comments 6:29:42 PM    

"There's an overfascination here with self-expression, with opinion. This is opinion without expertise, without resources, without reporting." [ Wired News ] Hmmm... I sure don't think of Doc Searls and Dave Winer as navel-gazers... wonder who it is that Ms Osder reads... This may be the only time my wife will admit to agreeing with someone from USC...
Comments 12:50:14 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures