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February 21, 2005

Symbiosis

Bloggers occasionally fall prey to the conceit that they are somehow either superior to or a replacement for the media. While the blogosphere has had a few successes since its inception (although not necessarily as great as we sometimes think), blogs generally serve as an enhancement to the media, not as a replacement to it. Yes, I'm aware that there are blogs that provide occasional original reporting, but those blogs are neither common nor reliable as the media. If a bomb goes off in downtown Austin, the media will send reporters there to cover the story. Bloggers must rely on locating local bloggers who both can and will take the time to do their own investigations. People come to the blogosphere for analysis of news, not for the news itself.

This is due to the corresponding weaknesses of the media. Reporters are rarely experts in the subjects they cover, and they have a bad habit of seeking out experts who can confirm what they already believe when they're writing a story. The media does a reasonably good job of getting the basic facts of news out to the public, but is not properly equipped to take a look at those facts and determine what they mean. Not that this stops them from trying to do so, but media analysis pieces tend to be weak because the author is usually expounding on a preconceived notion rather than really analyzing the facts on the ground.

The blogosphere is great at analysis not because bloggers are necessarily superior to reporters but because the blogosphere tends to include experts on just about anything. Want to know about the law? Run by The Volokh Conspiracy. Interested in the military? Check out Blackfive (or your humble servant). If there's a topic of public interest, there's probably multiple bloggers who actually work in that field whose opinions are informed by their practical experience. That gives us a major advantage over reporters: I can't count the number of times I've heard reporters describe very basic things about the military and get them entirely wrong. Hell, my own family still doesn't really understand a lot about the military, and I've been doing this for 16+ years now. I believe it was Michael Crichton who observed the fascinating cognitive dissonance we have when it comes to the media: we'll read an article that is on a subject we're familiar with and spot errors throughout the piece. Yet we'll then turn around and read the articles we're not well-versed in and accept them without question. Thanks to blogs, errors like that can be identified and corrected. But the blogosphere as it now stands is somewhat hit-or-miss; if I see an essay correcting something in the media, I'm aware of the differences, but those I don't see I probably will never hear about.

Now my once and future neighbor Steve Green offers an interesting suggestion for resolving that problem. Technorati already offers a great service for checking blogs: if I'm interested in what people are saying about a topic, I can enter it into the search box and see how many blogs are addressing that issue. Steve suggests they develop some code that could be appended to online articles that would allow readers to read the base article and then check out what the blogs are saying about the piece. This would allow the papers to offer virtual ombudsmen who are not beholden to the paper while keeping their costs down. It's hardly a perfect solution, but it would be a reasonably simple one to implement that could benefit both sides. Bloggers who provide value-added to media pieces would see increased traffic, while the media could highlight links to particularly insightful pieces that enhance the coverage they provided.

I don't see any way that the blogosphere can replace the media. But they can make the media significantly better (and vice versa) is both sides are so inclined. I wouldn't hold my breath.