This turned out to be a LENGTHY post. To save scrolling from people who want to get on with the next post, I’ve put it all “after the jump.” Also, it’s a real first draft, that just came pouring out, not a carefully considered post, so take that into consideration when posting comments!
The recent Winnipeg Free Press layoffs caused a ripple of soul-searching in the Manitoba corner of the blogosphere. Progressive Winnipeg kicked it off with a “State of the Blog Address” that took a look back at where he got his material:
Myself and most bloggers rely on news sources for our commentary. [My last] post is an example of that. In fact, I have gone through all my posts thus far in 2009 and have, out of 31 posts, 16 that were not based on a newspaper article (or, roughly half). I based two from the CBC and one from the BBC, two from other bloggers.
10 of my 31 posts (or, roughly a third) are commentary on a specific article from a newspaper or are follow ups.
Following this lead, Endless Spin gave it a whirl:
Doing my own test, I found that of the 24 posts I’ve written since the beginning of February, 15 out of 24 were directly based on something I read produced by a mainstream media outlet, while one other one was based on blogger reaction to a news item. Only two of my posts contained any modicum of “original” reporting .
He even does some extra research, citing studies that show 40 to 70 per cent of blog posts in the States reference something originally produced by the mainstream media.
Well, I am not going to put on this hair shirt. I think the “original reporting vs ripping off the mainstream media” dichotomy is a false one.
There is very little original reporting going on in the blogosphere — that much is true. But there’s a heck of a lot of original thinking. That’s because blogging is not the same as reporting; it’s got much more in common with writing an opinion column. I think the reasons for this are plain: writing an opinion is both easier than original reporting, and also, historically, more glamorous in the media.
But also, the very nature of the Internet makes original reporting, paradoxically, less important. Sixty years ago, there needed to be a reporter for each newspaper at the Legislature, or at the White House. Each paper needed its own source for the stories — it was a rare story that relied on the pool reporter. You wanted your readers to get all their information through your company? You needed an independent source for that information.
Not so anymore. Flush with information on today’s web, news consumers no longer follow the one-paper-for-all-my-news model. They pick and choose. And, as they gravitate to the most-popular two or three sources for, say, their national political news, the smaller players drop off the scene. Net negative? Maybe, but it’s what the Internet facilitates — clicking around from news source to news source.
So what does this mean for bloggers? It means as long as there is at least one source for original news, they’re free to link to it, and riff on what it means all they like.
Bloggers should not be confused with reporters. We’re much more like columnists.
That said, it doesn’t address the core issue, which is that news coverage, as it dwindles, leaves less and less to feed the blogosphere’s chatter. Or does it?
Consider the metric that Progressive Winnipeg and Endless Spin used to measure their own reliance on the mainstream media — how many of their posts linked back to or relied on something in the MSM.
Now let’s apply that thinking a little higher on the food chain: How many so-called “original stories” in the newspaper do you think relied on a press release?
After all, make a couple of phone calls to a known critic, take out the PR-flack’s most odious puffery, and you’ve got a bona fide news story from any press release.
I would bet that well over three-quarters of the news in any newspaper is generated in a similar manner. Maybe it’s not as obvious as a press release, but it could be phoned-in a tip, or a court schedule, or a meeting agenda. It’s generated from somewhere outside the newsroom.
Underneath the umbrella of “mainstream journalism” there is a wide range of stories — from rewrites, to chronicling, to reporting, to investigations, to opinions. So far, bloggers have mostly replicated just the opinion stuff. Like I said, it’s both the easiest and the most glamourous. But it also relies on some other people doing the grunt work of generating original stories.
Or does it?
If even three in 10 news stories in any paper are the result of some reporter pounding the pavement, working sources, and digging through things that aren’t merely handed over, I’ll buy a hat just to eat it.
If tomorrow, poof, every newspaper in North America vanished, what do you think would happen to those press releases, those meeting agendas, and those phoned-in tips? I’ll bet before the month was out, every blogger in the world would be getting deluged with them.
Because for every negative story that gets printed about city hall, there’s probably five that are either positive or neutral — and those are stories that city hall still wants to get out.
And bloggers, bet your bottom dollar, wouldn’t miss a beat. They’d go to the city’s website, link to the press release, and write a post about it — same as they do now with a news story.
Is this as good as a “professional journalist” doing his due diligence?
Well, I’ll say “not yet.” But I’m optimistic for the future.
Because if you go back a couple of centuries, before the dawn of what we might recognize as newspapers, what you’ll find is kind of like a low-tech blogging society.
Pamphleteers — often solo and self-financed, or financed by patrons (sometimes political parties) – would publish screeds on the doings of the day. Without any news organizations to reference, they would assume that their audience had at least a partial understanding of the news of the time. If they didn’t, the audience would have to make do by reading between the lines of the pamphleteer’s latest jeremiad.
Gradually, these one-person opinions evolved into early newspapers, and from there into the newspapers that everyone knows, loves, and is getting ready to mourn, even as we link to them.
So I have to think that these early days of blogging will — and I don’t know how — give birth someday to a real new kind of journalism. Maybe it’ll be corporate, maybe there will be ultra-rich “blog barons” who keep a stable of low-paid opinion peons, maybe it’ll be financed by grassroots donors, maybe by non-profit endowments. I don’t know.
But I do know that there’s a hunger for information out there that won’t go away even if newspapers as we know them don’t survive.
And I can see the broad outlines of what blogging may become. The blogosphere is decentralized in a way that the mainstream media is not. They’re collegeal and courteous, by and large, to fellow bloggers. There is an emerging “blog culture” that encourages crediting and building upon the work of others.
There’s still a rush to be first — to get the classic “scoop” — but when you’re talking about minutes or seconds instead of a day, being first is much less important than bringing something valuable to the table.
I like that philosophy. Linking to and building upon the work of others recalls to me the words of Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further than others, it has been because I stood upon the shoulders of giants.”
Bloggers may currently stand on the shoulders of the mainstream media, but I don’t think we’re parasites. I think we’re just trying to peer a little further.
Grant Hamilton
13 Responses to “Bloggers are not parasites”
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Good post, Grant! I missed pamphleteers, and I see bloggers as their natural heirs. Will you be my new Tomas Paine?
It’s not just the press releases that bloat “original” newspapers, either. Let’s not forget the syndicates. How many of the stories in “original” mainstream media stories come from the syndicates? All but local for all the but the largest papers, I’d bet.
Oh, I’ll bring the Paine
You’re right about syndicated content, which I think is baggage that newspapers carry from decades ago, when their readers relied on “the paper” to bring them all the news. With so much information and news out there now, though, I think bulking up a paper with yesterday’s breaking international news, when it was covered exhaustively online and on the 6pm newscast, plus updated on the morning radio shows, is just redundant.
However, there’s a huge amount of pride in newspapers for “all the news that’s fit to print” and, to think of it a different way, newspapers also serve an important archival function that no one has figured out how to duplicate in either broadcast or online.
This is an excellent post. My thoughts are similar, but you articulated it much better than I can.
On a similar note, I don’t think “old media” will die out, but newspapers especially will have an increasingly local focus. Which is pretty much the only reason I still semi-faithfully read the Brandon Sun (and Community News).
Thanks! I agree with you about the increasing local focus of, well, local media. And I think paper is here for a long while, too — At least until something can replicate the flexibility, fold-ability, write-on-ability and other physical properties of the medium.
Community News FTW!
“I would bet that well over three-quarters of the news in any newspaper is generated in a similar manner. Maybe it’s not as obvious as a press release, but it could be phoned-in a tip, or a court schedule, or a meeting agenda. It’s generated from somewhere outside the newsroom.” — Grant Hamilton
I have stated this elsewhere, but I will reiterate. At what point does a blogger cease to be a blogger and become a journalist in the MSM sense of the word? When they start getting news tips, look to a court schedule or get a press release. At that time I wonder if bloggers will start writing more like journalists than columnists.
What you’re talking about here is the transfer of information sources from well-funded ones to currently not-so-well-funded ones. There is no doubt that bloggers are a great source for sometimes thoughtful responses to daily life or daily news, depending of course on the quality of the writer.
But I take issue with your idea that most news comes from outside sources. ALL news comes from outside sources. There is no way in hell that a reporter sitting in a cubicle with all ties cut off to the outside world will come up with amazing stories. Impossible. All of us hacks gain ideas from living our onerous lives and talking with other people and answering the phone. As the saying goes, nothing comes of nothing.
The real issue that needs to be addressed is the ability for bloggers to keep politicians and government honest. Newspapers and other main stream media have lost some of this ability, partially due to cutbacks in staff, but also in part because of the corporate politics that are forced upon news rooms. I would argue this is especially true within conglomerate organizations such as CanWest which own numerous papers and TV stations and thus control editorial content in a large part of the country.
I think papers will survive, but they will have to be locally owned. The large-scale media empires are responsible for the destruction of media more so than any blogger. Blogging is more a response to that destruction, in my humble opinion, one that is likely to stick around.
In the non-newspaper world you mentioned (or a much debilitated MSM-sphere) I would be somewhat wary that bloggers’ opinions will not be fully separated from the “news” they report, and that takes away the virtue of fact-based reporting, without the insertion of unnecessary commentary. There’s a reason that newspapers evolved the way they did. Look back to the Whig and Tory papers of England in the 18th and 19th centuries, and you will see highly partisan, opinionated rants in place of fact-based stories, (much like many blogs you see nowadays). This kind of reporting did not stick around.
My hope out of all of this, is that somehow, the job that newspapers have done so well in the past will somehow get re-established in some form, and that is keeping governments accountable. It remains my opinion that bloggers have yet to achieve this. It remains my hope that they will.
Wow – great comment.
I think we can both agree that bloggers have yet to achieve the fact-based unbiased pinnacle of “journalism” that the MSM venerates, and I, too, hope that this will eventually evolve. However, it bears repeating that this is fairly recent evolution even in the mainstream world. I mean, you don’t have to go very far back before you get to yellow journalism, etc. Or turn on Fox News to see it today.
Opinion, spin and torque are present in just about ever story ever written, and while its the duty of a professional journalist to strive for an ideal that includes as little of them as possible, that’s a very difficult peak to reach. There’s a philosophical debate here about whether it is better to strive for non-bias, or whether it is better to wear your biases on your sleeve, so to speak, so readers can judge for themselves.
As to my point about news coming from outside sources, all I meant to point out is that, in today’s cut-to-the-bone newsrooms, there’s very little time or space for investigative reporting. Running on a skeleton staff, it’s all most news organizations can do to keep up with the press releases and meeting agendas.
In an ideal world, freedom-of-information requests would be more the lifeblood of a journalist than a press release. Unfortunately, no one has that sort of time, anymore.
My hope, ultimately, is that some sort of news reporting function will come out of this “blogosphere” — and, based on the collegial, collaborative nature of the blogs I see now, it could be a pretty powerful one.
“There is very little original reporting going on in the blogosphere — that much is true. But there’s a heck of a lot of original thinking.”
You can say the same thing about the food court at the Town Centre mall…coincidentally, also populated by people who operate outside the “MSM”, and has a lot of “original” thinking going on.
Doesn’t mean it’s worth a damn, though.
You get what you pay for — it’s always been true, always will be.
I disagree that getting what you pay for is true anymore. If that were true, VCRs would just have gotten more and more expensive over the years, and instead you can pick up a DVD player for less that $50 at any Wal-Mart. Sure, it’s not the best DVD player — but it’s thousands of times better than the most expensive VCR ever was.
And honestly, the cost of transmitting information — which once required specialized education and work by pricey monks — is now so cheap that the price you must pay for access to that information verges on free.
If you really think that you get what you pay for — and that free, therefore, means valueless — then you must be saying that websites like Google, Facebook, Flickr and this blog are worth nothing to you.
I would disagree. I think price, value and worth have come unstuck.
That sounds nice but doesn’t bear up to even the flimsiest of sniff tests.
• VCR analogy: faulty, since it completely ignores advances in hardware. Economies of scale, my friend. That’s like comparing apples and tyrannosaurs.
• Transmitting information is indeed cheaper, but we’re not talking about that here, are we? We’re talking about GENERATION of information.
Some dude sitting in a basement somewhere regurgitating information generated by media outlets…that’s supposed to be credible, in any way..? Puh-leeze.
The very vital difference between that and some editor in a newsroom sifting information is a little thing called “accountability.”
Take a guess which option has it and which one doesn’t…that’s the difference. Price and value are still going steady.
Point-by-point:
- Why can’t bloggers, also, benefit from economies of scale? Dozens of people, working together cooperatively may not ever produce a “newspaper” per se, but I’m willing to consider that they might generate some news.
- As I’ve pointed out above, I don’t think most news organizations generate all that much news themselves, either. Most of what’s printed or broadcast is a regurgitated press release or meeting minutes, with a veneer of stylized newswriting and the obligatory opposing quote.
- Your concept of “accountability” is outmoded. Sure, 30 years ago, when people in Brandon has exactly one news source, the idea that there was someone responsible that you could write to had an appeal. But holding someone accountable only matters insofar as you want something from them. Ie. you want news that’s accurate and correct. These days, I have tens of thousands of news sources to choose from, and if one of them proves less accurate or correct, I don’t need to hold them accountable — I’ll just switch to a different one.
- Similarly, no one cares if they get their news from Joe Blow, or Grant Hamilton, or NewzGuru99. If it’s proven accurate, they’ll trust the brand. And if it’s proven wrong, the switching cost is so low that they’ll just go somewhere else.
- Finally, I still think you’re looking at cost and value in the wrong way. Or tell me that you don’t value Google or Facebook. Since they’re free, they’re worthless, right? No credibility in Google.
“If it’s proven accurate, they’ll trust the brand. ”
That’s a mighty big “if”, amigo.
One of many ginormous “if’s” in your theory.
But hey, it’s only the accuracy and credibility of information in a democratic society that’s at stake.
It’s not like it’s anything, you know…like, important, or anything.
As to whether media outlets ‘make news’ or not – that’s besides the point. They don’t, nor should they — but they are far better positioned to make sense of what’s going on and provide context – both of which are vital in relaying information.
You yourself made a post not long ago about the creator of the “The Wire” taking on a news story himself. Now, that sort of thing ought to happen WAY more often (I’m sure we agree) but it makes the point that a blogger wouldn’t have a hot clue what to do with that idea…or even HAVE it in the first place.
I think this is one of those conversations that we’re just going to have to lay aside, and come back to in about 10 years, when the landscape has settled a little bit. I mean, I share your concern that the mainstream news organizations, which do provide an important service, are struggling and on the decline. I hope that they don’t disappear. But I’m quite excited by the possibilities in this new, grassroots blogging phenomenon.
I suspect that what happens will be something in between blogging and old-style industrial journalism. It’ll be more flexible, more nimble, more opinionated, and yet have some of the institutional advantages inherent in a news organization.
That last paragraph is my personal ‘best case’ scenario.
I hope I’m not too cynical to doubt its evolution, though. The problem with morons is there’s just sooooo damn many of them…even quality bloggers can’t help but be inundated with the tidal wave of stupidity.