Bloggers: Will they eat the media or vice versa?

That's the question I considered in this paper for my New Media class:


One of the most stunning transformations of our times has been the democratization of the media. The rise of desktop publishing, the Internet and digital video means the franchise on a mass audience no longer rests exclusively with those rich enough to buy a printing press or operate a movie studio.

But will what should be a golden goose of access for the masses turn out to be foie gras for the media monopolists?

It's certainly starting to have that overstuffed look.

In this paper, I propose to examine the promise and the perils facing the new media by looking at what's going on with blogging. What began as a means for citizen advocacy and networking has been expropriated as a channel for commercial use (see all the blogs by lawyers and PR specialists) and mainstream media expropriation.

While this isn't necessarily a bad thing -- blogging seems to encouraged both the established press and the corporate establishment to speak more in more candid voices -- it's definitely a different thing from what Dave Winer envisioned when he defined blogging as "the unedited voice of a person."

As a member in good (or is it bad?) standing of the Mainstream Media, I can guarantee you that very little, if anything, that is unedited gets on the pages, electronic or otherwise, of today's news media. Indeed, there have been celebrated cases of reporters being fired for blogging overexuberance.

Still, the mainstream press has yet to be toppled by bloggers as the source par excellence for news. This despite the fact than any (wo)man with a laptop is a Citizen Kane for the new millennium.

Why is this? I would argue that it's the very proliferation of alternative news sources that gives the old standbys their staying power. As of June 13, 2007, the Technorati website reported that it was tracking a mind-boggling 86.3 million blogs. Just a little more than a year ago, when Carl Sessions Stepp was reviewing a book about blogging for the American Journalism Review, the number was 23.5 million.

With this kind of information glut, it's not surprising that people are looking to experienced hands to edit it all down to a manageable package. That's why former Heinz CEO, now international investor Tony O'Reilly said he's putting his money in the media -- including the dead tree variety. "In my view, a newspaper, properly edited and presented newspaper, is the ultimate browser," O'Reilly told Charlie Rose on the TV host's show Dec. 28, 2006.

So where does this leave the corps of citizen journalists that digerati such as Dan Gillmor and J.D. Lasica are trying to recruit?

If bloggers want to avoid being overshadowed and/or subsumed by the mainstream media they vow to revolutionize, they need to break away from the media pack. There are many interesting blogs that succeed because they give people news and information they cannot get elsewhere. . Efforts like Baristanet, a blog that chronicles the community of Montclair, N.J., show the possibilities. The University of Maryland's J-Lab is encouraging the development of other such ventures with its New Voices grants.

Besides hyperlocal news coverage, blogging can also provide powerful when it's hyperfocused. With fewer and fewer news organizations making the investments to do intensive beat coverage, dedicated bloggers can fill the gap by covering the stories that are too insidery to break through the days Paris Hilton headlines. That creates a record and a readership among opinion leaders that can have a ripple effect. A good example of the kind of blog I'm talking about is Steve Clemons' Washington Note, widely read by foreign policy wonks.

A larger question is how long the utopian euphoria that seems to motivate many bloggers can sustain the phenomenon. Advertising on the Internet still pays far less than advertising in print journalism. And as Samuel Johnson, a man who was as prolific in his day as the bloggers are in theirs, once famously noted: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

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