How others see him who shall remain nameless
Power Line
Masthead is the periodical publication of the professional society of newspaper editorial writers. Masthead's editor this year is Doug MacEachern, columnist and editorial writer at the Arizona Republic. MacEachern invited me to contribute a piece for the current Masthead issue's symposium on how blogs are changing "opinion-framing."
Among the several interesting columns in the symposium was one by Phil Boas, deputy editorial page editor at The Arizona Republic. His contribution to the symposium is headed "Bloggers: The light at the end of the newspaper's tunnel," with the subhead "Engaged bloggers are voracious newspaper readers too."
I asked MacEachern for permission to reprint Boas's contribution and thought it might be timely in light of John's "jodhpurs" post below. Here is Boas's contribution to the Masthead symposium:
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It's customary for anyone writing to the uninitiated about blogs to define them. This is a journalism trade publication and you are no ordinary reader, so I'll spare you the customary definition. Instead, I'll define blogs as they relate to you. They are your Nemesis in the making.
If you've remained nonplussed as they took down Dan Rather and four of his Black Rock colleagues, if you haven't the slightest interest in acquainting yourself with the blogosphere, don't move an inch. You won't have to. Bloggers will be knocking on your door any day now. Or knocking it down.
To many of you, bloggers are a presumptuous rabble - amateurs elbowing their way into the publishing world. You may not know them, but they know you - your face, your manners, your prejudices, your conceits.
They're your readers. And, God help us, they've become the one thing we've always begged them to become...Engaged. The engaged reader in the world of cylinder presses and snail mail was much more manageable than the engaged reader in a wired world. Newspaper reporters and editors got their first glimpse of this not from bloggers, but from readers responding by e-mail.
Where once you could duke it out with a reader on the phone over the facts of story or slant of column, you now do so with pause when that reader is on e-mail. You've learned from experience that the e-mailing reader can turn around and send every word of your dustup to the mayor, the governor, the competing newspaper and your publisher. That reader is now his own publisher.
If that was disconcerting before, it is ever more so with blogs. Ask Nick Coleman, a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist, who has become a human shuttlecock batted across the Internet. He didn't like the withering critiques of his work by the amateurs at the Power Line blog (powerlineblog.com), so he fired back.
"These guys pretend to be family watchdogs but they are Rottweilers in sheep's clothing," wrote Coleman. "They attack the Mainstream Media for not being fair while pursuing a right-wing agenda cooked up in conservative think tanks funded by millionaire power brokers."
The bloggers strongly denied the implication that think tanks or millionaire power brokers were behind the content on their website, and demanded Coleman produce his evidence.
The Power Line bloggers aren't journalists. They're attorneys whose pedigrees include Dartmouth, Stanford and Harvard law. There is undeniable heft to their argument, so that to watch an exchange between the conservatives at Power Line and the lefty columnist at the Star Tribune is to watch an intellectual mismatch that is, frankly, embarrassing.
Likewise, Dan Rather thought he could stand down the bloggers. For 12 days he and CBS stonewalled on their now infamous scoop on George W. Bush's National Guard record. But with each day it became blindingly obvious that the story was constructed on myth.
The Power Line bloggers deserve and got much credit for becoming the information clearinghouse that ultimately exposed the fake memos behind the CBS story. But it was Charles Johnson on his blog Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com) who I believe ultimately sank the CBS anchor.
Johnson wasted no time in the days after the 60 Minutes broadcast producing an exact duplicate of the CBS memos using the default font on Microsoft Word. He then aligned copies of the so-called CBS original and his duplicate on his website, blinking them on and off alternately so the eye could see that everything - the font, the kerning, the leading, the superscript "th" - almost perfectly matched. CBS would have us believe three decades separated those two samples - one produced on a `70s-era typewriter and the other on a modern word processor. As was obvious to the eye, the charade was over.
To the CBS brain trust, Johnson's pulsing visual must have seemed the proverbial beating drum, drawing links from all corners of the Internet and demonstrating in utter simplicity that Dan Rather had been conned. In those days when Rather was still stonewalling, you had to marvel at the confidence of the bloggers. They knew what Dan did not - that he and his network would ultimately blink.
Here's what newspaper editors and writers should know about this new Internet phenomenon. Bloggers don't have much respect for you. You are the "legacy media," the MSM. You're the Roman Catholic Church to their Martin Luther and his new high-speed cable modem. To Hugh Hewitt (hughhewitt.com), the blogosphere's leading cheerleader and one of its most polished practitioners, you are Stalingrad in 1944. Your institutions are hollowed out and your walls are scorched.
But of course, Stalingrad held, didn't it. And that gets me to the second definition of bloggers. They are your light in the tunnel. The newspaper industry has known for a long time that eventually wood pulp would give way to microprocessors. That long-awaited paradigm shift now seems imminent. We may very soon be predominately an electronic medium and that has many print executives on edge.
Newspapers have enjoyed some of the biggest profit margins of any industry for decades and it is unclear if those can hold in a Web-based environment. Moreover, when you no longer need the millions of dollars in capital, the multi-million dollar press, the network of delivery people fanning out across the land, to start a newspaper, the door opens to competition.
If great gobs of capital will no longer separate you from that competition, what will? Information. Or rather, the quality of your information.
We are headed to the Web in a big way and our readers, especially our most engaged readers - the bloggers - are going with us. They are giving us a taste now of what our new environment will be like. They will challenge and cajole us to confront our biases and our mistakes. And if we don't confront them, they'll clean our clocks.
They'll be our competitors and our colleagues and they'll force us to dig deeper into issues, think harder about them. They'll show us how to coalesce expertise on a breaking story and drill deeper for the more complete truth. They're already teaching us today how to own up to our mistakes. You don't stonewall, as Dan Rather did. You fess up immediately and with full transparency. There's a lot of garbage on the blogosphere, but there is a high tier where the product is superior and is drawing mass readership. On those blogs, correcting error is part of the culture.
It has to be, explains mystery novelist and screenwriter Roger L. Simon on his blog rogerlsimon.com. "Bloggers - at least those with sizable audiences - are subject to more editing and fact-checking than virtually any mainstream media journalist....I have written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle - among others - and received nowhere near the amount of editing I get on here. I make a factual error on this blog, and I am often corrected within minutes."
If you listen closely, tuning in to the conversation beyond the oft-expressed contempt for mainstream media, you'll find the blogosphere actually needs mainstream media. We provide most of the coverage that's starts the conversation. And by carrying the conversation further than we do, the blogosphere makes mass media vital.
The bloggers are demanding better standards and less bias - not unreasonable demands given journalism's current track record. But they're also creating stimulating and often irresistible discussion around the news we produce. Journalism tomorrow, thanks to forces like the blogosphere, will grow more competitive. The best journalists will flourish. The mediocre will be exposed and washed out.
That's not something to lament. That's progress. We are living in the information age, when government and business are increasingly dependent on knowledge. It was inevitable that a knowledge-based culture would demand better, faster, more reliable information. We're about to provide it, even if we get bruised in the process.
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Two years ago Boas created a group blog for his newspaper called Plugged In, which features timely opinion from dozens of prominent and well-connected Arizonans. He can be reached at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
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