And reporters can certainly interview people on TV in a way that elicits the full story from the interviewee rather than starting to debate the interviewee as soon as he says something inconsistent with the reporter's bias. Active listening comes more easily to some than to others, but it's a skill that can be learned by everyone who wants it.
Is that all it takes to be a reporter? I believe even I could do that. <g>
I haven't given up on professional journalism as the standard.
Who do you think meets that standard? Tim Russert is often praised as one who does. But check this out.
Russert Bias? Those who suspect a liberal bias might want to carefully check this week's Meet the Press transcript. Tim Russert interviewed Senators Sam Brownback (R, KA) and Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) on the nomination of Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Russert interupted Brownback's defense of Pickering with tough questions several times, while allowing Feinstein to speak without interruption. Instead of questioning her as he did Brownback, Russert read her a Washington Post editorial and allowed her to respond. A 10-9 committee vote against Pickering seems likely; what happens after that is unclear. The two Senators also represented the different Senate views on cloning.
punditwatch.blogspot.com
I picked up The News About the News by Downie and Kaiser. Yawn. Same old tired cant. They give short shrift to the net. Drudge is dismissed as "an online chat room gadfly" although they give him credit for sending millions of viewers to their (The Washington Post) website. The only other news websites mentioned are Slate and Salon. They forgot to mention WorldNetDaily, a site that actually makes money and does a little original reporting. And they completely ignore, or maybe they're unaware of the weblog phenomenon. Drudge was right when he said in his speech at the National Press Club a few years ago, "in a few years we'll all be reporters."
February 23, 2002
'Bloggers' emerge from internet underground
Sept. 11 the catalyst
James Cowan
National Post
On Sept. 11, when the world's lenses were focused on New York City, Dave Winer's Scripting News Web site (www.script ing.com) joined the fray. If Winer's site had been a news site, such as Slate.com or Salon, this would not have been unusual, but Scripting News is dedicated to discussing the intricacies of Web programming.
On Sept. 11, however, there was no appetite for debating the merits of Web scripting tools, nor for discussion of Microsoft's questionable business practices. Instead, Winer posted news updates, first-person reports from the streets of New York and links to articles about everything from the history of the World Trade Center to a discussion of the knives the terrorists used.
Interspersed between these messages and articles were Winer's own comments as he worried about his father, who was in Manhattan. "My dad is OK," Winer finally told his readers. "Just talked with him on the phone. He was in Grand Central Station when the subways shut down."
If you reread Winer's postings from that day, you discover they have as much immediacy and depth as anything produced by the mainstream media. In fact, because of their do-it-yourself, varnish-free prose, they have more.
The content on Winer's site may have been exceptional on Sept. 11, but its format was not. Scripting News is a Web log, or "blog" for short -- a personal journal posted on the Web for public perusal -- and each day he posts his own observations, links to new articles and tips from readers, all relating to building better tools for Web programmers.
Other blogs are like traditional diaries, offering regular updates on the writer's (blogger's) life. Still others are guided tours of the Web, offering links to noteworthy stories, sites and even other blogs.
The first blog was created in 1992 by a computer programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research to track the development of the nascent Web, but blogs remained a burbling undercurrent until the software needed to create them became user-friendly.
Now, anyone with a home computer and Internet connection can visit blogger.com or blog spot.com, and as easily as they would send an e-mail, they can set up a blog of their own in about 15 minutes.
If improved technology created the opportunity for a blog-explosion, it was Sept. 11 that created the desire for one. "A huge burst of growth came out of September 11th," said Winer from his Silicon Valley office. "When there's just an incredible amount of information available and people are so hungry for that information, then to have a great distribution system in place is in our national interest. September 11th was an incredible day for amateur journalism."
Indeed, since Sept. 11, the number of new blogs has grown at an exponential rate, with 41,000 new ones created at blogger.com in January alone. Conservative estimates suggest there are now 500,000 on the Web in total. "After Sept. 11, a lot of bloggers couldn't leave their computers for a few weeks," wrote journalist Ken Layne on his blog (www.kenlayne.com), "and many new blogs were born. With so much news, it's good to have smart people acting as filters."
But with so many bloggers blogging, there are, of course, wild fluctuations in the quality of the posts and the writing. Many blogs offer little more than a mundane account of their blogger's daily life, or out-of-focus digital photographs of their cats. But there is gold amongst the dross. As David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, said in a commentary for National Public Radio: "The most visible Web loggers, those with most visits and the most links to their sites, are reaching thousands of people each day. Their sites tend to combine the writing talent and insight of real world columnists with the Web's informality."
For a writer, a blog's appeal is easy to see. They get to write about what they want, when they want, without interference from pesky editors or publishers. Consequently, many professional journalists, such as former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com) and Slate.com columnist Mickey Kaus (www.kausfiles.com), have turned to blogs as another venue for their writing. Journalist Matt Drudge, on the other hand, gained fame solely through his Web log, the Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com), when he broke the Lewinsky scandal.
Now, however, corporate news companies and not just their writers are launching blogs and bringing them into the media mainstream. The National Review recently began publishing staff blogs on its site (www.nationalre view.com) and this past week, Fox News unveiled a Web Log of its own, while Salon.com announced plans to reprint content from the Spinsanity.com blog site.
Fox's inaugural column, published on Tuesday, is written by Layne and described by Fox as "a tour of the Net guided by a pilot you will come to know over time." In his first Fox column, Layne links to stories from The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard and his personal blog, while offering chatty commentary on "the sleazy Winter Olympics" and "nut sandwiches like bin Laden." The blog is an interesting mix of the standard news of the week (cloned kittens, Mike Tyson) and the strange (a Web page announcing Olympian Michelle Kwan as the official spokeswoman for Star Skater Barbie). The only real difference between the Fox site and the hundreds of other news blogs is the corporate brand name.
Fox's new venture is an attempt to develop a loyal readership. "I was surprised when FoxNews wanted actual blogs as part of its site," Layne said in an e-mail interview from his home in Los Angeles, "because commercial news sites want to keep the readers there and blogs encourage people to leave [by linking to outside pages]. But good blogs become habits, and the voice of the writer ends up being important as the interesting or timely links. So maybe a bunch of blog readers check out FoxNews for the first time and maybe they come back for other stuff."
While FoxNews experiments with blogging, the blogs themselves have begun to compete with the traditional media's reporting on certain issues, such as technology. "If you want information about a certain [computer] product, you'll find it on a Web log," Winer said. "You won't find it in a 600-word review in The Los Angeles Times. The newspaper will skim the surface and tell you a little bit about what the product does but will probably skip the details. And PC magazines are even worse because they take ads from the companies and that influences the editorial."
As it stands, it's doubtful that personal blogs will supplant newspapers anytime soon. "There could be no blogs without full-time reporters collecting news and full-time editors putting out papers," Layne said."One valid criticism of bloggers is that they sometimes just link back and forth to each other. Remove the actual journalism from the Web and you've got a couple of hundred thousand people talking about nothing."
That said, Layne does not deny that blogs are influencing the news business. "Matt Drudge is really the father of news-blogging," Layne said, "and his effect on news sites is gigantic. The new book by The Washington Post writers [The News About the News by Leonard Downie and Robert G. Kaiser], acknowledges that Drudge is responsible for a huge chunk of washington post.com's traffic. That's what the bloggers really do: Point people to good stories and tear apart dumb stories."
Furthermore, Layne hopes more newspaper columnists might learn something from bloggers' attitudes. "U.S. papers are so damned dry," he said. "I mean, who picks up the paper and says, 'I wonder what the Pentagon reporter has to say this morning.' The good bloggers are not much different from old-time newspaper columnists. They have a style, they have a personal connection with readers, they don't seem like factory-made op-ed writers. Maybe newspapers will inject some of this first- person style into the news columns. What I hope news sites learn from blogs is that personality matters."
nationalpost.com |
