Jack Shafer - Slate
.....My friend Bill Powers dismisses our current infatuation with bloggers as a fad in his new National Journal column, "Why Blogs Are Like Tulips." Powers doesn't disparage these lowly but mighty scriveners, writing that their greatest attributes are bird-dogging factual errors in the press, speaking in a vernacular, and having fun. But he says they "don't have resources or, in most cases, the skills to do the heavy journalistic lifting that the big American outlets still do better than anyone, and will continue to do for a very long time."
"We're having a Dutch tulip moment with the bloggers. This, too, shall pass," he concludes.
But the unusually suave and erudite Powers boots it this time.
Newspaper reporters who barricade themselves behind doors manned by security guards and screen calls with Caller ID tend to lose contact with their readers—and more important, what their readers know. Blogs reconnect journalists with readers by reminding them how closely they're read outside the newsroom. I agree with Powers that most independent bloggers don't have the resources or skills for "heavy journalistic lifting," as he puts it. But what he misses, I think, is the fact that 1) the skills can be quickly learned by bright, well-read people; and 2) the Internet has leveled the resources playing field. Thanks to the Web and affordable databases, today's blogger has more information at his fingertips than the best investigative reporter at the Washington Post could acquire after a week's work at the Library of Congress.
Entrepreneur-loudmouth Mark Cuban, who owns the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, put it well in Blog Maverick this week. Reflecting on the Eason Jordan and Dan Rather sagas, he writes:
The bloggers are here, and they are ready to knock down the gates and get their pound of flesh. The traditional media has no idea what is about to hit them.
In every major conference, at every major speech, sitting at tables in restaurants, there is going to be a blogger or podcaster with microphone, PDA, Videophone, laptop or paper and pencil in hand. Listening. Taking notes. That information is going to be transmitted to and from a blog entry and placed in the hands of "the readers."
Unlike celebrities who hear or see the flash of the camera, the gatekeepers don't know they are there. Blogging in plain site. Questioning everything.
Cuban encourages the press to recognize and respect bloggers, which I think many journalists already do. I'd go one step further and encourage the press to use bloggers as stringers, as virtual assignment editors—and as even as reporters, if they're willing to apply to their work the sort of rigor we expect in good journalism.
The "citizen journalist" authors of blogs, much lauded in some corners, aren't going to automatically produce great news stories any more than the "citizen builders" who buy their tools and materials at Home Depot are going to design and build the next Fallingwater. But bloggers and other unpaid Web contributors are throwing down a matrix of valuable information—notes, historical connections, documentary material, opinion, scoops—that only the hidebound can afford to ignore.
Next time he's in Washington, I'm going to invite Powers over for dinner. The first course will be a tulip salad drenched in lemon castor oil.
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