In Good Company

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting entry on his blog about the popularity of blogging. Apparently, the Pew Foundation found that approximately 2% of internet users in the US blog, and 11% read blogs (and of those, about a third report that they have posted comments on at least one blog). [link] [link to Pew Internet & American Life Project]

Yglesias points out that based on the current population of the internet, blogging reaches a wider audience than cable news. Now granted, there are far more blogs than cable news outlets, so the blogging audience is much more widely diffused; as a result, it's premature to assume that blogging is a power that will displace the traditional media anytime soon. Nevertheless, it says something about the way in which blogging could someday change the way in which we interact with our media sources. Among other things, whereas journalism has been described as the rough draft of history, blogging has been likened to journalistic footnotes. Lest we miss the point, the ability to footnote history represents a democratizing of information akin to the advent of the printing press. In short, blogging shouldn't be lightly dismissed as a fad, yet.

In fact, in a weird way, there may be an analog to what blogging may ultimately do for journalism in what legitimate online music stores are currently doing for the music business. Let me explain: there was an article in today's Wall Street Journal (not accessible online, unfortunately) about how Apple's iTunes store and its competitors have started to offer exclusive material that is not, and is not likely to become, available from the major labels. For example, Beyonce's rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl became one of the most downloaded singles at the iTunes store, but no record label intends to, or easily could, sell it on a CD; as it turns out, even though electronic distribution of the song is cost-effective and profitable, the total number of consumers who have downloaded the song is far too small to justify the production and distribution costs of a CD single, let alone an entire CD.

The same could be said for the media -- there are stories that are just too nuanced to make it onto the 6 o'clock news, and so they don't get on. Now, that doesn't make them unimportant or any less significant than the stories that do make it onto the 6 o'clock news, it just means that they won't find an outlet there. Traditionally, that meant they didn't get reported. True, newspapers can take on some of the nuanced stories, but even newspapers are limited in this regard by the economics of running a newspaper -- a story that is too slow to develop, or seemingly too limited in scope, or too esoteric might not make the cut even if it is an important story.

And that's where blogging could have its biggest impact. To be sure, on paper, two million bloggers far outnumber the reporting muscle of any news-gathering organization (and probably, of all of them combined), but those bloggers' resources will never be focused full time on the news gathering process the way even a local newspaper can focus its resources to get the stories and print them. And so, it's unlikely that those bloggers could ever replace the traditional media, just as iTunes might never be able to replace a major record label's A&R and promotion capabilities. But where iTunes can provide new, and more importantly, complementary content cost-effectively, so too can blogs, whether they're focused on politics, entertainment or virtually any other subject, complement what the media puts out for consumption.

Significantly, there is evidence that the traditional media gets this -- perhaps most prominent is ABC News' "The Note" [link], which is a daily blog that pulls together vast quantities of reporting on politics into a single webpage. The subject matter is somewhat esoteric, and there's no way Peter Jennings is going to cover all of this, but now, thanks to blogging, we have access to information that complements the stories we see on World News Tonight. Other media outlets are beginning to blog in the same way. [This is not to suggest, by the way, that the blogging-as-journalism phenomenon should be limited to major media organizations' blogs, just that they're starting to see what I'm talking about, too.]

Of course, viewing blogging as a complement to journalism raises questions about old-school journalistic ethics, since bloggers aren't likely to be bound by top-down journalistic ethics codes. For a lively debate on this point, check out a point-counterpoint between the Columbia Journalism Review and the Daily Kos. [link] Kos describes the blogosphere as the Wild West, where the rules of ethics aren't worth a damn, and it's up to the readers to understand the ethics of the particular blogger and then vote with their feet (or mouseclick, as the case may be); in Kos's case, readers are presumed to know that Kos is both information source and advocate, and therefore, readers decide for themselves the value of reading Kos's posts.

CJR, not surprisingly, argues that bloggers like Kos are journalists whether they realize it or not, and that they ought to comport themselves as such. CJR notes that historically, newspapers adopted Kos's attitude as well (if readers don't like what we print, they'll stop reading), but then came around to the "modern" point of view:

[M]ost newspapers recognized that it was by agreeing to uphold certain basic ethical standards that they won for themselves the right to play a major role in the national debate -- the right, in short, to be taken seriously. That was a tradeoff they were more than willing to make.

For what it's worth, I think that CJR's view is as idealistic as Kos's is naive (think about how objective the New York Post or the Washington Times are, or, for that matter, Fox News), but both have some merit. Kos is right -- bloggers won't bother themselves with journalistic ethics in the traditional sense, and readers will vote with their feet, so the harm to be done is minimized. At the same time, bloggers should be expected to document, to the best of their abilities, the sources that they rely on in making a statement, and should be expected to distinguish, either explicitly or through context, fact from opinion. This feature of blogging is what drew me to it in the first place -- it was an opportunity first, to share what I know (not much, but what I do know is somewhat specialized), and second, to add my voice to the great American conversation.

For most bloggers, it isn't a problem to separate fact from opinion -- 95% of what I post is solidly in the opinion category, and when it's not, I try to post corroborating links. And if I miss now and then, and misstate a fact, it's not the end of the world. If I can do it, most bloggers, particularly the prominent ones, can easily be held to this standard; it's not all that hard.

And that's a fact.