A group of bloggers, mostly centered around the right-wing blogs which brought down the CBS in the Memo-Gate - but supposedly they’ll cover all political wings, have launched a new media group called Open Source Media (formerly: Pajamas Media), which will try to leverage the thousands of bloggers around the globe to act as journalists instead of paid experts and professional journalists. Kinda like a Wikipedia of news.
Relying on hundreds or thousands of bloggers around the globe they claim they can be out faster with the news - and, due to the larger numbers of fact checkers, that they can be more accurate as well.
It’s no secret that I look upon the idea, just like I look upon Wikipedia, with very favourable eyes - in that it has a promise to do just what the Internet does best: cutting out the middle man, extending democracy. Power to the people!
What will the future be like for this initiative? Of no consequence whatsoever - already forgotten. Bigger than the last great news-revolution, the CNN. It’s the future of news?
I think the point is that “open source” generally refers to copyrighted content that’s released under a license that allows the audience to reuse, build upon, extend, or redistribute that content. Doesn’t look like they’re doing that here.
Well that’s more sour grapes than anything else. I don’t mean that anything in there is inaccurate, just that the purpose of that post is not any concern for the writers or potential advertisers or investors, it is to settle a score. The author pretty much says so. He also says that it could have been a great business had he been kept on, so I guess it doesn’t really refute the OP.
I wonder how they plan to get statements from the people who are making decisions, though. Real journalists do that because they have access because they are professionals. With no barriers to entry, bloggers can never expect their prestige to increase. They will never be someone Scooter Libby talks to, because they will always be one of thousands. Even the popular ones will only be popular long enough for someone to imitate their marketing plan. The New York Times circulation may be dwindling, but it will still be significant in 20 years. They not only have reporters talking to Libby, they have a reporter there when the president makes a statement publicly. The bloggers comment on what the journalists do.
Since it’s basically a right-wing outfit, I don’t foresee big problems for them in this respect.
No, they get access because they’ve got readership or viewership, and if you’re essentially calling up on behalf of a large number of readers, high officials see less profit in blowing you off.
Although it depends on what sorts of officials you mean. If you’re not talking about, say, executive-branch officials whose appointment needs approval by Congress, you’d be surprised who you can get on the phone just by calling. And when you’re calling a few levels below the big political honchos, you’re more likely to talk to people who actually know stuff - especially in this administration.
Some bloggers do in fact do original reporting. Josh Marshall started off as a reporter, and he continues to do investigative reporting. AmericaBlog paid a stringer in the immediate aftermath of Katrina to go to New Orleans and see for himself what was happening. When one of the bloggers at Firedoglake (can’t remember if it was Jane Hamsher or Reddhedd) wanted to know some facts about the grand jury investigation into PlameGate, she called up the courthouse and asked. While the rest of the world was speculating whether the PlameGate grand jury was a regular or a special grand jury (i.e. could it be extended some more or not), she was able to report that it was the regular kind.
Bloggers who do reporting will always be the exception among bloggers, but I expect bloggers who do reporting will become a nontrivial component of the set of people doing reporting over the next few years.
That’s like saying there will never be any famous basketball players, because millions of people play basketball.
There’s no reason why some blogs won’t become so well-read that if they start reporting on stories and call up “senior Administration officials” for comment, they’ll get their calls returned. Not that that’s really the essence of reporting, anyway.
There seems to be only one marketing plan for a blog to become successful: write intelligent, interesting posts, and post fairly frequently - then have whatever stroke of good luck it takes to have been the go-to blog on a big story before it’s the story everyone’s following. People started reading AmericaBlog in large numbers because it was on top of the Gannon/Guckert story from the beginning, and now it’s one of the top blogs because it continues to be worth reading. Similarly with Firedoglake and PlameGate. (Expertise also helps: for instance, ReddHedd at Firedoglake is a former prosecutor.)
The NYT will still be a player in 20 years, sure. But a community blog like DailyKos could already probably cover the White House continuously with a rotating group of volunteer reporter/bloggers if they wanted to. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see this happen at some point - if not with DailyKos, then with some other large blog.
But talking to Libby or Rove isn’t really that important. Rove and Libby played the reporters, not the other way around. There are plenty of stories out there, buried in Federal reports and data, or in the wording of legislation. These are stories that anyone with a brain and a computer can do original reporting on. And if they stake out a particular beat where they become knowledgeable, they’ll get their calls returned - not by the House Majority Whip or the Undersecretary of Commerce, but by the Congressional aide or the GS-14 who can help the reporter make sense of the story. Then the reported can call the majority whip’s office or the undersecretary’s office, get no comment, and web-publish the story.
I think reporting’s about to get a lot more democratic.