I really can't stand the whole "newspapers will be replaced by blogging" meme.
Then again, the Washington Post runs articles that start like this:
Almost every morning for a decade, Roger Bratter has stopped at a Starbucks in Gaithersburg to sip a grande latte sans foam or a green tea and spend 20 peaceful minutes with the newspaper before heading to his auto repair shop.
Grabbing a cup at home, he said, just isn't the same.
Wow. This is the newspaper that broke Watergate. And this was particular article was on the homepage earlier today.
(The rest of this article was about The Starbucks Effect, how we spend so much time commuting in the DC Metro region, and how a lot of that time is spent stopping by for coffee for the long commute.)
In other news, Aaron reported how his interview with the Y Combinator folks went. Gee, which is more newsworthy?
Detection Problem
chaoticset on 2005-04-19T03:58:31
If there were still journalists instead of people with pretty haircuts, some poor newspaper out there might actually uncover
news.
Fortunately, modern humans are on the whole unaccustomed to reading it, and will immediately flip the page before something new enters their mind.
Blogs, News
pudge on 2005-04-20T16:48:31
Let someone with a degree in communication, with an emphasis in journalism, reach back into his Comm. Theory class
...
;-)
What we are talking about here are taking labels that exist merely for convenience. I call these things on my feet "shoes." But you call them "sandals." The question is simply, does my calling it shoes adequately convey the salient information about what is on my feet when listeners hear the word?
If so, then it is valid to call it shoes. If not, it is not.
And it is for this reason that I think it is obvious that in the general case, blogs are not news, and bloggers are not reporters.
We could discuss the actual similarities and differences, but it seems to me self-evident that when someone hears "I read in the news that
..." they think of something substantively different than "Some guy in his pajamas wrote on his personal web site that
..."
Or, to put it in a less accurate, but more concrete and humorous fashion:
Mom, I find it interesting that you call The Weekly World News "the paper." A paper contains facts.
This paper contains facts. "Pregnant man gives birth." That's a fact.
People are taking a label that exists for convenience and making it less convenient -- broadening its meaning -- in order to lend credibility to themselves. We see this a lot, in various forms. Sometimes it is not broadening a label's meaning, but creating a new one, such as we see often in "political correctness," where a garbageman becomes a waste disposal technician.
But in the end, using this method of broadening meanings doesn't lend credibility, at least not for the long term, because the credibility is tied to the meaning, not the label. Once the audience assimilates the new meaning, it will carry with it all the credibility that new meaning mandates, and if these new kinds of "reporters" don't live up to the standard of the old meaning, it will bring down the credibility of the meaning for everyone called a "reporter," which is the big reason why reporters and the news business mostly react negatively toward the re-definition of the labels.
