I was thinking about the relationship change between the public and the media and how recently it has seemed that the public is more in touch with the media and with each other. I agree with this but there has always been the idea of horizontal journalism, person to person rather than big company down to the public, technology just propels it so that people can interact instantaneously with millions of others. Before blogs and sites like Twitter, newspapers used tools like man on the street (getting peoples' opinions on certain subjects), polls, letters to the editor, etc. The change is that now there are so many more channels to go through and they work immediately rather than waiting for a letter to be delivered or waiting for people to call in a response for a poll. The want for a two-way street is nothing new to the world of journalism, it has simply grown exponentially in recent years.
The thing is though, that no matter how many blogs there are on certain subjects, they are still more opinionated versions of the story. If I needed to get the facts on a story, the New York Times would win out over a blog. I see bloggers as the people who are there to challenge what the mainstream media says rather than taking everything they say as the whole truth. Though people are critical of what they read it is the bloggers who post their questions and concerns for the world to see. Maybe it is that I don't have enough experience with blogs, but who is there to hold the authors responsible for what they write? They do not have to be balanced, they don't even have to be completely true, from what I can tell. This is what worries me, and what leads people to the trust the public or trust the press question. I guess you have to look at everything with a critical eye.
It is clear that the popularity of blogs is rising, but the demand for hard news stories and investigative journalism will remain. The majority of blogs get their start from these main stream media outlets. I think that rather than a "death of all newspapers" as some people are predicting, we will instead see the continuation of the change in tone. The more conversational the language is, the more popular the article will be to readers.
A blog about Why We Need the New York Times in the Huffington Post
This may be a bit off topic, but while reading the first paragraph of your post I ran into a few things I thought I'd comment on.
ReplyDeleteFor me, technology and the web have finally allowed for TRUE horizontal journalism. Don't journalists get to choose who they poll for a "man on the street" segment? Isn't this in itself a kind of media censorship, that not every person on the street will be asked for his or her opinion (whereas almost every person on the street - in America, at least - could theoretically start a blog, even from a public computer at a library...)?
What about letters to editor? Don't the editors at the paper get to determine which letters get published and which do not? This doesn't seem like a truly horizontal or interactive form of audience participation in media to me -- instead, it looks more like editors deciding what public view they want to expose their readers to.
And, finally, polls generally only allow for a set number of answers, usually defined by the leadership at the newspaper. The audience member has to respond using a pre-determined, pre-worded answer, and there are a limited number of answers to choose from.
Granted, there are plenty of "faux-audience involvement" techniques like this also used on the web (for example, internet polls, and even Twitter limits users by forcing them to update with only 140 characters), but I feel like blogs, personal websites, comments on news stories, and the like finally open up a truly horizontal and mostly interactive kind of journalistic communication -- the kind that ultimately engages the audience in an open discussion that is not "moderated" by the big news media.
However, I totally agree with you about the role of bloggers in the larger news media landscape. I also think you make a solid point in arguing that bloggers exist mostly as a check on the major news media, much like the news media acts as a check on government. The hard part, in my opinion, is that most engaged audience members DO want to be a part of the discussion started by the mainstream news media, and outlets like polls and letters to the editor - old standbys of the print model of journalism - don't offer enough audience participation/interaction/horizontal connection as most people today desire.