PressThink: Nick Lemann's Amateur Hour

Nick Lemann's Amateur Hour

I’d like to personally welcome Nick to the idea that blogging revives a pattern several centuries deep. I joined up in August 2003 with the Introduction to PressThink, my first post. "The people who will invent the next press in America—and who are doing it now online—continue an experiment at least 250 years old. It has a powerful social history."

Nicholas Lemann is a colleague, someone I’ve had lunch with, the Dean of the Columbia J-School, and the Wayward Press press columnist for the New Yorker. I am a fan of his writing, especially his profiles of political figures, and have followed his work since well before he got into teaching journalism or took on the press beat. I also admired his intervention at a critical moment to stablilize Washington Monthly magazine, an important institution in political journalism and today the online home of Kevin Drum.

I thought Lemann was an inspired choice for Dean at Columbia; there is no doubt that he is the key person in the future of that school, which makes him also a leading figure in the press establishment. The column he writes for the New Yorker was inherited from the great A.J. Liebling, a god to most press critics. What Lemann says matters, at least in my world and in PressThink’s. He represents one of the best claims elite journalism has to all around excellence. Plus, it’s his generation in charge during the great upheaval in platforms, and the game-changing Administration of George W. Bush. That’s gotta be tough.

In his recent critique, Amateur Hour, which is subtitled, “Journalism without journalists,” Lemann said a great many things I agreed with. I am quoted in the piece, and New Assignment.Net is described briefly.

About Net journalism: “It ought to raise suspicion that we so often hear the same menu of examples in support of its achievements.” It’s Trent Lott. It’s the big man, Dan Rather. It’s Eason Jordan. I’m suspicious of that menu too. And there’s this: “It sounds obvious, but reporting requires reporters. They don’t have to be priests or gatekeepers or even paid professionals; they just have to go out and do the work.” Exactly. I based New Assignment.Net on that idea.

Lemann, I think, was right to ask: “what has citizen journalism actually brought us?” When he warns, “there is not much relation between claims for the possibilities inherent in journalist-free journalism and what the people engaged in that pursuit are actually producing,” that is an apt warning. And he’s right to wonder: Does any of it compare to what the “old” press, even in its weakened form, does?

Yes, let’s compare, said Debbie Galant of Baristanet, whose site was unfairly trivialized.

My NYU colleague, the Net writer Steven Johnson, said most of what I wanted to say in reply to Lemann’s Amateur Hour. His Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism puts it more crisply than I did in Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over (Jan. 15, 2005), which he kindly mentions. Let’s stipulate…

1.) Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should.
2.) Bloggers will grow increasingly adept at covering certain kinds of news events, but not all. They will play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of all kinds of news.

3.) The majority of bloggers won’t be concerned with traditional news at all.

4.) Professional, edited journalism will have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than blogging; examples of sloppy, offensive, factually incorrect, or tedious writing will be abundant in the blogosphere. But diamonds in that rough will be abundant as well.

5.) Blogs — like all modes of contemporary media — are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus.

I join fully in Steven’s proposal: “If you’re writing an article or a blog post about this issue, and your argument revolves around one or more of these points — and doesn’t add anything else of substance — stop writing. Pick a new topic. Move on. There’s nothing to see here.”

But I don’t think it will do any good. I made those points in lengthy inteviews with Trevor Butterworth of the Financial Times (“Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion?”) and Ryan Blitstein of SF Weekly, who wrote about Craigslist (“The much-loved Web site is taking millions from Bay Area newspapers and causing layoffs that adversely affect coverage. And its founder’s well-intentioned support of citizen journalism has a slim chance of fixing the problem.”)

Both were on a mission to debunk the extravagant claims being made for the Net and new media. They interviewed me hoping I would make some of those claims. When I didn’t they just pretended the interview never happened; I don’t appear in either piece. Blitstein, whose article on Craig Newmark ran seven pages, did write to me to tell me my quotes got cut out. Butterworth (who published 4,500 words) told me I had nothing insightful to say and didn’t deserve to be in his article.

About Johnson’s No. 5, “…not historically unique,” I’d like to personally welcome Nick Lemann to the idea that blogging revives a publishing spirit that goes back several centuries. I joined up in August 2003 with the Introduction to PressThink, my very first post. “The people who will invent the next press in America—and who are doing it now online—continue an experiment at least 250 years old,” I wrote, invoking the pamphleteers and Tom Paine.

Invoking the pamphleteers and Tom Paine, Lemann goes back further than I did, another 50 years or so, to Addison, Steele and Daniel Defoe, the Late Stuart period in England when new voices “entered a public conversation that had been narrowly restricted, mainly to holders of official positions in church and state. They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day. Then as now, the new media in their fresh youth produced a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style.”

These are important comparisons. They help. “The more ambitious blogs, taken together, function as a form of fast-moving, densely cross-referential pamphleteering—- an open forum for every conceivable opinion that can’t make its way into the big media.”

In this sense it’s blogging that’s “traditional” and professionalized reporting that’s a rupture in pattern. (Which is an excellent point.) Lemann wants to preserve the reporter’s tradition, “by which a member of a distinct occupational category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography and class, to go where important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt and impertinent questions, and to report back, reliably and in plain language, to a general audience.”

I think that’s worth preserving too. So does ex-CNNer and Global Voices blogger Rebecca MacKinnon. She thinks Lemann may have ignored all the bloggers who agree because he was reacting to his encounters with Hugh Hewitt, who does say about the press establishment things like, “They cannot save themselves from irrelevance.” Though he is the closest thing we have to an avowed blog triumphalist, Hewitt isn’t mentioned at all. His triumpet is heard, however. A lot.

Mitch Ratcliffe thinks Lemann is mostly on the mark. “Yes, it’s easier to publish today,” he points out. “It was also easier at every point in history when a new technology for disseminating information has been introduced.”

The most recent example before the blog was the Web page, and prior to that desktop publishing “revolutionized” communication, giving everyone the power to layout a page without the extraordinary hassle of using wax to hold design elements in place on a board that could be photographed for use in a press. If we acknowledge that all of this is progress instead of declaring every new thing a revolution, we might actually make some solid progress as a species instead of insisting that all the old lessons aren’t of any value anymore.

That’s useful. But I don’t understand why we can’t have a picture with a lot of continuity in it and some genuine moments of rupture. How’s about one degree of complexity in this debate? Why does it have to be the newsroom reactionary’s “there nothing new under the sun…” or the Net revolutionary’s “…there’s never been anything like it?”

I try to stay away from these extremes but journalists don’t seem to want that. They prefer what Lemann terms “the most soaring rhetoric about supplanting traditional news organizations.” It’s the extreme claim that interests them. If they don’t have speakers to quote they just go without.

Look at how Lemann begins, “On the Internet, everyone is a millenarian.” Really? Here’s PressThink on it, October 17, 2003: “The weblog is continuous—not a revolutionary break—with five hundred years of print culture. It is the printed page, modernized, interconnected, made two-way, but still… ‘powered by movable type.’” (See Ten Things Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism.)

Here’s Ratcliffe this week:

I want us to think and debate as a society, and citizen journalism, especially when it learns from the standards of professional journalism, can help us do that. The more voices the better, but let’s set up the expectation that participation must be informed and rigorous in its self-criticism.

Here’s what I wrote March 25, 2004.

My own feeling is that amateur journalists, citizens, webloggers should take seriously the existing standard in the institutional press. They should understand what goes into meeting it, and even emulate professional journalism from time to time…

I was trying to set a high bar in 2004, just as I was stressing continuity with tradition in 2003, and attempting not to overdraw the claims for blogging in 2005. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Lemann’s piece is about journalism without journalists, a dubious development, he thinks. NewAssignment.Net is mentioned, which is good, but somehow he fails to mention that New Assigmment is not about “journalism without journalists” at all. It’s more the opposite: bring full-time reporters into productive alignment with smart mobs of citizens.

“I like Jay Rosen’s idea of NewAssignment.net, a swarm financing mechanism for citizen journalism,” says Ratcliffe, wrapping up.

But I think it is destined to fail for precisely the reason that it is aiming to do “stories the regular news media doesn’t do, can’t do, wouldn’t do, or already screwed up.” Why will that fail? Because the many people funding reportage are unlikely to agree on what is the “correct version” of facts and, so, are not likely to hang together to support the really hard tedious work of journalists, which has almost no flavor of immediate gratification.

Actually, the more who think it will fail, the better for New Assignment. So thanks, Mitch! Thanks also to Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher, who said about New Assignment, “This is not a solution for creating news on a daily, hourly, minute schedule. This is overly complex, it is news editing by committee, and the funders will likely always have agendas.”

Nick Lemann’s article will help if it lowers expectations for “amateur hour.” For I don’t think we know how to do users-know-more-than-we-do journalism… yet. My favorite moment was when he wrote: “Great citizen journalism is like the imagined Northwest Passage—it has to exist in order to prove that citizens can learn about public life without the mediation of professionals.”

That really made me smile.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

Jeff Jarvis: “I’m sorely disappointed…”

I would have hoped for something more expansive, imaginative, open, creative, generous, constructive, strategic, and hopeful from the head of one of America’s leading journalism schools — from, indeed, the man hired to bring that school into the future — and from a leading light of American reporting.

Lemann wrote, “As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.” Jeff says: Okay, how? Then answers his own question in a second post, Bigger, better journalism.

And don’t miss this comment at Buzzmachine: “I am a traditional and occasionally paid journalist who is a traditional professor who traditionally scorned the non-traditional world of blogs. Until I read them. And I mean read them so recently that my embarrassment requires me to use a pseudonym.” There is more truth in it than in fifty articles on bloggersandjournalists.

More reaction to Lemann’s “Amateur Hour.”

John Temple, editor of the Rocky Mountain News, writes the best piece yet. “I’m concerned that Lemann inflates what citizen journalists are in order to more effectively knock down the phenomenon.” Precisely. “It’s easy to look down on the promise of new technologies or approaches. I think we’d do better as journalists to explore the potential of the Internet and of citizen involvement in news gathering, if only because we may have no other choice, given the economic trends washing over our industry.”

Chris Nolan at Spot-On: “BlogHer and the rise of the ‘citizen journalist’ are examples of the broadening use of the Internet for a variety of purposes and their cumulative effect on the network is to make established authorities less important. Many of those established authorities - be they tech geeks or Columbia professors - are shocked to find out that they do not matter.”

Glenn Reynolds: “Despite claims to the contrary, I haven’t argued that blogs will replace traditional journalism.” Indeed, that whole charge is basically fiction. See Reynolds from 2004 battling the same charge.

Robert Cox: “What jumps out at me in reading his piece, is that Lemann is in such a great position to be a force for good in the development of citizen journalism and instead uses his bully pulpit to find fault and tear down. It is a testament to the potential for small-mindedness among those entrusted with a great responsibility, serving as Dean for one of the leading journalism schools in the world.”

Nick Lemann’s profile of blogger Hugh Hewitt is not online. But here’s a pdf of it that Hugh posted. Hewitt in the Weekly Standard, The Media’s Ancien Régime. Subtitled, “Columbia Journalism School tries to save the old order.” Then see Chris Nolan, You Can’t Get There From Here on the exchange between Lemann and Hewitt.

Trevor Butterworth, author of the hype-busting article on blogging to top all hype-busting articles on blogging (it’s called Time for the last post and it’s from the Financial Times) takes issue with me over at Romenesko’s Letters. He says I have a persecution complex. I say Butterworth had his story and stuck to it. Enjoy. And here’s another exchange if you’re interested.

Daniel Conover in the comments: “Blogs aren’t changing journalism — they’re changing the context in which journalism occurs.”

Lessig gave the keynote address at the AEJMC convention in San Francisco. He called the changed context “read write culture.” Previously we had “read only” conditions, a very different context in which to be a professional journalist. (Ethan Zuckerman has a summary of Lessig’s talk to Wikimania, which sounds like it was the same talk.)

That’s what this whole thing is about. Journalists act out their anxieties about the change Lessig named by denying that they’re about to be replaced by bloggers or amateurs. No one said they were. But there’s nothing we can do to stop them. Just as there was nothing I could do to dissuade Trevor Butterworth from fulfilling his wish, and calling it reporting.

Lemann: none of what’s called citizen journalism “rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum.” Andrew Cline concludes his reply this way:

Is citizen journalism where it wants to be? First you have to ask: Where does it want to be; what is the goal? And that’s premature because we’re all still trying to figure out what’s possible.
I sympathize with Lemann to the extent that some voices in the blogosphere are less than temperate (and less than intelligent) critics of journalism. And, yes, those of us interested in this medium are filled with enthusiasm for its potential (although we don’t really know what that is yet).

Come to think of it, being an addendum sounds pretty good for this early stage. It opens the possibility of partnerships between professionals and amateurs—something that’s already occurring, something that may lead to improvement of both the professional and amateur product.

Confused of Calcutta, a blog new to me, says it’s all about the changing terms of trust.

Trust used to be something that bound small groups together. Over time we tried to scale trust. It didn’t scale. And what happened instead was Big Everything. In an Assembly-Line meets Broadcast world. Big Everything broke trust. Big Media lied. Big Content Producer reduced our choices. Big Pipe and Big Device reduced it further. Big Firm wrongsized away. And Big Government did what it liked.

The anxiety in Big Journalism: Will we still be trusted when the shift to the Web is complete?

Craig Newmark: What I’m doing regarding journalism and why. Craig explains his various projects, including Daylife, “which is the effort by Jeff Jarvis and Upendra Shardanand to figure out new ways to aggregate new and present the better trusted versions of big stories.”

Margaret Simons, who is kind of the Tim Porter of Australia, says that NewAssignment.Net “relies on the insight that journalism and media are not the same thing. Media is the business of delivering eyeballs to advertisers. Journalism is enmeshed with and supported by the media, but has an older and more important purpose.”

When it comes to commissioning in-depth research, what will people want to know about? My guess is that the internal machinations between Howard and Costello won’t attract much funding. Politics as spectator sport won’t get there. Politics as the issues that affect people’s lives may well do so. Another question is whether the market in Australia is big enough to support a local equivalent of Rosen’s idea.

A possible New Assignment story? (From Tom Evslin.)

Karl Martino: Blogging, networked journalism, business models, contrasts.

New Assignment in proto form (from chartreuse):

I’m putting up $1000.00 of my own cash to send 2 people to New Orleans and the Gulf Region for a weekend to find out what’s really going on.
I’m going to supply you with a cool ass video/camera, a place to stay and a rental car.

Look at it as a vacation that matters.

See the follow-up post, which reports on responses. Very interesting.

Two posts (this one and that one) compare what I’m doing to Richard Stallman and his campaign for Free Software, which begat Eric Raymond’s campaign for Open Source software. Here’s an interview with Stallman and one with Raymond by journalist Richard Poynder, who also interviewed me in the same series.

Uh-oh… “The web is of course abuzz with speculation that the future of news is in not-for-profit NewAssignment, and the BBC remains shielded from commercial reality for at least another decade.” (Seamus McCauley at Virtual Economics)

Malcolm Gladwell: “When it comes to politics—and to some extent high culture and business and economics—it is quite right to argue that traditional print media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal continue to set the conversational agenda.

Posted by Jay Rosen at August 4, 2006 1:33 AM Print

The People Formerly Known as the Audience: "You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." More...

Migration Point for the Press Tribe: "Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable." More...

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?" "It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?'" More...

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...

Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

I can see the excitement among the supporters of this idea.

Perhaps, though, it's one of those things I don't get.

What would be the difference in result between this type of new journalism and current journalism responding fully to citizen input?

Example: The NYT International ran an article on The Demise of THEL, an anti-missile laser weapon system. It is sitting in a hangar someplace costing a mill a year for maintenance and can't possibly be deployed.
We will presume--against evidence, this being the NYT--that the story is roughly true.

However, would it have been better journalism to note that the follow-on system, SKYGUARD, seems to be pretty good?

Suppose--tough supposin', this being the NYT--that a citizen who knew more than the reporter about this called the paper and explained the situation and the paper immediately expanded the end of the original article to include SKYGUARD?

What would be the effective difference in result) between this kind of activity and the proposal for citizen journalism Jay is pitching?

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at August 4, 2006 10:53 AM | Permalink

By dwelling on the Hewitts and the social and political bloggers of the day, we're missing what I believe is the "new" of the blogosphere. I think you have to get to the local level to see what's really taking place -- a community of self publishers redefining what's news.

It's not about the powerful or threats to established power. It's simply everyday people, weary of failed institutions, talking to and with each other in attempts to improve their lives and the lives of people around them. It's as bottom-up as it gets, and I don't think lofty commentaries about journalism will ever understand that.

In Nashville, for example, the online community (and that's what it is) is expanding offline, and the centerpiece is a little barbecue place called Mothership. It's run by a blogger and its clientele is largely bloggers. The loose organization that is the online community is slowly developing as a postmodern "anti-institution," and it is fascinating to observe.

These folks don't give a crap if people like Nicholas Lemann acknowledge them or not. They have long given up and are happy to live within their own definitions of news and information. So and so's dog died. Who spotted who at Mothership? Who has joined the community and who has departed? And who ARE these people anyway?

Along the way, they comment about "the news" and rail against the institutions, but that's what people in a community do. What I fear many observers miss is that this type of news is VERY important to people -- moreso, perhaps, than that over which we obsess. This is the real revolution in journalism that's taking place at the local level. It's growing and, I believe, will change things forever.

And I think we need to be paying attention instead of dwelling on the A-list and all that. While I certainly think the comparison to pamphleteers is valid (up to a point), it misses the mark by assuming that the news mission of the blogosphere is the same as that of institutional journalism. This is where I disagree, and it's why I think we still have a lot more listening to do.

The blogosphere isn't a place of competition for the mainstream; it's a new addition, and one that's constantly broadening the scope of what we call news.

Posted by: Terry Heaton at August 4, 2006 11:43 AM | Permalink

People blind themselves with labels. The problem with a label is that it pretends to be a description, and is, in essence, the end of an understanding. By saying "bloggers," people are forgetting that they are talking about the People, as in "We, the." And the reason that "Bloggers" are being discussed so much in the News is that they are a force. WE are a force. We, the People. As opposed to They, the Entrenched Corporate-Sponsored Semi-News. Had They stuck to their original purpose and agenda—to report to We, the People on Those That Govern Us, and ALL that is fit to print, We the People would still be, primarily, We the Readers.

Let Them talk, let Them minimize, let Them postulate, let Them pontificate, let Them continue to try and hypnotize, mesmerize, and analyze. I'm sure it is fun for them, and something of a habit.

Meanwhile, We will move and think and speak and organize with passion, and unfettered by fear or fiscal agenda. Time will tell where the power lies.

There will always be a crowd submerged deeply in the Party Line, which the traditional outlets seem to be so good at delivering. They need have no fear. For the toothless, there will be Zweibach. Supply and Demand.

It's just that many of lately are feeling the bite of oppression, and we want to bite back.

Posted by: Nezua Limon Xolaquinta-Jonez at August 4, 2006 1:21 PM | Permalink

Good example Aubrey! Good example Heaton!

When we think about it clearly, we realize that mainstream journalism itself has always been the product of combined work by professionals (those paid to produce journalism) and amateurs (those who contribute to the end-product for free).

In the MSM tradition, the amateur contribution has typically been to provide unremunerated information, insight, analysis or perspective to the reporter. The reporter-as-gatekeeper interviews the participant or the eyewitness or the expert in the field to understand the story. The reporter assumes that the source’s reward is non-financial -- personal flattery at having been paid attention to, civic pride at having contributed to a better understanding, or professional or ideological gain at having one’s own point of view supported and authenticated.

(The expectation of such non-financial payment is exemplified in Professor Rosen’s understandable resentment that he freely offered his wisdom to the professional reporter at Financial Times only to find his unpaid labor disdained and discarded)

The journalistic medium of the blog is defined by two additional tools unavailable to traditional mainstream media: links and comments. These two tools allow the rigid gatekeeper relationship between professional and amateur to be loosened and recalibrated.

In Aubrey’s example, a comments section on The New York Times’ missile story would have allowed the knowledgeable amateur to add insight, context and perspective after the fact, so the initial story would no longer constrained by the quality of the reporter’s Rolodex.

In Heaton’s example, the blogoshpere around the Mothership becomes a beat, populated by amateurs, that a professional reporter covers. Whenever the buzz at the Mothership goes beyond the self-referential and impinges on issues of interest to the community at large, that buzz itself becomes a source.

Just as many mainstream media reporters were jolted into discovering the discourse of born-again Christians as a legitimate newsbeat after they supplied the swing vote to win the 2004 elections, so the mainstream media now has to use blogs -- both their content and their form -- as a new way to organize the relationship of professional and amateur.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at August 4, 2006 2:45 PM | Permalink

The most grating passage in Nick Lemman's thoughtfully condescending article is the one in which he describes "the catechism" regarding the joys and wonders of "citizen journalism". As if the Blog had already calcified into an orthodoxy that both Glenn Reynolds and the Rude Pundit follow. I don't get the feeling Lemman has grasped the real nature of this thing yet, despite his skimming, dismissive sampling which allows him to liken the output of all of this energy to something we might read on the back of a church bulletin.

There is a certain confidence in Lemman's citation back to the days of Pamphleteers, as he knows that the press ultimately co-opted,outlasted and silenced them. Lemman's apparent vision is for the MSM to move on the Blog and similarly kill it off, or at least transform it by an infusion of professional journalists to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from and digestible by the MSM. The tendency for certain high-profile bloggers to go all weak-in-the-knees when in the company of members of the MSM would hasten this contemptuous takeover.

And while it is true that his article is about the Blog, not primarily the MSM, it is not possible to accurately assess the Blog without understanding its relation to MSM, in cause and effect terms. And there, Lemman soft-pedals, to the point of missing entirely, the systemic failings of the MSM that propels many people to seek other sources. I'm afraid we're talking about conditions more serious than merely off-putting "pomposity and preening". I wouldn't mind a dose of pomposity and preening (some would describe the sainted ERM himself as having those qualities) if there were less conflict of interest and bias in the MSM, destroying its credibility.

I think perhaps that Lemman reflects a common sort of disdain among the MSM, motivated by their pique at having some gutter-trash trying to crash their cocktail party. Understandable enough, but what Lemman doesn't recognize is the MSM's irritation at the audience, not merely for straying from their proscribed pathways, but also for determining for themselves, what stories are important and deserve more attention The instances of story-lines kept alive and growing in the Blog which have been ignored or scuttled in the MSM, only to be belatedly and reluctantly addressed in the MSM, are by now too numerous to recount. What they continue to overlook is that this dynamic is ultimately audience driven. The caricature of the pajama-clad loser/blogger obscures the fact that such a creature has become known, even to the MSM, most often because it feeds (arguably junk-feeds) a powerful hunger for information. The MSM keeps telling its audience that the Blog is junk food, without appreciating that the MSM is starving off its audience, with its canned and often empty coverage. I suppose it easier to attack the Blog than to put sufficient meet back on the table.

Posted by: Mark J. McPherson at August 4, 2006 3:32 PM | Permalink

Where is Mr. Lemann?
Is he aware that his article is being discussed?
If so, why isn't he here discussing it too?

(Jay, perhaps you could send him an invite?)

Posted by: Anna Haynes at August 4, 2006 4:16 PM | Permalink

An exchange of letters at Romenesko:

From TREVOR BUTTERWORTH: Subject: Jay Rosen's persecution complex. I told Jay Rosen that his quotes were not "compelling" enough to make it into my final article, and not that he "didn't deserve to be" in it. But I suppose that when you're the deep thinker of the blogosphere, it must seem like you ought to be in every story on blogging. I also told Jay that the same went for Nick Lemann, who was also interviewed and went unmentioned, and to a large degree, Glenn Reynolds. A big collective sorry if you're reading guys. I never for one moment thought that you didn't deserve to be in my piece. You're all very talented and interested writers, but it just didn't work out. Maybe it was me. Maybe if I'd interviewed you at a different time things coulda been different. But hey, Jay, you've got your blog and a journalism school, and Nick has his column and a journalism school, and Glenn has a book and a blog and a law school, so look on the bright side. Think about the people who gave great quotage who also didn't make the cut. Ben Widdicombe, for example. Now that was sad, as Ben (along with Horacio Silva) was a pioneer of proto-blogging citizen gossip with, what was it called?.... ah, Chic Happens.

My reply:

From JAY ROSEN. Subject: Trevor Butterworth's BS. I've been left on the cutting room floor countless times after being interviewed by a reporter. Big deal. That's part of journalism. It happened with this article a few weeks ago. What Butterworth did is different. He had his story before he began his reporting and he stuck to it. He came to debunk (because that's entertaining) and by golly that's what he was a-gonna do. He had his ridiculous and prefab extremes... "Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion?" as against, "Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave 'new economy' a few years ago?" And he wanted to make the world fit into those extremes.
The whole FT article played off "the surge of hype about blogging," but the people he interviewed wouldn't give him any of the hype, though plenty wanted to puncture it. I told him that almost no one with good knowledge of the subject thinks that blogging is about to "drive the mainstream news media into oblivion," and to base an article on popping that balloon would be a cheap and misleading thing to do. I said the reason there was excitement about blogging in journalism circles is that bloggers were the ones were who developing the Web platform and figuring out what it could do. Meanwhile, news organizations were stuck on re-purposing their content. But he had his story and he stuck to it. Had someone else in his account made similar arguments, there woud be nothing to object to. Of course these points were just ignored. They didn't fit the prefab.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at August 4, 2006 4:21 PM | Permalink

Yes, there will always be reporters. No, they will not always be working in an industry structured the way the MSM is today.

Michael Barone tells of his conversation with a major MSM honcho who claimed that a media with 90% liberal journalists is fair and balanced, but a news media dominated by 90% conservatives couldn't be. How damn stupid can you be!

Because of blogs and talk radio, more people every day are realizing that the MSM produces a daily dose of left-wing propaganda. And when Bill Keller proves completely incapable of articulating a coherent explanation for publishing national security secrets, they realize that incompetence is also a huge problem.

What kind of industry convinces itself that an insane moonbat like Cindy Sheehan, stage-managed by an avowedly Stalinist group and regularly prone to mouthing provable falsehoods, has more credibility than hundreds of retired military officers and men who have lived lives of honor and integrity? And after the military men prove the facts behind many of their claims, the industry unanimously labels them liars?

In 50 years when researchers, unburdened by the political orthodoxy which is ruining the MSM today, examine what caused the demise of so many of today's dinosaur news organizations, the inability to exercise simple fairness and balance in reporting will be seen as the prime factor.

I challenge anyone to honestly examine the claims of the SwiftVets and those of Sheehan and conclude that she has more credibility. Then look at the vastly different amounts of coverage afforded each. Simple explanation -- the MSM didn't like what the Swiftvets said and they love what Sheehan says. The coverage obviously reflects it.

Ask Juan Williams who is presently learning what happens to a journalist who strays ever so slightly from the orthodoxy. Total boycott of his book.

And these are just a couple of tiny straws in the mountain which is breaking the camel's back. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Posted by: stan at August 4, 2006 4:38 PM | Permalink

What surprises me about the reaction of professional journalists to what they see as amateurs encroaching on their territory is that so many try to slam the door--rather than opening it further. I thought they were more observant than the Hollywood types who went into such a panic in the 1970s, when the invasion of that horrible 'tapeworm,' the VCR ended up making them more money than they had seen in decades.

Just so, the amateurs aren't a threat to the professionals, but will ultimately improve the health of the profession by strengthening those worn connections to the people that also have the commercial and professional news media in a tither.

"Blogger vs. Journalists" should never have happened--it was a useless dichotomy in the first place. It is about as enlightening as videotape vs. television.

Posted by: Aaron Barlow at August 4, 2006 4:46 PM | Permalink

This is no different than the reaction I saw from "professional typesetters and old-timey designers" to Adobe postscript and Quark (or countless other changes that reduced to barriers to entry in a once fat and happy walled-in industry).

Posted by: laurence haughton at August 4, 2006 5:25 PM | Permalink

A reporter here is doing a story on the rise of our local blogosphere, so local bloggers were writing and commenting about the experience of being interviewed by a reporter. That put me in the position of explaining what reporters do, and talking about how to deal with the press. And it reminded me, among other things, that the approach that works in dealing with savvy, media-manipulating public figures just doesn't go over quite so well with private citizens who've never been interviewed before.

Then yesterday one of our reporters took me to lunch and wanted to know about bloggers, so I found myself once again explaining blogs to a journalist. And it reminded me, once again, that until you can see a thing in its own context -- rather than forcing it into the context you bring to the subject -- it's just awfully hard to figure out why a thing works the way it does.

Pro-jos tend to worry about -- and argue against -- the replacement of Big-J Journalism by blogs and amateurs and people who don't use AP Style, etc. Which entirely misses the point. Blogs aren't changing journalism -- they're changing the context in which journalism occurs.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at August 4, 2006 5:41 PM | Permalink

In case you missed it in After Matter...

The email I got a few days ago (which I posted on this site) really bothered me. I felt an an intense need to do something but I didn’t know what.
How can we find out the truth?

How can we learn what’s really going on?

So here’s what I decided to do.

I’m putting up $1000.00 of my own cash to send 2 people to New Orleans and the Gulf Region for a weekend to find out what’s really going on.

I’m going to supply you with a cool ass video/camera, a place to stay and a rental car.

Look at it as a vacation that matters.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at August 5, 2006 4:56 AM | Permalink

As a consumer of the news, my experience with blogs is that they're not trying to replace journalists, they're calling them to account. They — and a lot of ordinary joes like me who read the news — are idealists. We have an idea in our head of what a journalist is. Instead, what we find are big names who act more like courtiers than what we imagine journalists should be.

On the matter of trust, any trust I had in the New York Times was lost when they ran an article saying Arab-Americans supported Bush's stand on the Iraq war — and almost all the names quoted were clearly Iranian. This was such an egregious error, just plain ignorant, stupid, or deliberately deceptive, from the supposed premier newspaper of the most powerful nation on earth. If you want to know why blogs exist, that article is for me proof of why they are badly needed.

Posted by: Bob Ludlow at August 5, 2006 8:47 PM | Permalink

If we had a different kind of journalism, we wouldn't need Jay's new paradigm.

I see why journos hate bloggers, and LGF in particular. Charles Johnson, who busted Dan Rather, has just busted Reuters.

As one commenter noted, if you want to get a cold sweat, think of where we'd be with no blogging.

Anyway, if every paper which ran Reuters' doctored photo followed it up with a detailed story of how it happened, how readers can spot it next time, how they missed it, and the details of their lawsuit against Reuters, we wouldn't, as I say, need citizen journalists.

Just a few sharp-eyed readers and responsive publications/networks.

Oh, yeah. Qana may be turning into Jenin. The real Jenin, not the one the journos talked about.

Or, it could be even worse.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at August 6, 2006 11:50 AM | Permalink

I think it isn't a problem of one end; as an old saying, "shadow comes after sunshine," both major and amateur jounalists should be responded for this situation.
We can hardly see any objective- as an criterion of journalism, at least, being taught in the school- journalism on the mass media, neither with partial bias nor with commercial patronage. What fix the concept "objective journalism" has no longer exits, the displacement is market directed principle.
In this context, since mass media can't bring us news with credibility, we have to create one by our own.
On the other hand, bloggers without professional training might sometimes convey rumors as "truth" cause they are lack of systematic knowledge and also the back-up of the verifing network of mass media.
Perphas the outcome is not satisfying enough, come hell or high water, we have a platform to pursuit our ideals, why should people feud?

Posted by: Fiona Chou at August 7, 2006 4:27 PM | Permalink

Daniel. Was I unclear or are you being deliberately obtuse?

The cold sweat is not caused by bloggers catching journalists screwing the pooch. It's caused by contemplating where we'd be if bloggers hadn't caught journalists screwing the pooch.

Resentment is natural, of course.

Posted by: RIchard Aubrey at August 8, 2006 10:29 AM | Permalink