Blog with me

NOTE: The following is my final reaction essay for class.

Many claim that blogs may end up changing a lot of things, but saying that they will forever change the way we get our information is a stretch.
The Economist, however, doesn’t agree. In a survey entitled “Among the Audience,” a collection of edited selections from the magazine thinks that blogs and podcasts aren’t just the wave of the future, but the wave of today and the norm of the future.

The magazine writers are heavily one-sided on the issue. Pages are dedicated to glorifying the endless possibilities of what blogs can do for people and what they can do to traditional media companies. They call this new untraditional media “personal and participatory” -- a system where citizens are writing, reading, judging and deciding the information that they receive.
Foolishly the Economist is giving not only blogs, but the public way to much credit.

It interviews internet media moguls who say “people no longer passively ‘consume’ media,” instead, they read about it and instantly chime in through their personal blogs. The benefit of this arrangement is that instead of a few media giants competing there will only be small media companies and individuals competing, or as it states, “collaborating.” The writers say this is a good thing.

This is laughable. When there are hundreds of these small firms competing, news is thinned out, credible news is fuzzy and real journalistic reporting is lost. As long as there are a few big companies competing we will be fine. Competition between the best is good; competition between thousands of novices is bad.

The magazine spotlights its bias toward the new media by mocking old media traditionalists, such as Barry Diller, a man who launched FOX broadcasting and runs two Hollywood studios, thinks that participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry and that “self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting.”

After that statement the article quickly labels Diller as an “ignoramus,” quoting Jerry Michalski, who says “there’s tons of great stuff from rank amateurs” and “(Diller) is completely wrong.”
Michalski, who is not credited and could be living on the street for all we know, is the one who is wrong. He says that “not everything in the ‘blogosphere’ is poetry’ and everything on Wikipedia is not 100 percent correct but you could say that about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopedia Britannica.” Talk about an ignoramus.

Newspapers and radio stations have a code of ethics to follow, they are responsible for what they report on and serve a public service. Whereas bloggers answer to no one, they are protected by a username and have no ethics. They have no responsibility to a company or the public. They are free to write about anything they want, unedited. Why on earth would any news-gathering citizen want that? I would trust a Dave Thompson/Sun-Gazette before I’d trust Doomy22.
The article states that young people will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. I understand this magazine is British, so the British lifestyle must be completely different. The writers foolishly think that young people have the time to decipher good information and bad. They also think that people will volunteer their time to delve into investigative reporting and cover borough meetings. They think the public’s opinion will be strong enough for all to read.

Do we have all the time in the world to put aside our jobs and lives to write decent articles that only a few people may read? This ideal might last a few months, but there is no way it can stick. People have lives. They aren’t going to be willing to take time out of their day to write coherent and credible articles just for the heck of it.

It was interesting to read about Ohmy News, which actually has a system where readers can donate money to the writer if they like their stuff. Unfortunately that is in China and we are in the United States where people like their stuff free, especially if it comes from the Internet. There is no way the American people would fork over cash to read a random news story – or at least not enough to keep these random writers writing.

Some of the most asinine comments come at the end of the blogs section of the paper. The writers think people want to read the opinions of every computer owner. They say that “journalism won’t be a sermon any more, it will be a conversation.”
Yikes. What’s productive about a bunch of uneducated people babbling on about their self-proposed ideals? A lot of people in the U.S. gripe about uneducated voters. Having them read blogs as if they were news isn’t going to help that problem.

I don’t like to be preached to, but I would hope that most people would like to be preached to by a credible source than a litany of partisan morons. You may say that many traditional media outlets have shown their biases, so they’re just as bad. However, I disagree. If a person is going to take their time to write about what they think is important and post it for all to see, they have more of an agenda than someone who enters the professional world to bring people the news.
You don’t have to look farther than this article to see how easy it is to express one’s bias when you have no one to answer to. The writers must have something to gain by promoting this “new media” so heavily.

The writers ridicule traditional media leaders, they predict the year newspapers will be extinct (2040) and they often use quotes like “the more journalism the better; I don’t care who does it.”
They safely leave journalism undefined. What do they expect will be covered? Will people want to cover the township fund raisers, the little league baseball games, police chases, human interest stories, city meetings, court cases and the endless amount of stories that fills the newspaper everyday? I don’t think so. I might be wrong and it could be OK “not to care” who writes it. That is the most irresponsible end journalism can ever come to.

These articles give blogs way too much credit, but that doesn’t mean that the idea of blogging is a bad one. They are good for normal people to express their opinions and ask questions. They can be used to challenge traditional media. If an article on CNN or your local newspaper’s Web site doesn’t give you all the information you want, throw it up on your blog or e-mail the reporter.

The reporter can ignore you but many readers may have the same concern and find your blog. That starts a chain reaction that no reporter will be able to ignore. Surely, a follow up story would end up in the newspaper covering all the previously left out information. To think that those readers could go out and interview the main sources themselves is ridiculous.

This article needs to define what they expect from these novice writers. Realistically, one cannot expect much from about 97 percent of them.
Lastly, the article talks about podcasts. A little different than blogs, you don’t have to sit staring at a computer screen to enjoy music, news and radio-type shows. People can leave their pods connected to their computer and be instantly updated about everything they need to know.
Podcasts seem to be a little less harmful, compared to blogs. Not everyone has a pod and not everyone has recording capabilities or knows how to use recording equipment. Not only that, it is probably more tolerable to read bad writing than it is to listen to bad audio content and quality.

One of the more useless “facts” the article mentions is that the YouTube.com Web site transfers more data each day than the equivalent of an entire Blockbuster video-rental outlet. What an irrelevant fact.

YouTube.com offers an endless amount of movie snippets from TV shows to cell phone videos. The content is free and is usually only a couple minutes long. It is also available to hundreds of billions of people. I wouldn’t be surprised if YouTube.com has more data in its system than a whole Blockbuster store. A store caters to the town it’s in, not the world.

The Discman might have gone the way of the walkman, due to pods, but as far as pods being the primary source for TV shows, news, etc…it's got a long uphill climb to go. Unlike blogs, podcasts are at a disadvantage because they began as a music player and not as a news information gathering tool.

Overall, we will always need to rely on our traditional media for news. We can’t expect Joe Schmo to sit down with the president, a terrorist or murderer to conduct a hard hitting interview. This job is and should be for professionals. The present day media may not be perfect, but it offers us much more than the amateur method this article is suggesting. We shouldn’t stop the conversation, but we need something true and real to talk about.