Slashdot Mirror
When Blog Networks Make News, Silence Abounds
1sockchuck writes "It's been a bad week for transparency and disclosure in the blogosphere, demonstrating that once blogging starts making money, the rules change. Nick Douglas was dismissed from ValleyWag, Jason Calacanis bolts from AOL, and co-founder Duncan Riley abruptly departs from b5media. Where do we get the real story? From The New York Times, or not at all. If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons, it's because so many blogospheric leaders have told us we should. And now suddenly we're getting the snarky insider accounts of blogospheric dirt from The New York Times?"
You're laughably naive if you thought it would be any other way. The media (including blogs) is only answerable to other media. They keep each other honest. This is why you see papers like the Times printing lots of stories about themselves when they catch a reporter plagarizing; because when you out yourself, you get to keep a little face. People give you a little credit, even though you screwed 'em, when you own up to it and try to make amends.
But mostly, and by mostly I mean 99% of the reason, is because you do not ever ever want to give that kind of ammo to your competition. You will be found out and when you are, they will make you pay...Remember the Bush papers?
This is a prime example. The Times breaks it, but everyone and their dog will jump on the bandwagon about how the oh-so-transparent Blogs are perfectly willing to bury information when it comes to themselves. Can you really trust them? Is it just a passing fad? News at 11:00.
This is a good lesson for them. It's not easy to gain credibility, but it's easy as pie to lose it, and when people catch you in a single omission, they'll wonder how many omissions they failed to catch, and no amount of assurance will convince them that the answer is zero.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons, it's because so many blogospheric leaders have told us we should.
Huh? Wha? I have no idea what or who you're talking about here. Are you telling me that your criteria for whether or not a person is honest is if they tell you they are? If so, please use the pronoun "I". Where on earth did you get "we" from?
Alaska Jack
...for the main reason that I've never seen a blog worth anything that requires you register with some dumb pointless "Elmer Fudd at 90210" registration just to be able to read it like the NYT does.
Where were you when the voynix came?
This just serves to illustrate that we should never blindly trust what people tell us, and that critical thinking skills can't be dispensed with just because we think some author somewhere is above reproach.
But don't just take my word for it.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
The rules didn't change because blogs started making money. Rather, now bloggers have something to lose, and they don't want to lose it. And worse than losing something would be throwing it away by pointing out your own problems to the world. People's first instinct is hide, not voice, their own problems. Unlike traditional news sources, blogs haven't had the longevity to know that transparency is the best policy.
The NYT also likes to cite 'blogghorea" as well .
There's some truth to this, because bloggers have a "can't get no respect" problem that often gives them an attitude that opposes 'legitimate' journalists. 'Legitimate' journalists, in turn, decry bloggers.
At some point, bloggers are useful and convey good information, if not aligned with both legal and journalistic principles. Now journalists are becoming bloggers, and the distinctions are becoming exceedingly blurred.
What we wanted is truth, or opinion, but clear distinctions between the two, and referential rather than specious information. The quality of both journalists and bloggers is now emerging, and there's a price tag for that quality-- and we're willing to pay for it, because we need the truth, we need opinion, and we need referential integrity.
It's all natural.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What a total misunderstanding of both blogs and mass media. The only reason any media outlets, however interactive, publish stories about each other is competition among them, and defense from such competition. Blogs publish stories only because they're interesting to the blogger. Bloggers aren't so much in competition with each other yet. And blogs' personalities aren't the main interest yet, compared to newspaper writers. So stories about those bloggers changing publishers is just "insider baseball", not even interesting enough for practically any blogger to cover.
Although I note that we're discussing those stories in Slashdot, a (ginormous) blog.
The story made it to this blog once it became interesting enough to the blogger, the submitter, and the publisher, Slashdot's "author", that it got written (in 3 minutes) and published (typically <30s). It got covered by the NYT, because the NYT is threatened in its power as its circulation further declines, and it transforms into a mainly online publication. It's in competition with AOL, and struggles to exert power over the influence of those name brand bloggers.
The age where an editorial board of a mass (one-way) publication like the NYT controls the definition of "what's news" is drawing to a close. If you think an event is news, blog it, or get a popular blogger to blog it. If that's not a good enough system for you, produce or contribute to a project that produces another layer, like a weighting system for an RSS aggregator that can amplify tiny blog stories (and cache/loadbalance them) that do cover these events, when they're interesting to you and people like you.
The new age of P2P journalism is here. Since it was built with the tools of the old centralized journalism, it will resemble the old regime at first. But its agendas, the way its agendas are served, "what's news", and how it becomes "news", not just "new", are a quantum leap from the old regime. In what directions has yet to be seen. It's still up to us.
--
make install -not war
Excuse me if I don't get it, but this story seems to be about the fact that some bloggers I never heard of got fired and some other blogger I never heard of thinks that some unnamed additional bloggers should have blogged about it before the NYT reported on it, and we know this because....
...he said so in his blog.
Ok, maybe I'm different from most blog readers, but I:
Other than the fact that this item seems to fit the "blog related flamebait" template, I frankly don't see the point of it. Does anyone really expect that blogs will give them complete and accurate behind the scenes information about the blogging carriers of every blogger on the planet? Does anyone seriously want them to? (Other than this guy who obviously cared enough blog about it I mean.)
--MarkusQ
You trust the one class of writers who CANNOT be held accountable if they should deliberately lie??
There is this charming piece there, written a long, long time ago, concerning a "researcher" that spent all of his time reading and re-interpreting the writings of other "researchers". There was a statement to the effect that going and looking at original sources was too much trouble and way too difficult. Besides, all the real work had already beend one once, why simply repeat that?
Well folks, we are pretty much there. Journalists now spend probably equal amounts of time covering each other, gossipping and relying in innuendo and hearsay rather than facts. Little wonder we have the sort of news media we have today with this.
And the "internet journalists" are probably the worst. We have "aggregator sites" on the web which simply dish out stories rehashed from other web sites. We have bloggers writing stuff about aggregated news sites and other bloggers.
Read the bit about the "Old Empire" in Foundation and see if you think it is happening here now.
I seriously question whether these groups do in fact keep each other honest. If you have multiple groups lying, and each accusing the others of lying, that doesn't help anyone find the truth, because the accusations may be lies as well.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I think one problem is that people keep fooling themselves about what blogs really are. Make no mistake, blogs are, of course, a great way for people to communicate - for example, for managers to communicate with their employees, or people to communicate with relatives in other countries -, or to cover rapidly changing topics. Further advantages are that you don't need significant amounts of money to reach an audience, and that blogs are easily accessible and always readily available. Blogs are good (even though they started out as an annoying buzzword).
But what blogs are not, even though some people just won't stop claiming it, is some sort of radically new media that solves most of the problems of traditional media. Blogs aren't really news outlets - 99% of them get their news from other sources, e.g. the established organisations that they decry as the "old media". 99% of blogs don't give you any new facts, they simply pass on facts that they have picked up elsewhere. And some blogs deliberately spread misinformation. After all, it only takes very little to create a good-looking blog, so a reputable writer will look just as serious as a complete charlatan.
At the end of the day, blogs are basically nothing other than your good old-fashioned soap box brought into the 21st century - or maybe I should say, soapbox 2.0. Blogs might give everyone a chance to make his voice heard, might be a great solution to the problem of censorship, might be great to spark a good debate in the comments, might be a lot better for diversity of thought and opinion, and blogs might be a really convenient way of publishing things - but blogs are NOT by definition more reputable than "old media". Perhaps even less so. At the end of the day, if you want a balanced opinion, there is no one source of information you can use. You still need to get as many views on issues as you can, consider your sources objectively, and make up your own mind. And no new trend or technological advance on the web is going to change that.
I think if people took a moment to think about it and understand this, they wouldn't be so surprised when stories such as this one come up.
Basilisk Digital