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.
.. are you saying that MySpace and Livejournal aren't reliable sources of information?
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
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
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.
Some, but not all of it. There are also the people who care deeply about a subject, and for whom the facts matter much more than the personalities. A year or so ago I decided to try my hand at cheese making. A little bit of google led me to a cheese makers blog, in which I found several years of detailed first hand accounts of his efforts at amature cheese making, along with interesting comments, questions, and (in a few cases) differing opinions from his readers.
This is where bogs really shine. Care about SCO v. IBM? Or the Plame outing and coverup? Interested in making your own Victorian christmas ornaments? Or a trebuchet? There's a blog out there for you. Ditto if you're dealing with some strange (to you) illness, trying to learn a new language, or planning a vacation off the beaten path.
Yes, there are a lot of bloggers whose sole topic seems to be "Look at me ma, I'm a blogger!" but they are easy to ignore. Don't cast out the interesting ones along with the loudmouths who have nothing to say.
--MarkusQ