All the News That's Fit to Aggregate
Ezra Klein makes an astute point:
The news business, we all agree, is an inefficient enterprise. But it has benevolent inefficiencies. Not every story in the paper maximizes readership and thus advertising revenue. The low-readership stories, however, aren’t misfires. They’re aimed at a different audience: Empowered elites. They make the political system aware of problems, or they alert the political system to the fact that other people are aware of problems*.
And that only works because newspapers are hard to ignore. The result is a startlingly inefficient from a revenues standpoint but fairly important from a civic accountability standpoint. Newspapers run popular articles and use their resulting readership to make their unpopular articles matter to the relevant constituencies. Regulators, say. Or city councilmen who wanted the paper’s future endorsement. That’s the thing a blogger can’t do. They can get the information. But they can’t make it matter. They’re easier to ignore. In that way, the fear isn’t that we’ll stop having news. But that that news will stop forcing accountability.
Andrew counters:
I’m not sure I agree. A good blog, with a tenacious blogger, on a difficult subject, can keep at a subject with intensity newspapers are hard-pressed to match. And as long as there are meta-blogs or aggregators or edited blogs that can highlight niche blogging on important, less-read subjects, these issues can be brought to the fore. Ideally, blogs and newspapers form a helpful nexus. But both can and will evolve to save the old civic function of the press.
I hope Andrew is right about how the blogosphere will evolve, but at present I don’t think that blogs — Andrew’s blog possibly excepted — serve the civic function that Ezra is talking about. Yes, blogs have kept stories alive and pushed them into the mainstream media, but the blogosphere’s ability to influence events is partly predicated on the knowledge that blogs have the ability to drive newspaper coverage, which has the ability to drive television coverage. Take newspapers out of the equation and no one knows what happens.
And at the local level, an important story that the newspaper once would’ve written about but no longer does is unlikely to get highlighted by the kinds of aggregation sites Andrew is referencing. The information just isn’t relevant to an Internet wide readership.
And “[a] good blog, with a tenacious blogger,” can keep alive stories like the Sarah Palin fake pregnancy story, or the Obama was really born in Kenya story, or God knows what, for what seems like eternity. Reading Andrew Sullivan makes me pine for the days when the MSM screened out tinfoil hat madness from public discourse.
— y81 · May 8, 08:59 PM · #
What y81 said, but also: Andrew is a paid blogger. He can devote all the time he wants to Bristol Palin’s baby because, strange to say, he has found an employer who will give him money for doing so. Let’s remember David Simon’s comment that when he was trying to penetrate the obfuscations and cover-ups of the Baltimore police department he didn’t trip over any bloggers at the station house. That’s because no one was paying any bloggers to do the footwork and spadework. Most bloggers blog after work (okay, during work) and they’re simply not able to do much beyond offering opinions. This is no slam on bloggers. I just keep saying over and over that there is one central question about the future of journalism, in comparison to which everything else is, in terms of social health, secondary: Who is going to pay for investigation and research?
— Alan Jacobs · May 8, 09:17 PM · #
Conor, did you ever chase up that NPR/San Diego scene blog link I posted?
— Tony Comstock · May 8, 10:08 PM · #
To amplify Alan’s point…journalists often point out that bloggers are parasitic on professional reporters’ work, but MSM outlets add ballast to blogging on the other end, too. Bloggers’ original reporting or (more likely) analysis sort of awaits recognition from MSM outlets. Otherwise it never finds its way out of the online salons and people with power don’t have to pay for ignoring it. How this might change once the NY Times is encased in ice I don’t know.
— Matt Feeney · May 9, 03:05 PM · #