Garrett M. Vonk

In an interview that is reminiscent of Amber and Rusty’s encounter with the Traditional Media last June, NPR’s Daniel Schorr expounds on his disdain for new media in the Sacramento Bee:

[...B]logs and citizen journalism. Is this a form of news gathering that you embrace?

A: I can’t embrace it. Not after what I’ve been through at the hands of the copy editors’ desks. I have suffered many, many arguments about what I’ve wanted to say – whether it was grammatically correct, factually correct and all of that – and I want everybody to have to experience what I experienced. But today, your blogger is totally free. He is his own reporter, his own editor, his own publisher, and he can do whatever he wants.

A person like me who believes in the tradition of a discipline in journalism can only rue the day we’ve arrived at where we don’t need discipline or anything. All you need is a keyboard.

Ah, yes, the tradition of discipline in journalism. I understand completely the criticism that the democratization of the media has resulted in an overall decline in truly newsworthy news in the mainstream journalism. But the brave new world of blogs, podcasts, social networks, video sharing, and mobile communication has created unprecedented opportunities to broaden the horizons of the media one consumes and the awareness one achieves of the world around us.

Schorr’s main argument seems to rest on the idea that citizen journalism suffers from the inaccuracy and lack of polish inherent in its low barriers to entry. But many have argued quite the opposite. To paraphrase Jimmy Wales, if someone makes a mistake on a heavily-trafficked Wikipedia article, it’s often corrected in a matter of minutes, whereas an error in a popular Encyclopedia Brittanica article will remain in that book forever. The same is true for popular blogs and other sources of citizen journalism… The more popular–and thus influential–a given source becomes, the more readers are exposed to it and have the opportunity to correct it. Which do you see more: blogs fact-checking traditional media or vice versa?

There are two other huge advantages to citizen journalism/new media that desperately need to be considered.

A. Immediacy/access-
When everyone has the ability to report the news, even in what Mr. Schorr would decry as a pathetically amateurish effort, everyone has access to information that is both up to date and more thorough than the establishment has ever been capable of. Two examples immediately come to mind: interdictor and Jamal Al Barghouti. The Wikipedia (heh) article on interdictor’s coverage of Katrina sums up its impact nicely:

The Interdictor blog quickly became a widely recognized and cited source from inside New Orleans. Sources such as CNN even read directly from the blog on the air, putting its contents on-screen. Even after the media arrived, the Interdictor blog was still commonly cited as a reference to the events ongoing in New Orleans. When a police-enforced evacuation of New Orleans was ordered by Mayor Ray Nagin, the Interdictor bloggers were exempted from the mandatory evacuation. The blog’s debut and rise to prominence during the hurricane and its aftermath was listed in an MSN/PC World article as number 14 on a list of “The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History.”

What ever could CNN have been thinking, reading a blog on live television??? Why, some nutjob could have been making the whole thing up, what with the internet and all its inherent lack of credibility. Why couldn’t they have just waited until New Orleans was fixed up and the infrastructure was rebuilt so that they could have fully vetted Mssr. Interdictor themselves?

B. Specialization
In J-school, they called it fragmentation, and the concept got a good bit of buzz a few years ago as The Long Tail:

An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that’s essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that’s the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands.

…And the average newspaper needs X number of people to read a given story in order for advertisers to buy the space next to it. And on and on it goes. But a funny thing happens when space and leverage become free. Niche sources become must-see, everyday reading for some people. Understand that more than half of Amazon’s book sales are books that aren’t even available in a Barnes and Noble store, and you’ll understand the mind-blowing effect that this democratization of ideas has had on the diversity of content available.

Media Savvy: NPR’s Schorr vital link to ‘responsible journalism’[warning - tries to auto-print] (via Kottke)