We’re no strangers to boneheaded luddism, ranging from the apparent fear the British public has of cameras to US politicians’ bizarre need to put newspapers on life support by giving them nonprofit status. The latest bout of hysteria is yet another move to “save the media,” yet, either unwittingly ironically or knowingly masochistically, the suggestions put forward by Bruces Sanford and Brown would hurt the media more than anybody else. Which media? The media we so derisively refer to as blogs. We should treat them more kindly as they are the evolution of journalism and media.
Blogs have replaced newspapers as the places where stories get broken. Sure, stories sometimes find themselves in print before on the net, but those same stories are made known to the public through the internet. TechCrunch, for example, is quite often the first places where the vast majority of those who follow tech learn about some breaking story. It doesn’t matter if it was published in a little, middle-of-nowhere paper earlier that morning: a story has been broke when a significant number of people have been made aware of it.
The internet is quite frankly better at providing news more likely to be accurate as so-called “bloggers” are the ones who cite sources. Anyone who reads Techgeist will note that we do not mention non-commonplace facts without providing an accompanying link, a standard we certainly did not invent. When the Wall Street Journal ran a story last month about how Steve Jobs was still working with the folks at Apple, they provided not a single source to verify the claim, only saying that they heard it from some people who know a thing or two about Apple. This does not fly online. Gizmodo mentioned that they believed the story “smell[ed] a little weird,” as well it did.
The people scrambling about claiming that we need new laws to save journalism are both arrogant and wrong. Arrogant in that there’s no reason a sort of aristocracy has to exist of which one must be a part before writing the news. Wrong in that this aristocracy so frequently is inferior to the commoners who do their jobs better. This is not to say that all print media is now a lame duck. The Economist, for example, holds itself to such a high standard that it becomes silly to even compare it to most web sites. But on the whole, news has found a new home, and is better off for it.
