Maximal+bloggers+with+minimal+edits,+Tim+Cohen,+Business+Day

Business Day Weekender, Johannesburg, 02 September 2006
=Maximal bloggers with minimal edits=


 * TIM COHEN**

THERE is a fascinating debate currently taking place in the international press about, well, the future of the press. The cover of the latest Economist asks “who killed the newspaper?" As someone employed by a newspaper, it’s tempting to retort along the lines of Mark Twain: “The report of my death was an exaggeration".

But sadly, it’s obvious even to those in the industry that the challenges facing newspapers are, well, challenging.

Part of the problem is that they are not so much one problem as many problems rolled into one. The most often cited is the rise of the internet, but for newspapers, the internet is not a single problem. The internet challenges regular newspapers because it’s possible to organise smalls advertising more effectively and distribute it more widely on the internet. The internet challenges newspapers because the gap between production and consumption is faster on the net. And the internet challenges newspapers because the barriers to entry are so low that almost anyone with a computer, a few rand and an opinion can get into the information distribution business (blast their eyes).

The problem goes even further because of the immense and growing role of news aggregators, the most famous of which is, of course, Google. The ability to search widely, quickly and “laterally", means that the process of providing an exclusive collection of information which newspapers (and to an extent news reports on television and radio) provide is now being undermined.

Newspapers no longer “own” the reader for the time they devote to gathering news.

Newspapers tend to clip the tops off information mountains. But while the internet is okay on mountain tops, it’s very good on the deep valleys of specialised, detailed and varied knowledge. The result is that readers of newspaper websites are entering by a “side door", examining a single article on say, motoring, and then exiting. Fewer and fewer readers enter by the front door and fewer still travel progressively down each of its channels as you would turn the pages of a newspaper. This has all led to keystone statements in the industry, like media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s recent declaration that newspapers have been “remarkably, unaccountably complacent".

But the traffic is not all one way. In a remarkable defence of newspapers in the New Yorker magazine, Nicholas Lemann notes that “journalism is in a period of minimal self confidence right now, and the internet’s cheerleaders are practically laboratory specimens of maximal self confidence”.

He records an interaction between New York Times technology reporter John Markoff, and editor and academic Jeff Jarvis.

Markoff said (fatefully) that “it’s not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio". Jarvis retorted that the reference was “as old-farty and out-of-date as the sentiment".

“If you were a reporter worth a damn, you’d care to know that (sic) the market place cares about. But no, you’re the mighty NYT guy. You don’t need no stinking audience. You don’t need ears. You only need a mouth."

Yes, this is an academic speaking. The problem with blogging is that in order to become credible it needs to travel the same road newspapers have travelled long ago; it needs to be reliable, safe, sensible, honest, fair — exactly all the things bloggers are proudly not. This does not mean newspapers do not face a major threat from the internet. It just means that there is a reason newspapers are what they are.

The ethos of the news gathering and editing process are artful things, and as long as newspapers understand that art better than other mediums, they will prevail.

614 words
 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/weekender.aspx?ID=BD4A263883