Mainstream media, blogs: a good team

The battle between journalists and bloggers needn't be a battle at all

By Linda Seebach

Date published: 2/19/2006

DENVER--Bloggers and journalists are both given to making wildly inaccurate generalizations about each other-- often based on a nearly total lack of experience with the others' complementary roles in informing the public.

And I've just generalized about both of them, so there.

For clarity's sake, let's define some terms. "Blogger" is easier, because it's a new word and hasn't had time to accrete a multitude of overlapping and sometimes even conflicting meanings. A "blog," clipped from "Web log," is a Web page frequently updated with the proprietor's take on--well, whatever pushes his buttons. Or hers. Or theirs; many blogs are group efforts.

Many blogs are personal diaries, but shared with the world rather than neatly written in a tiny book with a key so Mom won't read it. Others, depending on the blogger's interest, focus on public-policy issues.

The "blogosphere"--a painfully ugly word, but it is useful--is all the blogs together, taken collectively. What they have in common is: nothing at all.

"Journalism" means any activity commonly practiced by journalists in the "journosphere" as part of their job responsibilities.

There is no doubt that some bloggers do journalism. Ed Morrissey (Captain Ed at the blog Captain's Quarters) has at least as good a claim as The Washington Post has to bringing down a government--the Liberals in Canada, who lost the Jan. 23 election in part because of revelations about Liberal financial scandals that were suppressed by Canadian courts and published on his blog.

At the 'sphere level, I believe there should be little doubt: Blogs and traditional media are complementary--that is, each does something easily that the other has difficulty doing at all.

On the side "Advantage--Blog!" there's Powerline and the 60 Minutes Wednesday program broadcast Sept. 8, 2004, based on fabricated "memos" regarding President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Within hours, Johnson's post had received hundreds of "trackbacks"--links from other blogs that had told their readers about it.

And Charles Johnson nailed Dan Rather's career coffin firmly shut with an animated post, showing that CBS' supposedly 30-year-old military documents were a near-perfect match for what you'd get if you simply opened a new Microsoft Word document and started typing in the same text.

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Date published: 2/19/2006