[Crossposted at What’s the Point?]
This argument is sooo 2005.
Darren Allen is a paid political reporter for an award-winning paper. John Odum is a private citizen who uses a particular software platform to do personal publishing.
Journalist vs. blogger? Or just human being vs. human being.
I mean, sure, it must be a little frustrating for hard-working professionals to see uncredentialed citizens slowly cutting into their audience and somewhat rarefied status. I get that, but, c’mon, it’s time to move on.
Just last night on Charlie Rose, before discussing how he enjoys the process of blogging, Brian Williams couldn’t help making what seems to be the contractual obligation to slam blogging (and YouTube) as somehow cutting into some cherished part of a disappearing American water cooler culture. His bosses made him do it, he said.
Had a similar feel to Darren Allen’s recent backhanded article on local blogging. One choice quote: "Yes, it’s a small audience, but it’s an influential one. As anyone who’s part of it will tell you."
Essentially, according to Allen, blogs are pretty much irrelevant, but his is the most popular one.
Now, I don’t know Darren Allen or Brian Williams. They may be very nice guys. But, I’m afraid that Messrs. Allen and Williams need to accept that the cat is now yowling way outside of the bag.
The media landscape has changed. And likely for the better.
Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor (and, by the way, the father of Zack Rosen, Dean for America staffer and co-creator of CivicSpace, a mostly open-source campaign-in-a-box software suite), wrote persuasively in January of 2005 that the argument, Bloggers vs. Journalists, is over.
Rosen writes (after the jump)…
If my terms make sense, and professional journalism has entered a period of declining sovereignty in news, politics and the provision of facts to public debate, this does not have to mean declining influence or reputation. It does not mean that prospects for the public service press are suddenly dim. It does, however, mean that the old political contract between news providers and news consumers will give way to something different, founded on what Curley correctly called a new “balance of power.”
Others have seen the change coming. In a 2003 report, New Directions for News said, “Journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history where … its hegemony as gatekeeper of the news is threatened by not just new technology and competitors but, potentially, by the audience it serves.” The professional imagination in Big Journalism wasn’t prepared for this.
Armed with easy-to-use Web publishing tools, always-on connections and increasingly powerful mobile devices, the online audience has the means to become an active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information.
Meanwhile, the credibility of the old descriptions is falling away. People don’t buy them anymore. In 1988, 58 percent of the public agreed with the self-description of the press and saw no bias in political reporting, according to the Pew Research Center. (And that was regarded as a dangerously low figure.) By 2004, agreement on “no bias” had slipped to 38 percent. “The notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto,” wrote Howard Fineman of Newsweek, Jan. 13. “Now it’s pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things.”
This past spring at the Charlie Ross panel discussion at UVM, Howard Fineman reminded us that during the "golden age" of the Walter Cronkite water cooler years, things weren’t necessarily so golden — when the editorial slant at virtually every news organization was determined by the New York Times.
Fineman said, ~You have to ask yourself, when Cronkite said "And that’s the way it is," was it really the way it was?~ Though I wouldn’t have predicted it, Fineman seems to truly understand and appreciate the positive aspects of the emerging user-driven dynamic.
But, today’s press professionals should be able to take solace in the knowledge that they are not alone in slowly losing their status.
As VDB pointed out following the anti-Dean Carville freak-out…
It’s hard to imagine the post-election Carville/Dean story coming together without some strong shared need on the part of James Carville and Anne Kornblut, the journalist behind the New York Times piece.
That point can be broadened without losing its force: Carville’s general prominence in the days following the election has much to say about the momentary intersection between his needs and those of the mainstream media.
The best way to summarize that shared need is as follows: Carville needed to remind the world that he is a professional political strategist, and the mainstream media needed to remind the world that they are professional journalists — and for both, credentials are the key to professional status.
Carville and Anne Kornblut share the spotlight as bona fide members of interlocking, complementary professions.
Why the pressing need to stress credentials, for political strategists and media regulars? Because the real wave this election wasn’t the Democrats inundating the Republicans.
It was the uncredentialled swamping the credentialled.
So, as Rosen says — as does Chris Anderson in the Long Tail — when given the choice of a single source for news, entertainment or political strategy vs. an almost infinite array of choices, consumers choose the latter.
And that’s the way it is.