Bashing the blogosphere

I missed the Online News Association conference in Chicago last weekend, but I’ve already heard and read a lot about it. In fact, I’ve lost track of where, exactly, I am in the second-hand downstream mishmash of conference reports, reviews, feedback and criticism delivered to me electronically, beginning last Friday when the conference kicked off in Evanston, Ill., with a conference group blog. Travis Smith, editor of Variety.com, submitted to the ONA discussion forum a collection of links to related blogs, articles and feedback, including those by Jeff Jarvis in his Buzzmachine, Staci Kramer in Paid Content, conference keynoter Andrew Sullivan in his own blog, Mary Hodder in her bIPlog, and Cory Bergman in Lost Remote.

As of this blog-o-moment in the Mediascape, Smith still hadn’t posted his collection of links on his own blog. Maybe he or someone else will link to this, and on and on we’ll wander through the self-reverent and self-mediated digital maze of ideas.

I’m using the word blog over and over here because I know how much it irks some people, perhaps even more so than the word convergence, and the most rewarding part of my think tank work with The Media Center is to irk: to marry education with agitation.

To some, blogs represent a degradation, if not a downright blight, on real journalism. One author said in a post to the ONA discussion forum today, “Anyone can "publish" their stuff. Drivel is passed off as journalism. The ramblings of someone somewhere are passed off as news. The result is acres and acres of terrible reporting. Incoherent ramblings and notes-to-myself that are published in public space.”

It’s a sentiment I encounter often with newspaper editors and other “seasoned” journalists who have been there and done that and believe that journalism is best handled by trained professionals.

Here’s some agitation: the “blogs good-blogs bad” discussion vastly oversimplifies a profound social change now under way – one I certainly don’t understand yet. Rather than obsess about the virtues of real journalists vs. the failings of amateur hacks, we urge anyone in media – from C-level executives to production-level editors and reporters – to contemplate how the relationship between media creators and consumers has shifted. Emphasis is now on the word relationship – implying a two-way conversation. Our notions of control, who’s an expert and what it takes to establish credibility, have been challenged, and the information dialog of the future may not resemble what we have known from the past.

Our interest at The Media Center is studying and facilitating these changes in a manner that leads to a better-informed society in this connected world. We hope our work will help today’s media organizations figure out the changes, but whether they do or not our goal is that society benefits. We’re in the midst of a communications Renaissance – an explosion of dialog unlike anything before in human history.

Is there noise? Sure. But the prospect of a better-informed and more engaged citizenry, regardless of their journalism credentials, is as thrilling today as the application 200 years ago of democratic principals developed in the Age of Enlightenment. To quote Dan Gillmore from our recent report, We Media, “Participatory journalism is a big piece of our information future. We’re all in for a fascinating, and turbulent, ride in the years ahead. Welcome aboard.”