I’m blogging this from the LSE itself today - I’m at an event about blogging and journalism. My comments in italics

Meta comment: The notes below may or may not turn into a ‘proper posting’ - as John Lloyd and Robin Mansell pointed out one of the problems with blogging as an alternative space for journalism is that good journalism requires time and time is money. I could spend several hours turning the comments that follow into a report on the event complete with my own thoroughly-thought-through comments but when I was a journalist that would cost you at least £200 to get. There are very few opportunities to make a reasonable income from blogging so it will always be dominated by people who have time to do it either because they have an income elsewhere and adequate spare time or because they have an axe to grind about some particular issue.

Time taken to improve this blog posting would come at the expense of my thesis and at the moment I can’t really afford it. Anyway, nobody said anything that sufficiently outraged me to make a counter-blast worth my while.

If I had spoken out at the meeting it would have been to suggest that what is needed now is some way to broaden the kinds of people who blog today. There are millions of people who might want some way to express themselves but who feel nobody would want to listen to them. Perhaps some kind of school blogging programme should be considered alongside other IT literacy items on the syllabus?

My notes on the event follow:

Notes:
Suw Charman - bloggers have ‘a wide variety of expertise’? I’m betting they have a narrow range of expertise, actually - lots of knowledge about politics and technology is out there but not as much about, say, how to raise kids on minimum wage. The blogosphere offers ‘a wider set of opinions’ than you can find in the mainstream press. Could lead to journalists finding experts they couldn’t otherwise find via the blogosphere. Journalists don’t usually find it difficult to find experts in a given field - the difficulty they face is who to believe and how to summarise what they say in a given space.
Bloggers are ‘accountable to each other - fact check each other very quickly. You can’t get away with being an idiot.’
‘Bloggers are very interested in their user stats.’

Robin Mansell - new media news organizations haven’t made revolutionary difference in news overall. Blogging still small in UK and much of it nothing to do with politics.

Leslie Bunder - Journalists are blogging because they feel they have to show they are in touch with the online public.

John Lloyd - The ‘new commentariat’ is much less inhibited than the old one. Robert Kaplan - modern journalism is like the medieval church - holding people to impossible standards of behaviour. Getting the facts is hugely difficult and expensive. From the screen you have to deal with a lot of secondary sources.

Robin Mansell - I don’t agree with the theory that blogosphere is automatically self-regulatory. It isn’t enough as there are unequal knowledges and skills. Regulation used to step in when something appeared to be relevant to the public interest. Now the idea of regulation is less popular and less easy (because of global-ness of Internet). But some form of regulation will begin to take place. There are an increasing number of offline places where debates take place (informed by online sources as well).

Suw Charman - journalism involves one journalist/article. In blogosphere there is a network of commentary which can build up a picture. The collation of information is spread out - a ‘hive mind’. But how can you get any cohesion from this? How can you ensure balance? The ongoing conversation goes on over a period of days to years. There are a lot of journalists who are not very accurate and there are a lot of bloggers who are capable of ideal journalistic standards. They can often write in an engaging manner.

Bunder - In the case of OhMyNews there are professional journalists who work with ‘citizen journalists’ to sub. One guy made ?5000 a month from donations via OhMyNews. I would be interested to hear more about that.. Journalists can’t fit into conventional journalism - they are losing their jobs and going into PR. Keeping their hand in through blogging to make a little money.

Is there a parallel between Open Source and blogging journalism?

Robin Mansell - a small number of developers do much of the open source stuff. In the same way there will be a few hard core bloggers. But there may be hybrid models - sometimes altruistic but also commercial. For how long can altrustic blogging remain when commercialness starts to sneak in and have an influence?

John Lloyd - Journalism is not an individual endeavour - it is cooperative with editors, journalists and subs. I don’t see how “bottom up” weblog consensus can work. There needs to be a space for narratives to be attempted that are complex and difficult to collect and understand. Resources for this used to be provided by the market. In this country we invested heavily in the most advanced public service broadcaster in the world. Weblogging has a different kind of value.

Suw Charman - There are a lot of tools coming out that will completely change this. Nowpublic encourages people to post photos relevant to news stories. Bloggers can flesh out news stories. New York Times wrote about a derailment but a woman posted in a personal manner about her own experience - gave a ‘better idea about what really happened’. NYT statement ‘no-one was hurt’ left out fact people thought they were going to die.

Leslie Bunder - ‘Wordpress takes less than two minutes to install’. If you have a server with a connection to the Internet already and know how to do a UNIX installation - most people are likely to rely on Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga etc. Newspapers don’t always publish letters - this way anyone can get a voice. RSS is scaring big media owners.

Robin Mansell - Who are these “everyones”?
bunder - “Everyone has the opportunity”. Whether people want to is another question.

RM - The people who are doing this tend to be a skewed population (wealthier and more educated than average). According to Pew only 7% of Americans online have weblogs. And I would add despite a fair amount of media hype only 38% of Americans who are online even know what a weblog is! We need to find out more. Online participation is not the same thing as authoritative decision making - where is the connection to the corridors of power. Is access and participation enough?

Jackie Danicki of the Big Blog Company - There is no collective blogging - it is individualist and individually motivated. Traditionally journalists are generalists. Brad DeLong, Lessig etc - experts - are correcting.

Prof Ivor Gaber - we don’t know the provenance of webloggers. Suggested Spiked (for example) has a hidden political agenda…
Suw Charman - you have to do your research. Journalists can be hoaxed just like bloggers.

Leslie Bunder - the popular entertainment and culture stuff on blogs is more exciting than politics blogging anyway.

Robin - a sort of branding process goes on to direct people to certain sites. Need more study of media literacies - how people make those decisions.

Tim at Fire and Knives - The bloggers who are important are in effect journalists. The rest is talk radio callers.

Alistair Shrimpton - Le Monde got 7 journalists to do blogs. It also got readers to do their own blogs.
Who was read more?

Leslie said journalists, Suw said readers (she was right, apparently).

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2005 at 6:43 pm and is filed under About the Internet, Citizenship, Politics, blogging, e-goverment, edemocracy, mass media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.