February 1, 2005, 6.05pm • 66 comments » • 628 Views

Some sobriety for journoblogging hypesters

Slate writer Jack Shafer pricks the perceived pomposity of guerrilla new media types who prophesy the end of establishment Big Media, the wholesale Marxist redistribution of media power through the keyboard, by drawing a parallel with the handheld video revolution (remember that?).

In the 80s and 90s, the falling cost of camcorders and the rise of social action movements promised to undermine, even destroy, the mainstream media cabal, opening up the airwaves (or cables) to a rich array of public-minded, anti-corporate personal programming. I knew a filmmaker who now helps run the Undercurrents movement - utterly dedicated to shining a light on the darker areas, where corporate interests and government ride roughshod over community and… trees.

Just back from the Harvard conference on Blogging, Journalism and Credibility, and noticing how the promised revolution didn’t quite materialise, Shafer notes the similarity between the rhetoric used then and that used by journoblogger messiahs foretelling the end of journalism as we know it…

He’s variously bang-on, overly sceptical and, as in this extract, hilarious…

When the Times’ [Jill] Abramson asked rhetorically if the conference bloggers had any idea how much it cost to maintain a news bureau in Baghdad, the supreme confidence of a couple of bloggers fractured into petty defensiveness.

“That’s a silly question!” snapped Winer. “Asking bloggers what this costs is silly. If you want to tell us what it costs, that’s fine. … But there are bloggers in Baghdad! That’s your competition; that’s what you have to deal with.”

I wrote two days ago on why blogomania, citizen journalism and participatory media are all well and good - but it’s how real, professional journalists in Big Media respond that will sort the wheat from the chaff, how new publishing media can augment decent reporting.

Shafer implies reporting has already been augmented, noting how journalists already use information sources like Google and conduct interviews by email, and spinning out an observation common to media studies students…

The premature triumphalism of some bloggers indicates that they haven’t paid attention to how Webified journalists have become. They also ignore media history. New media technologies almost never replace old media technologies, they merely force old technologies to adapt and find new ways to connect with their audiences.

As if to prove the point, he adds a bunch of aggregated blog reaction to the foot of his story, in a way that makes his journalism resemble journblogging. Oh, and there are also comments from Slate’s Fray message area. Has the revolution already happened?