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The News According to Blogs

By Rob WalkerPosted Wednesday, March 7, 2001, at 11:30 PM ET

Last Wednesday at 10:55 a.m. Pacific Time, or thereabouts, there was an earthquake in Seattle. At 10:59 a.m., someone posted to a Web site called MetaFilter: "I'm sitting at work in the Real Networks building," which is in Seattle. "We have just experienced close to a minute of jostling and shaking. There is now a six foot crack on the wall of my office." Someone else followed quickly with a post from the Capitol Hill neighborhood, then came a third: "What's amazing is this news is breaking on MeFi"—that is, on MetaFilter—"when it hasn't been reported yet on CNN or Yahoo." It was 11:06 a.m. A whole thread followed, including another early post at 11:12 a.m: "MetaFilter scoops national News TV and Web sites. I wonder what combining 'opensource' trends & users all over the world can do to the news business?"

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I don't know if that's a serious question or if it's meant tongue-in-cheek, but as long as we're here, what about it? Does the rise of user-created content, to use a current buzz phrase, carry grave implications for the information business?

First, some background. MetaFilter calls itself a community Weblog—"a community of users that find and discuss things on the web." The term Weblog, according to this item linked from MetaFilter, dates from 1998 or so and refers to "a small web site, usually maintained by one person, that is updated on a regular basis and has a high concentration of repeat visitors. Weblogs often are highly focused around a singular subject, an underlying theme or unifying concept." MetaFilter, along with the famous Slashdot and more recently Plastic, are similarly made up of grass-roots material, although from multiple users.

Often the main thing you'll find on Weblogs are links elsewhere, to an article, or maybe a game, or just some random, time-wasting, but irresistibly cool Flash thingy. I became familiar with the term "blogging" about a year or so ago when my girlfriend, E., showed me the site of a Web designer named Jason Kottke. Later, Kottke was a subject of an article in The New Yorker, which concentrated more on the diaristic qualities of Weblogs as the backdrop for a kind of love-in-these-modern-times narrative about a blog-enabled romance, but which still represented a kind of definitive mainstreaming of the Weblog concept. (The other day, Kottke posted his own interview with the author of that article on his site.)

I like blogs, or I guess I should say I like a few blogs. I looked at Kottke's and at another one called Dack.com (and I've linked to both in the past). I've also looked at MetaFilter from time to time, and I've "stopped by" many other blogs that I never got around to revisiting.

What I have not done is stopped or cut down on reading newspapers or visiting "real" news sites as a result. And judging by how many MetaFilter posts link to "real" news stories from elsewhere, I'd say even the site's many contributors haven't exactly given up on straight journalism either.

Still, are there things the bloggers do better than regular journalists? MetaFilter did "beat" by some minutes the initial AP report that there had been an earthquake. (And even press criticism seems to travel faster online—it took just six minutes from the event for MetaFilter contributors to start dissing the press and less than 20 minutes for the earthquake to inspire a disaster prophecy for the media in general.) I'll also concede the example mentioned by another blogger: MetaFilter allowed for extensive ruminations on the IT/Ginger nonphenomenon (see here, here, here, and here for more—way more).

But I would argue that any comparison between blog reports and straight news, on the basis of speed or anything else, misses the point. What Weblogs are really good for isn't adding to an existing media pile-on but ferreting out strange and wonderful, or merely strange and strange, things you are likely otherwise to have missed. Recently, for example, I would cite this thread on the subject of corporate theme songs, several of which you can listen to via this referenced site. Pure gold is what that is.

My caveat is that I do think MetaFilter is superior at "breaking" certain stories of interest to very particular audiences. Specific technology news, for example, or the deconstruction of Web marketing campaigns. Back in August, an interesting discussion picked over a Lee jeans effort that included a character named Super Greg. Anyone in the Web marketing business ought to follow MetaFilter as closely as Ad Age.

Still, those are niche audiences. For the big picture, it's often worth it to trade some meta for a little more filter, which is why I read the Wall Street Journal instead of sifting through 400 trade journals every day. All of this is to say that what MetaFilter and its ilk really are is just one more part of a well-balanced information diet. The notion that user-driven content somehow competes with regular general-interest sources seems like another example of a common new technology theme: the assumption that the world is made up of zero-sum games, so if this is a new way of getting information, just think what it can "do to" the news business, etc. But I don't think that's the case at all—and I think we're lucky that it's not.

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Rob Walker writes the Ad Report Card for Slate.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: Hey Mr Moneybox, down here a minute. Just lower yourself down from your column and you will find a thriving cyber-community with themes, news, discussions, jokes and feuds. No need to go visiting those foreign sites, stick with the homegrown Fray. Highly recommended, polished up by the Fray Editor, a pleasure to visit.

Larry Gainor specifies two areas where user sites can beat out traditional news outlets. Zeitguy's riff on the future of journalism in cyberspace, below, contained a phrase (‘the distance between Kinsley and Redmond…') which seemed to mean something. We're not sure what. And we are not accepting that his description of Slate is an accurate one.]

If simply being the first person to communicate the occurrence of an event is to be considered a scoop, then anybody in Seattle who happened to shout out "it's an earthquake" scooped the press. Growing up in the San Francisco area, I can remember many occasions when earthquakes occurred while I was on the telephone with my relatives in Sacramento. Would that communication constitute a scoop on the news? I will concede that the communication on a Weblog is public and my communication over the phone is private. But, the Weblog doesn't come close to matching the depth of coverage, or scope of broadcast, that a news organization does. Having said all that, is there value to user created content? Yes, users add value in three ways.

The first way would be analogous to the Seattle earthquake report. Most local news organizations invite consumers to participate in real time news reporting. The most common example of this would be the commuter who witnesses something as it happens, and calls in to the local station. Next would be the "tipline", where news organizations pick up a story that they might not have, or would have later than sooner. Both of these could be considered instances of a consumer "scooping" the news.

Finally, there is the added value of the user perspective on the news. Isn't that why we're all here in The Fray?

--Tony Adragna

(To reply, click here.)

Blogs, newslists, usenet, click-through portals, internet activity stats, online communities such as the old Well and the new Plastic are various scouts sent in advance of the real revolution in journalism: the complete decentralization of "news" altogether.

The future of journalism has declared itself free of the monolithic empires of the past. It has given up the illusion of speaking in a global voice to all people, and returned to a more annoying, demanding and essential voice of personal ambition, recondite beliefs, skewed and sometimes bizarre personal values, incomprehensible allegiances, and all the other quirk-borne minutiae of highly personal life.

Slate is the rare amphibian, surviving in both the digital and "old media" realms with an odd patched up anatomy of online rant and studied essay taped together with daily updates of gossip disguised as news. The distance between Kinsley and Redmond [line omitted, click here to read it] is the space within which the new journalism is really emerging.

It is fun to sit here on this beach, collecting the odd driftwood, boiling a crab now and then, toasting the sunset of giant presses and saluting the dawn of the cackling mass neurosis and noospheric hot tub called the net. It's all about you. It's all about me. Its cicumference is everywhere and its center is nowhere.

--Zeitguy

(To reply, click here.)

I have not visited these weblog sites as yet, but I certainly will be soon. For curiosity sake, if nothing else. I have to say my first reaction was that this type of thing could be a big problem. What if I reported that the President had been shot or something? However, as I thought about it some more, I realized that the issue is not with the web. It is with the readers of the website. People trust info on the web too easily. Why would this be any different than if I saw somebody on the street that told me about the quake? Would I believe it automatically? Bottomline, if you are not sure of the source, take it with a grain of salt.

--Brad Priestley

(To reply, click here.)

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