Do you really want an information economy based on blogs?
One of the phrases I've heard bandied about a lot is something called the "citizen journalist." Apparently, the internet is opening up venues for all of us to be reporters. I also think that's what a lot of blogs believe they are.
But there are a couple of huge "however" in there. Believe it or not, most journalists, and I'm talking real journalists here as in reporters who (used to) work for your local daily paper have degrees in journalism. As someone who writes for a living, and who's done a little writing for some local newspapers, I know from experience that there's an art to writing a newspaper story, and it's a very different set of skills than writing a corporate report or a technical paper or a set of instructions that describe how to use a software application to accomplish a task.
In the blogosphere (and I'm always careful where I step when I'm walking there), I'd be willing to bet that over 75% of the content is not reporting in the traditional newspaper sense, but is, rather, editorializing (much like what I'm doing here). It's the same thing that you see on CNN, MSNBC, or that vast wasteland of aired content, Fox News ("Fair and Balanced" has to be the most cynical phrase used by a purported news outlet to describe its own content that I've ever seen). But I digress...
What I'm getting to is that an ever-increasing amount of content that tries to pass itself off as news is not new, but is, instead, editorial. There's a huge difference, but the more this phenomenon takes over, the less able many of us are at discriminating between the two. And it's critical, if democracy is going to work, that we be able to see the difference.
And that's another thing... all this talk about "the media" tends to lose track of the reporters who do the vast bulk of news collection and reporting. Only a very small percentage of reporters work for the major papers. Most work for your local dailies, bi-weeklies, or weekly papers. They don't earn very much, and I can guarantee you that their offices don't look anything like the offices of the Daily Planet in Superman Returns. They're just schmoes like the rest of us, many of whom probably make something in the low $20K/year range (if they don't work at a union paper). They're just reporting the news the way they've been trained. Given the volume of stories most of them have to write, they don't have time to editorialize or slant their news.
Two more gripes about online publications: one is that if you're going to an paid-by-advertiser model, then you become beholden to those advertisers. Consider Audioholics. Compare the products you've seen reviewed here in the past few months and count the ads that have been posted here. I'm sure that someone here will have something to say about my observation.
No, I don't have any numbers to back it up, but it's been a long while since I've seen a review of a B&W speaker here. Or a KEF. Or a PSB. I've seen what seems to me to be a disproportionately large focus on The Speaker Company, though. The reviews may be good. They may be bad. I'm not saying anything about the editorial content concerning the products, but I am saying that it seems odd how little coverage is given to manufacturers who don't advertise here.
The other is that online publications invest minimally in layout. Essentially, they have a template for content, and a few rules for writers to follow when composing content, and then the content gets dropped into a template.
Sure, it cuts costs, but there's an art to page layout that you can even see evidenced in the design and layout of daily newspapers. Yes, the dailies have templates, but the graphic designers spend time on the front pages of each section. I guess my thought is that if an online publication doesn't put any effort into the design of its site aside from a very occasional update of the template, is that publication really qualified to make pass any sort of judgment on the aesthetics of a product?
Aesthetics and design do have certain guiding principles, and if you're not aware of them, you're not really well suited to judge the application of those guiding principles to a product. About the best you can do is say, "I thought it looked really cool."
So I'm worried about the lack of design principles on what I read. I'm worried about the devaluation of what we read due to the dilution of journalistic independence and integrity, and I'm worried about how the paid-by-advertiser model will affect what we get to read online.
Oh, and what if you lose your connection to the internet?
