|
Sunday, December 26, 2004Looking at the latest from the Belmont Club on how the AP operates and why it does such a good job of getting pics of terrorists in action, I am reminded of a problem I've pointed out before:The problem with writing off bloggers is that they are not merely a threat to lazy, ideology driven reporting; they are also among the most serious consumers of news. From tv to magazines to newspapers, it's all about the eyeballs. But for those eyeballs to have value, they have to look. Check the bin at your local Starbucks. You'll discover tons of newspapers complete and untouched except for the sports, business and the comics/puzzle. AP thinks it's enlightening the world. In fact, it's providing a wrapper so that if you spill your coffee, you can still do your puzzle and find out how the Knicks did last night. All AP does for a lot of people is provide that one picture. So, who reads the stuff that AP writes? The kind of people who blog, and the kind of people who read blogs. Who pays attention to much more than the pictures? Few moreso than the bloggers. People who run newspapers aren't stupid. A lot of them already know that people read the sports and comics and use the rest to wrap their fish (or whatever). That's why the front section of a paper is increasingly wire reports. Not because the wires are good, but because there's no budget to create content special content that people aren't going to read anyway. This is also why celeb journalism is going nuts on television while "serious" - read piously liberal - programming is disappearing. Nobody cares. In the image wars, AP, AFP and Reuters have been doing themselves a major disservice. A while back, National Review writers, starting - I think - with John O'Sullivan had a mini-forum about how it was no longer necessary to read the Times. Given the election results, people saw AP's photos and voted for Bush anyway. But who read the stories that went with the photos? I know bloggers do, because they tear them apart on a regular basis. But in cafés, restaurants, even bookstores, I rarely hear anyone talk about what they read in the newspaper. How long before the smart papers become American versions of France-Soir: lots of pictures, lots of captions, few actual stories. And what happens to the journalists. Bottom line: The blogosphere loves the MSM. We read it, inspect it, rip it apart, discuss it, link it. If you want to find someone who actually cares what they write about in the papers, find yourself a blogger. He may hate the MSM, because it should do better, but he loves the idea of having something to learn from, point to and use as a point of departure for thinking about the world. Who else fits that description? A decade around universities convinces me it's not professors or students. Ordinary folks? Only to see who got picked up for DUI and if they've fired the home team's coach yet. Those who actually read the papers are a pretty small demographic, and the easiest way to locate it is not to run focus groups but to check out the characteristics of those who are actually writing back. Which makes it idiotic for the AP to think it has an educational mission of the sort it invokes when it snipes at the heels of the blogosphere. Those who read the newspaper are aware of a need to know more about the world or they wouldn't buy the damn thing. Meaning that the newspapers, and all the others, need to start cleaning up their acts or admitting their biases and more seriously aiming for the partisans' whose causes they not so secretly espouse. Incidentally, this post takes part of its inspiration from a very apolitical place: Steven Den Beste's Chizumatic site. On the site, we find some definitions of anime terms, including this, from the Yale Anime's 100 most important anime words: This, I think, defines the blogosphere and the MSM well in relation to one another. When we face each other, the result is quality reporting and interesting commentary. When we don't, the result is journalistic sludge and bloggy silliness. So, onward bloggers! Hold AP to their duty. It'll make for better reading and better thinking all round. 
posted by gbarto at 2:08 PM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
