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Blogs to kill traditional media?

Friday | December 10, 2004 | 2:23 pm  

Sev­eral recent things have gotten me think­ing more deeply about blogs.

The first is the announce­ment that Dan Gilmor is leav­ing the Merc to pursue an grass­roots / open-​source jour­nal­ism effort.

The second was an inter­est­ing tidbit from Tom Curley, CEO of the AP:

Deliv­er­ing a keynote speech at the Online News Asso­ci­a­tion con­fer­ence in Hol­ly­wood, he said a change is taking place right now in which broad­band access, Web search, RSS feeds, and weblogs are coming together to “unlock the con­tent from any vessel in which we try to con­tain it.”

Ever since blogs’ mind-​share started rising among the pop­u­lace and the media, I’ve been noodling their affect(s) and place in the media landscape.

Aside from hard-​core tra­di­tion­al­ists, who would say “blogging isn’t journalism,” or “blogs, my doctor said I’ve got a benign one of those,” most are insert­ing blogs into the tra­di­tional media circuit.

Take a look at what Curley says about the new “atomic content.”

Curley acknowl­edged the dif­fi­culty of build­ing a new eco­nomic model for jour­nal­ism built around “atomic content,” but pointed to bright spots in the trans­for­ma­tion, espe­cially the “emergence of an engaged audience” that can be seen form­ing around the news in the con­text of weblogs.

In this case, Curley, and others, are insert­ing the blo­gos­phere in the feed­back por­tion of that diagram.

But, I think that’s just a rehash­ing of the old-​school “we pub­lish, you listen” model of journalism.

The prob­lem is that blogs are more than just a method of feed­back for the tra­di­tional media.

So what is a blog, really? What does it mean to the tra­di­tional media? Tune in again for more, same pun­ditry chan­nel, same pun­ditry time. (Or check my RSS feed for updates.)

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