Carl Sullivan
Mitch Ratcliffe has only been running the Red HerringBlog since it launched on Jan. 26, but his expertise in blogging and theInternet goes way back. He wrote about networking and other issues forMacWeek back in the '90s and was editor of Digital Media, which chronicledthe Net's early development. Ratcliffe covered Y2K issues for ZD Net beforeheading the content team at ON24, the financial news network. Ratcliffe'spersonal blogging can be read at ratcliffeblog.com.
Now blogging for Red Herring, a defunct tech magazine that was resurrectedonline last fall by entrepreneur Alex Vieux, Ratcliffe is a believer in thepower of Web logs -- both as a tool for and a check on mainstreamjournalists.
1. Is it hype that blogs will "change journalism as we know it"?
Ratcliffe: Let's make a distinction between the tools and the many stylesthat represent "blogging" when you ask that question. Blogging tools areprofoundly easy to use and combine both composition and syndicationcapabilities (with the RSS protocol for distributing content authored usingthese tools). The tools are as transformative as the desktop publishingtools that changed the economics of publishing during the 1980s and early1990s. That technology saw an explosion of new magazines, many addressingsmaller niche markets that would not have been served by individual titlesin the pre-desktop publishing days. Now, we've got not one publication insome of these markets, but several competing for advertising and readers.
So, the tools will definitely transform the news as we know it, because manymore people are able to contribute to the recording of the news. Individualcitizens can tell stories instead of waiting for "the media" to do it. Lookat OhMyNews in Korea, where "Every Citizen's a Reporter," which has brokeninto the top five media outlets in the country. Here in the United States,we have individual bloggers, like Glenn Reynolds, who are breaking intoestablished media outlets by blogging. They build an audience and that willalways catch some company's attention.
Now, will the blogging style, which is personal and conversational in manycases, change journalism? That's not clear, though we can assume thatbloggers' influence will change the expectations about what should be oneditorial, news and feature pages.
The tools will make their changes quickly and the style changes will proceedslowly.
2. Some mainstream outlets such as The New York Times have blog-likecolumns, but they're edited before going online. Do you consider theseefforts true blogs?
MR: I'm not a religionist about the how and what of blogging style. Editedpostings by journalists are a way to lower the cost of putting news on a Webpage; but no one expects those postings to show up on the pages of thenewspaper. The absence of opinion and first-person perspective, though, isgoing to make some of these efforts less successful. Dan Gillmor, of the SanJose (Calif.) Mercury News, is an example of a journalist who uses a blog tofill in the back story of his published work. On his blog, Dan isopinionated, political and all the things that you don't expect a journalistto be; he's a whole person, and some edited blogs pose as personal but readas sterile notes, devoid of the immediacy that makes a blog an interestingand enjoyable read.
3. But what place will blogs have in mainstream journalism, which professesto be objective and nonpolitical?
MR: As I mentioned, they can provide the other half of the story thatdoesn't appear in the news story: Notes about interviews, reflections, andraw material that allow the reader to think along with the writer. It's alsowhere debates about the story can take place, in the comments section of theblog.
News is becoming a dialogue, not a one-way announcement. That can beprofoundly good for democracy, if there are lots of voices with manyopinions. It could also facilitate a mob mentality in which one ideaoverwhelms opinions held by minorities. Journalism won't simply experiencean impact from the rise of blogging tools, publishers and editors will facechoices about what place blogs will have in journalistic endeavors.
4. And how will the independent blogs written by individuals in their sparetime change the news media?
MR: They will fact-check, criticize and debate with the news media, remakingstories and spreading links. Most news blogs wouldn't have anything to writeabout if they weren't pointing to existing news stories about which theywant to comment, so the proliferation of blogs should be generally good forthe readership and traffic figures at commercial Web sites.
What I find most intriguing is the organization of independent bloggers intonews gathering networks. This "civic journalism" will eventually competewith some existing news sources the way OhMyNews has in Korea. I co-foundeda civic journalism site, Correspondences.org, to learn as much about this aspossible. We backup our contributors' efforts to gain press passes to eventsthey might not be able to access as individual citizens and have had somesuccess. We also find that there is a real need for editing, not lineediting as much as helping writers think about how to approach a story andin structuring a story. I can imagine an informal network of civic j-schoolsthat address the need citizens feel when trying to tell a story about eventsthat are important to their community as one eventual form of competition tothe news media. And, I think, these sites can pay for themselves.
5. What's the next evolution for blogs as they relate to news?
MR: We'll see more opinion columns and columnists coming from thejournalistic hinterlands and capturing larger audiences than in the past.The election of 2004 will produce some of these personalities. For example,Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo raised money from his readersto go to New Hampshire to cover the primary. This kind of self-funding, anentrepreneurial journalism if there ever was an example of such a thing, isgoing to propel new voices into the mainstream. I believe thesepersonalities, having proven they have an audience, will find employmentoffers from media companies coming to them, but it's the ones who stick withtheir own blog and keep delivering news and opinion that is unique,informative and engaging, raising money from their audience and, eventually,aligning with others, that will shatter the idea among journalists that astaff job is the safest way to make a living.
We've had freelancers in journalism since the dawn of the press, butblogging tools give these people more leverage to create audiences than everbefore and some of them will build media empires from scratch.
 Zijin (www.zijin.net) studies journalism ,communication, Internet communication. As a privately run website,it was founded on March 18th,2000. Originally named “Zijin Journalism Review", it changed to Zijin on October 18th, 2000. Started by Mr. Zizoo, Zijin is one of China's earlist academic websites on journalism and communication, well-known among its counterparts in China. |
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