Month: October 2009

Megan Garber has a thoughtful and all-around excellent piece at the Columbia Journalism Review that looks at how mainstream media and several blogs handled a story about Justice Antonin Scalia and comments he made about a landmark anti-segregation ruling:

In the teeming world of the Web — one defined not merely by seemingly endless variety on the part of news outlets, but also by, consequently, seemingly endless choice among news consumers — one of the rarest and therefore most valuable commodities is trust.

That tenuous good — a function of authority, accuracy, and audience attention — is a limited resource largely because one of its key components — attention — is itself finite. Each audience member has only a limited amount of attention he or she can give to news stories. And that limited resource, in turn, leads to a tension between plenty — the variety and redundancy of news outlets available to audiences — and scarcity. With the end result being, among other things, that no longer is reader loyalty something that can be safely assumed, in the old ‘well, where else are they going to go for their news?’ model. In our world of media plenty, no longer is the cultivation of trust one component of the journalistic equation; it is a key component. It is, in many ways, the component: If people doubt the accuracy of the journalism you produce — or, worse, if they don’t pay attention to it in the first place — then what, really, is the point?

For bloggers, whose journalism evolved with the Web, the visceral instinct toward trust — the implicit recognition of its primacy—is coded, so to speak, into their journalistic DNA. Mainstream outlets, on the other hand — outlets which, up to now, have been able to take their readership largely for granted — don’t generally share that instinct. They’ve always been interested in cultivating trust, of course — trust builds audiences, which builds both revenue and journalistic impact—but their relationship with trust has been more detached. They’ve generally understood trust as something to be ‘earned’…but not as something that is implicitly, and existentially, necessary. While they’ve had to work to maintain reader trust…they haven’t had to work too hard at it. Because, again: where else are the readers going to go?

As my friend Craig Newmark likes to say: “Trust is the new black.”

Micah Sifry talks about how Atrios and Digby see the blogosphere evolving, and the rise of corporate blog entities.

Is political blogging no longer a place for the individual, crusading voice? Do you have to be part of a group blog, and ideally backed by a big media property, to flourish in the national political blogosphere in the U.S.? Two powerful indie-bloggers, the pseudonymous Digby and the once-pseudonymous Atrios (Duncan Black), posted links back to my Friday post about Technorati’s new top blogs metric, that in essence expressed nostalgia for those good ‘ol days when all it took was a PC and a strong point of view to make it in the Big Blogcity.

One of the interesting elements in all this is how it’s a self-reinforcing problem (or a vicious circle), because of the linking policy at “big media” outlets.

It’s worth paying closer attention to Digby’s point about who links to whom. In essence, she is saying that when it comes to the link economy, indie bloggers are more generous than Big Media types, who she says mainly just link to each others. And I think she’s right; the linking patterns discerned by our friends at Linkfluence show that in general, the blogs at big newspapers sites are far less likely to link to “regular” bloggers than the reverse. And this isn’t a matter of one type of blogger (the indie), simply “leeching” content from the content generators, since Big Media bloggers are just as often doing their own opinionizing as much as they are reporting real news.

Whether we like it or not, this may well be a serious trend, one that doesn’t bode well for independent bloggers.

At my request, HuffPo supplied some details: Facebook referral traffic is up 48 percent since the launch—and the already-heavy volume of comments jumped to 2.2 million from 1.7 million in July. Fifteen percent of HuffPo comments now come from Facebook. In September, Facebook referrals accounted for 3.5 million visits, up 190 percent from June and 500 percent from January. Those numbers continue to build, according to HuffPo’s internal stats.

An excellent post at Columbia Journalism Review by Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. She’s responding to the Downie/Schudson report on The Reconstruction of American Journalism, which you can download as a PDF here or read online here:

In looking to reconstruct journalism, I’d start not by asking how do we get money for what we’ve always done. I’d ask instead: How do we provide something worth paying for? As a long-time news consumer, I have recoiled at much of what we are rendering as “journalism.”

What if it’s not just the business model of journalism that is broken? What if the way we are doing our journalism is broken, too? How are some of the new media makers trying to fix that?

Highly recommended.