A spectre is haunting the world of newspapers — the spectre of the blogosphere. There are currently more than 100 million weblogs or ‘blogs’ worldwide, about 15 percent of which are believed to be active. Most are produced by zealous amateurs who analyse traditional reportage by linking to online news items and supplying short, usually provocative comments. Publication costs are essentially zero, providing you have a computer with an Internet connection, after that only political sensitivities – particularly those in China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria – need to be considered. Luckily, if you annoy the government enough for them to imprison you, there are also blogs that will tirelessly petition for your release, as has happened with Fouad Al-Farhan, the “father of Saudi blogging”, who was arrested last year.
Like seventeenth century English pamphleteers, bloggers delight in their maverick status and are mostly unconstrained by the etiquette of print journalism. Taken together their subjects are as various as humanity, some devoted to gossip, politics, books, science, war, pornography, movies and computers, others to industrial design, parenthood, photography, opera, classical music and philosophy. A few years ago this remarkable growth of amateur curiosity was dismissed as little more than an Internet fad, but it is now becoming clear that many blogs will have a permanent impact on the way information is handled in dreaded ‘mainstream media’ they so passionately critique.
In 2005 the executive editor of the New York Times declared that bloggers could do no more than “recycle and chew on the news.” Shortly afterwards, a series of bloggers scooped the Times’s coverage of the Valerie Plame CIA-leak story, and set a pattern for subsequent big-media embarrassments. First a newspaper, magazine or television network would report something, then bloggers would dissect it, then the original publisher would apologize for the deficiencies of its story and, tacitly, cede the moral high ground to the triumphant gadflies. One year after the Plame story, CBS – itself humbled by bloggers in the ‘Rathergate’ scandal — would play catchup with the blogosphere when it confirmed a scoop by rawstory.com that Plame had been gathering intelligence on Iran before she was ousted.
This role reversal is hardly surprising when you consider that unlike traditional media, most bloggers have no deadlines or other management constraints and can therefore pursue stories for as long as their energy and patience allow. As MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann told Rolling Stone magazine: “They’re looking for scraps, rumours. They’ll spend hours that I don’t have, to go digging.” As its ability to tease newsworthy stories out of those scraps and rumours has improved, the blogosphere has evolved into a parallel form of journalism: today a number of political websites have been successful enough to carry out their own newsgathering, several have even become primary sources for the mainstream media.
Much of this is seen as evidence that newspapers will soon be obsolete. After all, who wants yesterday’s news in a bundle of ink and cellulose when up-to-the-minute disclosures can be found online? But this rather bleak diagnosis may be premature. Apart from accountability and trustworthiness (both essential to a newspaper’s reputation, though only marginal to most blogs) traditional reportage tends to have experience, judgement and access on its side. Over time, reporters learn about their ‘beat’, how to tell what is news from what is merely novel, they also learn how to cultivate reliable sources who can leak inconvenient truths when public interest is frustrated by corporations or the government. These skills are not easily duplicated, they require time and effort and quite often sizable long-term investments.
That is why most leading bloggers, especially in politics and current affairs, are former reporters. They haven’t reinvented the news so much as rerouted it outside traditional media. Far from being outsiders, they are mostly disillusioned insiders who wish to develop the new public spaces created by the information age. Instead of being harbingers of the death of print media, they could be taken as a sign of its evolution. Printed stories now have a digital afterlife that both widens and sharpens their focus, and in a few cases reveals them as fiction, or dismisses them altogether. Surely this is a good thing.
There are already a number of successful West Indian bloggers, and as their audiences grow they will inevitably encroach upon the territory of traditional news organizations. This ought to be encouraged by all newspaper readers, especially those of us in Guyana who have such a large and active diaspora community watching local developments from afar. Anything that widens our national conversation, and turns it away from our stagnant ethnic squabbles to focus on the sort of debates that routinely animate this newspaper’s letter columns ought to be welcomed with both arms.
