Kevin Carson has a lengthy blog post here proclaiming the practice of blogging (or online journalism) as a superior emerging form relative to traditional reporting. Some excerpts:
The revolutionary significance of Internet journalism lies not in how it generates content, but in the use it makes of existing content. Bloggers make better use of the dead tree media's own content than the dead tree media itself does.
...nobody disputes that print journalism has an enormous army of reporters on the ground, far beyond the resources online journalism has at its direct disposal. But as Lincoln once said to General McClellan, “If you're not going to use that army, may I borrow it?”
...
Bloggers may well be unoriginal, in the sense that they only link to what's already out there rather than reporting new information. But they use what's out there in ways that most traditional newspapers refrain from doing. That is, they put it together. They quote a factual claim from one source, and then immediately provide a hyperlink to information that provides a factual context to the claim. They take bits and pieces of news from different sources, aggregate it, and draw conclusions as to its meaning.
This advantage of networked, online journalism—making better use of traditional journalism's content than traditional journalism itself does—is only one particular illustration of the more general advantage of networked, open-source culture. Open-source culture is about eliminating proprietary boundaries on content, and leaving anyone and everyone free to build on and improve it without regard to organizational boundaries. The main difference between Windows and Linux lies not in what the primary code-writers do, but in what user and developer communities can do with other people's code.
...
Mainstream journalism is heavily influenced by Walter Lippman's model of "professional objectivity," which in practice means the journalist pretends to be stupider than he really is. The journalist, in order to project an air of "neutrality," deliberately refrains both from drawing obvious conclusions from factual evidence, and from going beyond quotes from the spokemen for "both sides" to report factual evidence as to who's telling the truth. Fake "objectivity" means not drawing obvious conclusions from the facts, and pretending not to notice facts that reflect on the truth what one side or the other claims. Appealing independently to an objective factual realm, to present information that doesn't come from "either side," would itself be (according to the current institutional mindset) "taking sides." But to the extent that the "two sides" can't both be right at the same time, truth itself is "biased." There is no way to maintain a pose of neutrality except by avoiding independent recourse to the factual realm.
...
Rather than simply reporting "he said, she said," journalists should provide the information necessary to evaluate the truthfulness of the competing claims. And although most mainstream journalists don't do this, it's a major part of what blogs are all about. Bloggers do exactly what mainstream journalists should be doing, but aren't.
Carson's focus is political in the piece, but most of what he says applies to sports blogging as well. The excerpts above nicely summarize many of the reasons I began - and continue - to blog myself as well as consume a lot of blogger generated content on a daily basis. Im sure this isn't a terribly engaging issue for most, but if you have any interest at all in the ongoing argument between new and old media, make sure to check it out.
