Bloggers v. Traditional Journalists

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, has an insightful post on why he prefers good blogs to most traditional journalism (in certain subjects). I’d like to reproduce his reasons here, with my commentary. (The juicy one is #4.)

1) They respect their readers enough to open their comments.

This is hugely important: the web is fundamentally a many-to-many, peer-to-peer medium. Unlike many other popular media, which are one-to-many (i.e. broadcast media: TV, radio, newspapers), the same technology to view a web page is also the technology to create a web page. Even if bloggers didn’t open their comments, people could still respond on their own sites.

2) When they make mistakes, they tend to correct them.

Right, on the Web it’s a lot easier to make corrections.

3) They understand that every factual statement that can be linked to its source, should be.

Hugely important feature of the web #2: it’s hypertext. The greatest way to organize ideas since indices and tables of contents. You may be interested to read about the history of hypertext.

4) Because they have little default institutional authority, they go overboard backing up what they say with evidence. Unsourced assertions are frowned on. In this way, paradoxically enough, blogs are often more rigorous than traditional journalism, because they have to earn their readers’ trust, not just assume it.

I disagree that they have little institutional authority. Virtually all bloggers that I consider ‘A-list’ are either academics (e.g. Volokh, Lessig, Instapundit) or respected experts in their field (e.g. Joel on Software, Zeldman, the B.B. crew). These bloggers often have more expertise than traditional journalists who must cover a wider range of subjects. My point segues so nicely into Anderson’s next point that I think he’s contradicting himself:

They’re often written by practitioners, not just observers, and as a result they tend to get the details right.

Right. Practitioners, academics. Two sides of the same coin.

If their information source is some random, unverified bar conversation or even just their own opinion, they’re usually big enough to admit it.

Um, incredible sources are a bane of bloggers and journalists. But blogging is a comparatively new medium and nobody has established themselves as the paragon of the blogging empire. Everybody’s doing it for the first time and making mistakes, and that requires a certain humility. Also, while newspapers only have to publish that tiny little ‘corrections’ box when they’re wrong, an overzealous blogger can quickly incur the wrath of hundreds of angry bloggers.