A Subjective Transcript

The September 17, 2002, Panel Sponsored by the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Entitled "Weblogs — Challenging Mass Media and Society"

Part 2 (of 2)

Are webloggers reporters?

J.D.: " When they're doing journalism they are." Scott: "That question always bothers me." (I jot the follow-up question: "Are phone users journalists?") Scott mentions the intent of the person creating the blog, the question of a commitment to traditional standards of accuracy, the need to ascertain reality first and then report it, also regularity and timeliness? (Scot Hacker says to me he thinks less than 1% are journalism, most are editorial, parasitic.)

Scott says that most weblogs are closer to opinion journalism. Scot asks, "Links with commentary is journalism? (evoking Scott R's "linkalist" article in Salon). Rebecca says "No," but cites the Daily Summit, a group journalistic blog coverining the Johannesburg Sustainability summit of a few weeks ago. Still, she agrees, "99.99% of weblogs are not journalism." Weblogs are not in and of themselves journalism, she says.

Rebecca says, "I've never considered myself a journalis[t]," and that she's surprised the professional journalists see blogs as journalism. Dan counters: "I'm not so sure weblogs are not journalism, and they're certainly part of the process that adds up to journalism." Dan talks about d.i.y. journalism vs. late 20th century mass-media journalism, how gatekeepers gather news from sources, how more people are involved in the creation of valuable — often accurate — information. (I write "RCB is the conservative in this")

Dan cites Dave Farber's interesting people mailing list as journalism, saying that aggregation of secondary sources is not all that bad. Matt Drudge, he says, " isn't my kind of journalist but he's a journalist." Weblogs, he says, are just a piece of the puzzle ... but it would be a mistake not to use them as sources. And as with any source, he says, quoting old editors, "If your mother says she loves you check it out."

There is a general discussion of the rise of single-source experts, as compared to generalists , as most journalists are. Dan says "something major is going on that is bringing journalism from the top down and from the bottom up. They won't meet in the middle, but there is there is some change that i'd like to use ."

J.D. says, "to me a journalist is anyone who is an eyewitness to or interpreter of events who reports is as honestly as accurately as possible. You don't need the resources of the New York Times [to do journalism]." This raises the question of how the reader judges credibility. For better or worse we all have our opinion about the veracity of the New York Times, but how about the Poor Man's blog? J.D. agrees with Rebecca in saying that what the vast majority of weblogs are doing is not journalism, but "a lot of it is," citing eyewitnesses to 9/11, Dave Winer's Scripting News.

(I wonder, are journalists as a group nervous when so many do for free something similar to what they expect to be paid to do? Then I wonder if we'll need to start distinguishing mainstream or pro journalists from bloggers if bloggers become the dominant type of journalist someday.)

From the audience: the web allows an alternative construction of news

An audience member says, "Regarding the social construction of information and news, it's not necessarily acknowledged that reporters and media construct information. Online we can construct it differently from how huge news informations want us to. I've been doing research with online breast cancer community and how they construct medical news and information...." (I think that the blogosphere and the mainstream newsmedia inhabit a continuum, there are subcommunities, microcommunities, overlapping and separate spheres of discourse.)

Someone says, "Weblogs don't need to ride on the coattails of journalism to be doing something significant." (I agree with this but noticing the similarities is OK, though, right?) J.D. says he's not saying the journalism validates weblogs.

There's a question about whether journalists are nervous and defensive, in fear of being put out of business.

Is journalism threatened by weblogs?

Dan tells the story of the Kaycee hoax, how Metafilter bloggers checked county courthouses and did the online legwork to expose the hoax. (I think, "This information has always been public but now people really feel empowered to look it up when they would have left it to journalists and the Jim Rockfords of the world in the past.")

Rebecca asks of the Kaycee hoax group debunking, "What makes it journalism?" She points out that his was done on Metafilter, mentioning "I was there," and saying it was just people finding something out. Dan says, "Publication makes it journalism." Rebecca says, "But that was the only way to discuss it." Scott Rosenberg cites the Time cyberporn cover story, and how journalists on the well collectively tore the article to shreds and pitched and wrote countering articles.

(And I think, "It was not a private e-mail list Scooby gang effort. It was done in public.")

Another audience question: Could the relationship between bloggers and mass media be compared to how hackers poke holes in security, demonstrating weakness and ultimately strengthening the community? Great question! The panel enjoys it but has no real comment.

J.D. adds, "You don't have to be paid to do legitimate work." He mentions how the media and weblogs are in competition for readers and tells of how at one point the Sacramento Bee restricted coverage of the web, making all web stories go through a single gatekeeper. He reiterates that reporters use weblogs as sources.

Blogosphere as neural net, global brain?

I ask my question, citing John Hiler's article in Corante's Microcontent News blog about the role of weblogs in the new media ecosystem, asking whether perhaps more important than any single popular or well written weblog is the overall ecology or ecosystem of blogs and the information it tends to link to or point to or discuss (mentioning Blogdex, Daypop, Metalinker, Google, Trackback, RSS, and so on). I ask if perhaps my blog is just one neuron in an emerging global brain. The blog neural net?

We agree these tools are in their infancy. Dan says, "How this all fits together is going to be fascinating to watch. The tools suck right now but they're getting better fast." He mentions the semantic web and XML.

Scott asks why all this daypopping and memetracking isn[base ']t going to turn into groupthink and Dan allows that it may end up that way. (I note that the level of effort is above that of couch potato, someone mentiones the Neilsen rating system. Blogging is easy but it requires some active thought. Also, I'm thinking, if the real information is in who is linking to who and how often and how many and so on, then we need to do a better job of tracking the links. I think about how TrackBack rides on pings and makes metablogs painfully easy to aggregate. Maybe the ping is the OS deep down?)

Scott mention growing pains and scaling problem, the risk of approaching a mass mean, when celebrities will top all the charts. Someone says we'll have tools to sift through and focus our searches. Someone else says anything that expands the ecosystem is a healthy thing. That ideas are bubbling up from regular folks given a chance to comment.

(I think about "READERS WHO ARE ALSO WRITERS.")

Someone mentions that people will still turn to traditional media for authentication. (Will that be their function? "I read this on the Web" right now does not imply any degree of credibility. I am reminded of the messengers I used to work with in New York, who could win arguments by saying "I READ IT IN THE NEW YORK POST" or the masterstroke: "I SAW IT ON THE COVER OF NEWSWEEK")

Another question from the audience: "Scott, are you elitist? The point of the web to encourage mass participation." Scott says, "I'm not sure I agree the point of the web is to encourage mass participation. The protocols can be used in many ways. The U.S. government today thinks the web is a tool for terrorists." He goes on to clarify, "If we say there's value in weblogs because the unusual signal will come through, as more and more participants come in to the pot, the ability to find things becomes harder." Someone mentions Google zeitgeist.

Echo chambers

Rebecca says, "I'm disturbed by echo chambers in the weblog universe. People often link only to people who agree with their own point of view." She says things were better, more open, Back in the day when there were only 100 of us." Now "little clusters have their own mass. That's the thing that's disturbing me about weblogs."

Another audience question, about side links, or blogrolls: Do they run counter to individualism? Rebecca says, "Most of us who started and most of us who are still doing this linked to each other to find community, things we were all interested in. This drives traffic. We are amplified each other's voices." (I ask myself, how is this different from the echo chambers formed by the masses? Does Rebecca just not like other people's choices of who to link to?)

Dan says he doesn't link to many other journalists, but instead links to regular joes and people whose politics are off-the-wall. As long as they are really good weblogs. But he also says, "I don't mix it up enough." Someone (Rebecca, Meg?) mentions "vehement disagreements over war, peace, and RSS."

Another audience question about whether traditional media is threatened financially by bloggers.

Does economics come into this?

Reb says, "The weblogger pays to blog." Meg say, "The traditional journalistic site tries to get traffic and keep it. The blog idea is about sending you off to your own information, with the belief that you'll come back of your own free choice."

The audience member asks, "Are your sources all renaissance people who can do and think about a topic but don't need to earn a living?" This provokes laugher. Reb says the "for the most part" it is "impassioned amateurs." Meg says a lot of topics are covered. The first ones tended to be people in the web industry,but people talk about their hobbies, to connect and share info, to form communities.

(I note to myself that blogs can be used for networking, to build reputation, to enhance credibility, for writers as a way of practicing and promoting writing, for hobbyists.)

Reb mentions knitting, Meg Mustang convertibles from 1965. J.D. mentions niche experts in their own field, and the question why go to a journalist who's getting it all second-hand?

Scot Hacker from the audience mentions the "economy of ego" (also sometimes called the "attention economy"). Meg says, "It's not just not money. I get an incredible amount of gifts, items fro my wishlist, and so on." Rebecca makes the "come on" gesture, with a "where's my swag?" look of mock indignation. From the audience I ask, "but does it scale?"

Dan says that most weblogs have "the same business model as community theatre." They will be a business for some but not most. He picks up on the idea of the rise of the individual expert, who does some one thing so well in efffect they become a journalist in the traditional sense (for that one beat, just as one of Corante's bloggers asked if he was really a journalist since he had written all of his articles on one subject—blogging—and can a journalist really pick their own beat, or is that more the matter of are you doing it for a living or are you doing something else for a living and subsidizing the time you spend doing this, which tends to be viewed as a hobby). He cites Glenn Fleischmann, whose blog on 802.11 wireless technology is the single best source of information on that beat.

Another comment from the audience: So blogging may not necessarily be about daily posts. It may be about finding experts. There might be a corporate model of self-organizing knowledge management. This is a different way of organizing the web and bringing it down to the individual person.

Dan says that some people say blogging is the best resume.

Mihail Lari from the Blogging Network asks from the audience a question about business model. He mentions the subscription model he's using for the BN, and says that more experts would love to be able to make money doing it. He mentions how blogs are sometimes derided as "conduit content vs. destination content, as if a link doesn't have enough value, but the web is all based on links. Al ink has a lot of value. I've stopped reading newspapers, but nick denton's blog on business and technology, makes me read more than i used to."

Another audience question compares individual blogging and group weblogs, asking, "When does a group weblog become a publication?" And "Why is the mercury news not a group weblog in a sense."

When is a group blog a publication?

Dan cites Slashdot whose content is generated by readers, but which now also runs interviews. Dan says that of course to get any value out of a site like Slashdot you have to "set the moderation threshold high."

(I think about the way the web forces publications to think about community, and what I learned from publishing Enterzone, and how I'd like to do it again someday using what I've learned since.)

My next notes read like a little poem:

this is something new
this grand conversation
it's clearly a publication

Is it a weblog? Slashdot, Kuro5hin and Metafilter are all sometimes referred to as community or group weblogs. Rusty from Kuro5hin calls it "collaborative media." (I also think of the MORNING NEWS, a collaborative zine published with MT, and American Times, an aggregated blog publication also managed with MT.)

Question from the audience about Salon, TableTalk, and the Well, asking "When are you out of weblogs and into forums?"

Weblogs compared with forums

Scott answers, "These are all different structures mostly defined and characterized by the software behind them."

Scott Rosenberg notes that Radio treats comments as second-class content (something discussed on Erik's Geekfun Emergency in the early days of Salon blogs). There is an infinite spectrum of possibilities, ranging in terms of moderation or not, group vs. individual, personal vs. professional, and so on.

(I nudge Scot to remind him of his recent statement about weblog software, saying that the software itself is political by what behaviors it enables or discourages. He gives credit to Lessig for the original.)

"Software," says Scott, "is created by people trying to do one thing, but the people using it find new ways to adapt it." The audience member follows up: "I asked because forum software is more attuned toward subject matter, threads, folders. (I know nothing about weblogs, I've never looked at one). Do you organize them by categories, subjects, etc.?"

Categories, metadata, and pings

"Yes," answers Scott, "but it's pretty crude right now. Scott or Dan says, "The architecture of the stuff determines a lot about how it's going to look." He compares the architecture of a magazine, a newspaper, or a TV show to that of a weblog. Right now, he says, there are a relatively limited number of relatively easy tools for doing personal publishing with many common features. This practice is stil lso young. Dan talks about "the idea of the web as a read and write medium (vs. the Hollywood vision of TV on steroids). We're just at the beginning of the write part of the read/write web."

Another audience question: "Do you guys ever talk about coming up with metadata around weblogs?" Various people say yes. Rebecca reiterates that individual weblogs are typically reverse chronological with archives, and that some blog tools have categories.) There are some metadata projects. Mostly volunteer projects. Meg adds, "One thing hard about metadata is that blog content clumped into posts. Each page has multiple posts. Each article different metadata (she rattles off potential entry topics: my cat, RSS, getting a reservation at the French Laundry).

Paul says, " Conversations spread through weblogs, linked together, This is both fascinating and maddening." He cites a dispute over Cynthia McKinney's donors, the former Georgia congresswoman who just lost a primary. "There's some real journalism going on there."

Rebecca mentions trackback pings as another metadata tool. (I keep thinking this is key. TrackBack is like a stalking horse for a stealth blog infrastructure in which pings are used to aggregate weblog posts by topic.) Dan warns, " There will be a problem when marketing community discover pings" (and their application to TrackBack, and weblogs.com).

J.D. says weblogs are "a lot more honest in a lot of ways than the traditional media. When is the last time the Times credited the Post for a story they broke the day before?"

Another audience member continues talking about TrackBack and following conversations across weblogs: "What interests me is the concept of space. Suddenly you can go back and forth. This is people sharing a SPACE. Are there summaries, comments?"

The Salon Blog community vis-à-vis Salon

Rebecca mentions how Scott is filtering Salon weblogs, posting links to notable blogs or thought-provoking entries at Salon blogs. Scott is gracious enough to say that the community has gotten too big for just one person to cover and that he replies on other Salon blogs, such as Radio Free Blogistan, to help him out with that.

He mentions the Radio community server: and how it aggregates rankings and updates. There's a discussion about keeping permanent referrer links and not having them cleared out each day. In theory a rankin g system like this could be gamed. "Some Salon Blogs have no interest in the 'community'," says Scott. "Others are very interested."

A question about the echo chamber idea and the social space being shared, about Metafilter and putting up with people of opposite beliefs. Rebecca distinguished moderating by community standards or by an individual moderator, noting that weblogs have been more personal. "People choose who they want to link to. You can't make them."

A question: Do publishers like Salon or the Mercury news take any risk by giving unedited webloggers a green light? Scott says that Salon blogs "are unedited by us. We're not stepping in to change the content. The blog is copyright the blogger, not us. Our role is like that of an ISP in that portion of what we're publishing." (So they're really in the hosting business there?) "We are protected under the telecomm act," he goes on. "I hope it won't be tested. Of course, problems will arise sooner or later."

Another question: "How do you draw the line between Salon content and the blogs?" Scott says, "The are on different servers, running different software. Salon's own content linked to from home page. A section of home page now links to my weblog and to pages that list the recently updated and rankings and how to start."

"Soon we'll probably start adding links to featured weblogs from the community of bloggers. We're still working out the details of how to do that," he says. "That will be the first time it gets blurred." These links are editorially selected, links on the home page, pointing to content bloggers creating. "Are there legal issues?" asks Scott. " No. Are there social issues? Maybe. How did I make choices? Why didn't you link to me. Why did you link to me?"

Rebecca asks Scott, "Do you reserve the right to stop hosting a site if you disagree with the content?" Scott says, "We adopted Userland's terms of service. It covered our bases: no editing content, but we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. If we did that in a clumsy and ham-handed way, it would get out. It's the nature of the medium, and we'd lose customers."

Another question related to last question: "Some of these blog postings are migrating to the mainstream media. If you're doing journalism, and you put up stuff you wouldn't necessarily publish, stuff that's 'not ready for prime time,' is there a risk of migrating more innuendo, rumor, etc. to the mainstream?"

Do weblogs give the mainstream media another excuse to cover innuendo, rumor, etc.?

Dan's reply: "What do you mean 'a possibility'?" The idea that rumor and innuendo are reported as news already is discussed, with the Gennifer Flowers story coming from the tabloids. (So, can newspapers now use "it's on the Web" as a reason to cover a story? If people are talking about it, it's news? "The people have a right to know." Does it devolve to pop-media-pablum as Scott wondered?) Answers from the panel: "Mainstream journalism standards have dropped for quite a while, regarding publishing rumor and innuendo." "I don't equate weblogs with the National Enquirer." (JD or Dan?)

Dan, I think, goes onto say that he is (or the media are) "leery of bright lines on any of this." He said his writing is "more colloquial on the weblog than in the column, but not that much more. Some things I won't say because they're against the rules. I'm not going to libel people." So his weblog upholds journalistic standards.

Unasked question: Should journalistic ethics be adopted by webloggers?

Dan also says, "I like the idea of more casual, conversational journalism." J.D. adds: "There is a possible downside the mainstream media should guard itself against. In the Monica Lewinsky time, leaks, innuendoes, and rumors were published as news. There was a lot of soul searching in the industry about the ethics of reporting a secondhand rumor that you couldn't verify." (I note: The TRICK: Report that people are reporting the rumor.). "Our obligation was to the readers," is how J.D. characterizes the argument, "and since the rumor was out there, we thought it was our obligation to report." Dan: "The 'out there' defense." J.D.: "I still don't believe in the 'out there' defense." (So journalists still have a gatekeeper role?)

Audience question: I've always been afraid that nobody would go to a website without e-mail to remind them to. I use eGroups.com. Do bloggers rely on membership signup lists?

Rebecca say "Nobody does that" (but some do! Bloglet is a plug-in and MT comes with the feature built-in, I believe. Not sure if it's whole posts or notifications). People discuss Blogger feature and MT features, and RSS as another notification system. Others mention email subscription, and Scott Rosenber says, "It's no big deal to send a snapshot of a weblog once a day by mail." (I think: You can send reminders, headlines, excerpts, full-text, and so on.) Meg complains that RSS removes the design from a site and hence much of the personality. Rebecca says, "I've never been interested in an RSS feed myself. My reward for doing my site [is the visitors]. I still blog by hand. It's too hard to add RSS by hand."

An audience question asks the panel to compare weblogs with chat and message boards.

Blog vs. chat vs. BBS (...vs IM vs email vs Usenet)

Rebecca says, "Message boards require someone to manage them," and talked about adding a forum to site. "I'm usually not impressed by the message boards at news sites. There are maniacs. It requires moderators. They cost money to do. Chat might be expensive. How would it tie in with news?"

Scott echoes the last question: "How would chat apply to news? Would it be on the same page? one click away? tied to content? ZDnet's talkback always featured endless posts summarized by the first few words. You had to click each individual comment." There is speculation that this tortuous clickthrough interface had to do with ad impressions. Scot (who was a ZDnet writer and editor in a former life) confirms it.

Dan says he's fairly sure there will be a job description or category, sometime soon, for online discussion moderator. Scott says, "We've had them on the staff for years," referring to TableTalk and possibly the Well as well.

Dan says, "For mainstream (that is, not born online like Salon) publications, [adoption may be slower]. We've done moderated ones, unmoderated ones. We've had scripts popping up, vile pornography. There are an amazing number of people out there just trying to wreck things because it's fun for them to wreck things. Still, you have to do something to bring conversation into the newsroom."

At the end, J.D. or Paul asks that anyone blogging the conference please submit their URLs.

{Back to Part 1}