A number of readers objecting to a story or editorial in the newspaper gleefully anticipate the demise of the Mainstream Media, or Old Media or even (ouch!) Corporate Media. Some say they don’t trust it and prefer to get all their news and information from the Internet.
My first impulse is to ask them if they think what they are reading online appears without human intervention.
News reports on the Internet, (a.k.a. New Media) on individual Web sites and from “news aggregators” such as Google and Yahoo and AOL all depend, of course, on mainstream newspapers and magazines, and on cable and broadcast news operations.
There is no substitute for an investigative reporter examining documents, a writer sitting through a trial or a correspondent witnessing events in Baghdad or Beirut. The work of people asking questions, seeing (and photographing) events, uncovering truth or fragments of a larger truth is what informs the public.
But I suspect what readers are telling us is that the attraction of the online world is not only the immediacy of information, but their desire for interaction: to be able to comment and reflect on events, to explore others’ thoughts or to express their own frustrations and pleasure and anger.
That desire has given rise to the blogging world.
A Weblog or blog is basically a Web site that contains a personal journal. It includes the writer’s commentary and reflections and usually sets up hyperlinks to other Web sites and encourages readers to join in the conversation.
There are millions of blogs, but the number that actually have impact beyond family, friends and those with similar interests is probably only several thousand. Just as talk radio attracted millions of listeners, bloggers gradually hope to draw the same size audience (and have a big impact on the next presidential election).
Tribune columnist Eric Zorn was a blogging pioneer at this newspaper, starting his own Weblog three years ago this month.
In the past two months, Zorn has experimented by putting highlights and responses to his “Change of Subject” blog into newsprint on Page 2 of the Sunday Metro section. Essentially it is closing the circle around readers of his newspaper column and his blog.
Thirteen other Tribune journalists, including Maureen Ryan and Steve Johnson, are contributing blogs on chicagotribune.com on topics from television to sports to, yes, the Internet. For political junkies, correspondents in the Washington bureau collectively post news and commentary to a blog wryly called “The Swamp.”
Those efforts reflect ways this newspaper is trying to attract readers and adjust to the growth of the Internet. Another is that Dodie Hofstetter, who is in charge of Voice of the People, receives up to 2,000 letters a week, though only about 70 are used in print. Now she routinely posts 10 to 20 additional letters online a day.
My question about blogs is what will they contribute beyond conventional opinions, the occasional “gotcha” to politicians and to other media, and the opportunity to vent?
Those calls, letters and e-mail messages foretelling the demise of the Mainstream Media in favor of blogs and other online offerings led me to think of the late I.F. Stone, an independent journalist whose career flourished long before the Internet.
Stone, who published his own newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, and then wrote for The Nation magazine, was so Old Media in interests and style but such a model for the New Media. Today you might think of him as a proto-blogger.
He had strong opinions on race and integration, on the presidency and the Vietnam War. In his heyday in the ’50s and ’60s, he wrote of his disdain for Sen. Joe McCarthy and displayed irreverence toward FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. An unabashed socialist, he skewered members of both political parties.
A few years ago, The Nation’s Victor Navasky wrote a tribute to Stone, noting that though “… he never attended presidential press conferences, cultivated no highly placed inside sources and declined to attend off-the-record briefings, time and again he scooped the most powerful press corps in the world.
“His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in the Congressional Record, study obscure congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets … contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties.”
What makes Stone a model, whether to the Mainstream or the New Media, is at the core of journalism–he reported.
He had plenty of opinions and shared them eloquently, but the backbone of Stone’s work was giving the public information that was new or largely unknown. Because he could document the information, his columns had credibility, a quality that is essential to success in whatever medium.
