What's happened to good, old-fashioned journalism?
By that, I mean sourced journalism. In the cyber world, it doesn't exist anymore -€“ and that's unfortunate.
Web sites like gawker.com and technorati.com are more like celebrity tabloid magazines one would find at a checkout lane of a supermarket than "the source for daily Manhattan media news and gossip," like gawker.com suggests.
I did a simple search of Paris Hilton on both of the Web sites. The technorati Web site gave me these results. On gawker.com, Ms. Hilton is at the top of the "hot topics" on the right-hand side of the page. Here are the results. It's all gossip.
The unusual and entertaining nature of this content is what drives bloggers to this hot topics list. News Web sites cannot get away with bold, biased statements about the recent Hilton car wreck such as what Gawker said: "There's nothing even slightly suspicious about a car full of professional party monkeys smashing a Bentley into the back of a truck outside of a club at 2:30 a.m. In fact, we're pretty sure the valet service at Element will plow your vehicle into the stationary object of your choice for a ten dollar surcharge. Wrecking your own ride is so five minutes ago."
The cyber world may be heading down the path of an unattributed, pure shock-value style of journalism. So what makes gawker.com credible? It's updated 24 times a day, according to the Web site. It's occasionally been included in the "soft sections" of the New York Times.
People on this hot list have also changed the meaning of news in the cyber world. Included on the list are Hilton, Gawker Stalker, Tara Reid, Tina Brown and Conde Nast -€“ huh? Hilton and Reid are equivalent to news evergreen stories for cyber space -€“ bloggers will always be interested in them.
The sheer image of Hilton here on this blog should attract viewers.
These Web sites are slowly moving away from respected, credible journalism by blogging about lustful individuals with little to no traditional news value.
Using Gawker and Technorati as examples to compare against the New York Times is really a straw man argument. Why not look at examples like New West, or Coastsider, or Wikinews?
Gawker and T aren't competing with newspapers. Gawker's competing with gossip columns, and doing quite well at it. Technorati is a search service, it's not a news product.
I am not sure a story on the Brussel Sprout Festival on Coastsider was what Eric had in mind when he tossed off this piece, presumably about the A list blogs. I think he was perturbed that lots of the big name blog buzz sites are, indeed, gossip and such. His lament is that trash drives big numbers traffic. But then, it always has. Even in newspapers. The Post outdraws the Times in its own backyard.
Ah, the lure of trash! Hasn't it ever been thus, though? A quick scan of early Hearst looks a lot more like the Post than the Times.
I would say that New West's long series on Dick Dasen, which won them the Online News Association award this year, is certainly as good or better than many a thing I read on dead tree this year.
Perhaps a useful distinction to draw is the role of a newsblog in a major media market and those outside a major media market. Metroblogs in major cities tend to perform a service by mining and sorting the wide array of media that's already out there. Newsblogs outside of a major metro tend to do more of their own news. Like Barry, I live in a place where there's not much news, and not much media covering it. So in smaller metro areas there are more blogs doing original reporting. For instance, this Thursday I'll be attending an election recount.
That said, smaller metros have less hard news and more Brussels Sprouts Festivals. But hey, if there were a lot of news in my town I'd probably move...natural disasters, shootings, scandals -- why it would probably ruin my tomato patch!
Come to think of it, there is a third category of newsblog, too, the national issue newsblog. Blogs like FishbowlDC have White House press room credentials, but many of them are like metroblogs in that they're recapping and pointing to media coverage in traditional outlets. Some are getting enough following (and enough advertisers) to break out of that, like the recently announced Talking Points Memo Muckracking Fund, which is a reader-supported initiative to start a blog that just focuses on Washington payola scandals.
I think the term is fast outgrowing itself as blogs become more of a content management system and less of an easily labeled journalistic subculture. It reminds me of a discussion I had with an online friend today about politics and what conservative and Republican and theocratic wing nut meant. We weren't talking about the same thing when I went off on a "big government" post he sent me. I increasingly find myself having to reset the conversation as people's eyes narrow when they hear "blog." But what is evolving is some interesting journalism. You are right.