Two worlds

This editorial from the Chicago Tribune, which we ran on our op-ed page late last week, seems to predict the end of the road for blogs, or at least a mighty rough patch:

A new report from Gallup pollsters, "Blog Readership Bogged Down," cautions that "the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative in the past year."

Gallup finds only 9 percent of Internet users saying they frequently read blogs, with 11 percent reading them occasionally. Thirteen percent of Internet users rarely bother, and 66 percent never read blogs. Those numbers, essentially unchanged from a year earlier, put blog-reading dead last among Gallup's measures of 13 common Internet activities. E-mailing ranks first (with 87 percent of users doing so frequently or occasionally), followed by checking news and weather (72), shopping (52) and making travel plans (also 52).

This has sparked Round 2 of the discussion we had a few months ago about blogs and their effect on Old Media (or MSM -- "mainstream media"). See the post here at Fort Wayne Observed, which also links to a piece by Eric Zorn, a ChiTrib columnist who begs to differ with his paper's editorial board:

And that's another reason I'm unpersuaded by the sepulchral mutterings over the supposedly twitching corpse of blogs: They're now often so well integrated into other Internet offerings that people don't even know they're reading them.

That same Gallup poll showed that 72 percent of Internet users say they regularly look for news updates online. And blogs have become nearly unavoidable at major news sites.

It's clear from reading the comments at the FWOB post that many people in this debate are in an either/or mode. Either blogs are just a pesty little interruption in the MSM's dominance, not practicing "real" journalism," or they are the vanguard of a whole new way of sending and receiving news, and people in TV newsrooms and in the dead-tree press might as well just admit it and slink home like whipped dogs.

But the old and new media are, in fact, complementary. Blogs are providing a level of insight and commentary not seen before, from a lot of people not heard from before, and they offer some critical scrutiny of the MSM long needed. But they still get most of the stuff they comment on from that very MSM. Watching a newscast or reading a newspaper might not give you the most comprehensive or accurate account of the news, but it's a lot easier to rely on a team of news gatherers who decide what's important by running everything through their filters than it is to search through dozens of blogs (after deciding which of the millions are the most useful to check) and trying to decide what's important by cobbling together what they think is important. Getting news from blogs is very labor intensive.

I notice a lot of people still dismiss blogs as "one person's opinion, who has to adopt no ethical standards, who doesn't have fact checkers or editors," blah, blah, blah. Funny, that's how newspapers got started in this country. A bunch of guys with fierce political opinions and bad attitudes started newspapers to advance their own candidates' causes and bash the other guys', in often scandolous terms, and, oh, what the heck, threw in a little information about when the ships were docking. (A whole big bunch of guys; starting a newspaper wasn't quite as easy as starting a blog, but the equipment needed was more accessible to the masses than the multimillion-dollar presses of today.)

Newspapers evolved from that beginning, as they had to in order to reach mass readership. One big leap came with the now-dead telegraph mentioned by one of the FWOB commenters. Suddenly the time span between events and the reporting of them was shortened to the point where "the news" actually mattered to people. If newspapers treat blogs as they should, as a technological innovation instead of a threat, perhaps they will enable a leap, too.

Blogs will evolve as well -- they have to. Part of the maturation will come as blogs do more original reporting  and more bloggers start walking around with cameras (both still and video) and digital recorders to take advantage of all the medium's potential. Part of it will come as bloggers keep connecting with one another, making it easier for the blog readers to keep up. There is already a "review of blogs" site for the state, and one is being attempted in Fort Wayne. I don't know where the evolution will take us, and no one else does, either. A lot will depend, probably, on how much advertising revenue flows to blogs, and in what form. As the new media evolve, so will the old media. Some will go away, some will adapt. All we can know for sure is that people will always want to know what is going on, and that new and better ways of delivering the information will always be found.

Since I have a foot in both worlds, I feel uniquely qualified to have a fierce opinion and a bad attitude about the issue, unedited and not fact-checked, my ethics known only to me. On the other hand, it's hard not to feel a little threatened, since the end of both worlds has now been predicted.