First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. [Mahatma Gandhi]
Jeff Jarvis, a self-confessed "journalism gray-beard", describes an unpleasant run-in with a clueless editor and comments incidentally on the ongoing journalism vs. blogging debate.
If the intersection of blogging and journalism interests you at all, then the whole piece is well worth a read, including some of Jeff's readers' comments (from whence I lifted the Gandhi quotation, above), but this paragraph in particular leapt out at me:
"She [the editor] also wanted me to address the issue of weblog news coming from often anonymous, sometimes unreliable sources and that's also a fair question. My answer is that the audience -- especially after the last cablecast war -- is becoming accustomed to judging news, even news from the big boys, with a grain of salt. They now know that the first news out of the box is unconfirmed; they know to wait until time has passed and confirmation and reporting have come in. They know that they need to look at what CNN says live through a filter just as they look at what webloggers say through a filter. It's all about trusting the intelligence of the audience."
Indeed. We know to look at what all of them say through a filter. CNN, Fox, the BBC, the NYT, the WSJ, the FT, the CBC, the Guardian - all of them and many more of that ilk.
Therein lies some of the power and importance of blogs. Trusting the intelligence of the audience, and including blogs as one of the many sources of information available to us, we can filter the feeds to arrive at our own balanced, informed POV.
For every Aaron Brown, there's a Joshua Marshall
For every Geraldo, there's a Salam Pax.
The important thing is to keep your filters on regardless of what you're reading and regardless of the purported credibility of the source. It's a sad thing to have to acknowledge, but these days a New York Times report is not necessarily any more reliable than a Slashdot post.
The really sad thing, though, is that while most people fully expect to run anything they read on Slashdot through a credibility filter, they'll still take the New York Times as gospel (or The Globe & Mail, The National Post, The Telegraph, The Australian, BBC, CTV, whatever).
That's dangerous. Worse - it's slack-jawed, sheep-like acquiesence.
Think. In the name of God. Read everything, then think.
If we don't filter for ourselves, we're letting others do the filtering for us. And that's just scary.
If the intersection of blogging and journalism interests you at all, then the whole piece is well worth a read, including some of Jeff's readers' comments (from whence I lifted the Gandhi quotation, above), but this paragraph in particular leapt out at me:
"She [the editor] also wanted me to address the issue of weblog news coming from often anonymous, sometimes unreliable sources and that's also a fair question. My answer is that the audience -- especially after the last cablecast war -- is becoming accustomed to judging news, even news from the big boys, with a grain of salt. They now know that the first news out of the box is unconfirmed; they know to wait until time has passed and confirmation and reporting have come in. They know that they need to look at what CNN says live through a filter just as they look at what webloggers say through a filter. It's all about trusting the intelligence of the audience."
Indeed. We know to look at what all of them say through a filter. CNN, Fox, the BBC, the NYT, the WSJ, the FT, the CBC, the Guardian - all of them and many more of that ilk.
Therein lies some of the power and importance of blogs. Trusting the intelligence of the audience, and including blogs as one of the many sources of information available to us, we can filter the feeds to arrive at our own balanced, informed POV.
For every Aaron Brown, there's a Joshua Marshall
For every Geraldo, there's a Salam Pax.
The important thing is to keep your filters on regardless of what you're reading and regardless of the purported credibility of the source. It's a sad thing to have to acknowledge, but these days a New York Times report is not necessarily any more reliable than a Slashdot post.
The really sad thing, though, is that while most people fully expect to run anything they read on Slashdot through a credibility filter, they'll still take the New York Times as gospel (or The Globe & Mail, The National Post, The Telegraph, The Australian, BBC, CTV, whatever).
That's dangerous. Worse - it's slack-jawed, sheep-like acquiesence.
Think. In the name of God. Read everything, then think.
If we don't filter for ourselves, we're letting others do the filtering for us. And that's just scary.
