Shying away from MSM
I came across a really engaging headline today while sifting through my aggregator, "Blogs Turn 10 - Who's the Father?", which instantly made me click on the link, but when seeing that the site pointed to CNet, my gut reaction was to close the window on principle. I'm sure the article's brilliant, well-written, properly edited and decently researched, but it just seems like there's a distinct disconnect between the quality of content found in blogs and mainstream media (MSM).
And since I'm in the news media as a professional journalist/developer, this is both contradictory and hypocritical. But that's kind of the harrowing point.
These days, I give a lot more credence to items written by non-professional writers from the blogosphere. The best pure writing I've seen over the past two years, without doubt, is from MSM authors, although bloggers more often than not make more of an impression - asking the right questions, issuing the appropriate challenges, making fair predictions, drawing accurate conclusions, and connecting resources where necessary. They just lack the grand scale circulation system indicative of newspapers, TV networks, publications and radio channels.
MSM sources also typically are slower to respond because of a need to cross-reference, fact-check, cross-promote a piece, in addition to running it through the editorial wash several times.
Take for example an article BusinessWeek did on Digg's Kevin Rose as the reluctant leader of the under-30 Web 2.0 movement. A masterful composition to be sure, but for guys like me in the know, incomplete. There were just perspectives not investigated, important history that was undocumented, achievements not chronicled, and associations that weren't made. And this was written, says the corresponding podcast, over four months. I could have gotten a lot more from Kevin's Wikipedia entry. But it is a major U.S. publication, so where it might be arguably lagging, it does give phenomenal exposure and circulation, as opposed to the relative obscurity of the blogosphere.
The scope in blogs is surely far narrower, but hits the mark more often.
(And in fairness, I did read the CNet piece after all, and it is very good, and bookmarkworthy. And despite my earlier criticism, the BusinessWeek pieces is one of my favorite articles on Digg. I guess we lash out against those things we adore the most. But these are still two of the exceptions of MSM.)
And since I'm in the news media as a professional journalist/developer, this is both contradictory and hypocritical. But that's kind of the harrowing point.
These days, I give a lot more credence to items written by non-professional writers from the blogosphere. The best pure writing I've seen over the past two years, without doubt, is from MSM authors, although bloggers more often than not make more of an impression - asking the right questions, issuing the appropriate challenges, making fair predictions, drawing accurate conclusions, and connecting resources where necessary. They just lack the grand scale circulation system indicative of newspapers, TV networks, publications and radio channels.
MSM sources also typically are slower to respond because of a need to cross-reference, fact-check, cross-promote a piece, in addition to running it through the editorial wash several times.
Take for example an article BusinessWeek did on Digg's Kevin Rose as the reluctant leader of the under-30 Web 2.0 movement. A masterful composition to be sure, but for guys like me in the know, incomplete. There were just perspectives not investigated, important history that was undocumented, achievements not chronicled, and associations that weren't made. And this was written, says the corresponding podcast, over four months. I could have gotten a lot more from Kevin's Wikipedia entry. But it is a major U.S. publication, so where it might be arguably lagging, it does give phenomenal exposure and circulation, as opposed to the relative obscurity of the blogosphere.
The scope in blogs is surely far narrower, but hits the mark more often.
(And in fairness, I did read the CNet piece after all, and it is very good, and bookmarkworthy. And despite my earlier criticism, the BusinessWeek pieces is one of my favorite articles on Digg. I guess we lash out against those things we adore the most. But these are still two of the exceptions of MSM.)
posted by Jason Salas @ 9:00 AM
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