Does Prince Harry think blogs are news? Ask the Drudge Report.

The Drudge Report breaking the news black-out on Prince Harry’s deployment to Afghanistan is a good example of how blogging news sites are easily and quickly slipping into the pit of greed and ambition that mainstream media has been trying to lift itself out of.

When stripped of its ethics, social justice and responsibility, journalism is just gossip. There is no better example of the harm that gossip could cause than the leaking of a Royal’s position on the front lines of a war, to the benefit and amusement of an opportunistic enemy.

For so long, watchdog blogs criticized the traditional media for their seemingly cutthroat tactics in reporting the story. Whether accused of being money-hungry, cowing at political pressure and interests or victimizing the public in trying to break the news first, the media lost the respect and trust of their audience.

Blogs, vaunting themselves as the alternative to the mainstream media, became the forum readers thought would give them the trusted quality news that they longed for, free from market competition and the influence of advertisers and politicians. With that recognition—which bloggers are constantly demanding from traditional journalists— also come responsibilities.

Instead, there is a double standard for blogger news sites. The Drudge Report plays dirty, but the only force that could demand that creator Matt Drudge be held accountable or at least apologize, is the same public that has given him the influence which prompted the Telegraph’s US editor to call Drudge the world’s most powerful journalist.

The Australian celebrity publication New Idea that first reported the Prince Harry scoop on January 7 on its Web site and later in its magazine edition made little waves but was berated by its readers for jeopardizing the lives of Prince Harry and the soldiers who fought along side him. The Telegraph reports that readers called New Idea an embarrassment to Australia, adding the statement of apology issued by the magazine:

Suggesting it had not contacted the Ministry of Defence or Clarence House for confirmation, a spokesman for the magazine said: “New Idea was not issued with a press embargo and was unaware of the existence of one.

“The story was published on Monday January 7. Since then New Idea has received no comment from the British Ministry of Defence.

“We take these matters very seriously and would never knowingly break an embargo. We regret any issues the revelation of this story in America has caused.”

Jon Williams, the BBC’s world news editor, wrote a post for The Editors blog in which he explained the position of those at the BBC who made the decision to agree to the news blackout for Prince Harry’s deployment.

Drudge has been mum on his decision not to heed it, although, unlike New Idea, he was aware of the embargo. His explanation would be appreciated by this blogger, who is sad to see him chipping away at our decency, credibility and trustworthiness.

 

Media mutualism

If traditional journalists could be found on-line, then perhaps the world would know whether or not they refute the bloggers’ claims that the professional media are worried about news migrating to the Internet.

For example, Alfred Hermida’s blogs from the Knight Science Journalism Symposium painted pictures of new-media champions lecturing to old-world reporters squirming in their seats and asking ridiculous questions.

The fact that there is almost no blogger voice giving a traditional media perspective makes the old-school reporters and editors look guilty as charged. It’s no wonder, then, that the new generation of media who are trying to carry journalism into the future see them as an impediment to advancement and a force to be reckoned with.

That is, unless there are traditional journalists who might agree with the way new-media advocates envision this future… We’ll never know until they blog about it either way, or leave a comment on this post.

As Hermida outlined in his blog on Tom Rosenstiel’s presentation at the symposium, journalists will soon learn to operate as part of a network rather than a final destination by assuming the roles of authenticator, sense-maker, navigator (yes, friends in the traditional media, it is OK for your readers to follow links away from your site…they will be back) and forum leader. These sound like better options than unemployment, so why wouldn’t a journalist support a way to preserve her livelihood?

Such potential responsibilities are also summed up in Daniel Conover’s foundations of 21st century journalism,

MAINSTREAM RETRENCHMENT
“Mainstream media” today are in decline, with “the people formerly known as the audience” fragmented. Future media will separate into market-driven grades of information. The “mainstream” will become a smaller subset of the total media flow, generally associated with less-sophisticated technology and users who: 1. Produce little content; 2. Profit only marginally from higher grades of information; and 3. Choose a passive lifestyle. Mainstream media will not dominate, but will represent the most significant media plurality.

Bloggers don’t seem to deny that professional journalists have a place within their shared information sphere. They actually thrive on taking news that’s run in the mainstream media and then “opensourcing” the information on their blogs. In fact, the investigative reporting job by political blogger Joshua Micah Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, just won him the George Polk Award for legal reporting. Part of his Web site’s process of covering the firing/resignation scandal of eight United States attorneys was to follow the news in the traditional media. But if the TPM staff and its readers hadn’t been paying attention and noticing patterns, their scrutiny of the scandal may never have been picked up by the mainstream media.

To recognize this media mutualism, both the traditional news companies and their employees will have to swallow their pride as well as the reality of smaller profit margins. Unfortunately there are signs that, well, this recognition may be further away than we’d like. In the New York Times story about Marshall’s award, a fellow blogger is quoted suggesting Marshall will win a Pulitzer someday. However, NYtimes.com writer Noam Cohen writes,

“It won’t be this year. Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said in an e-mail message that online articles are eligible for the awards, but they must have been published on a weekly or daily newspaper’s Web site.

‘A freestanding Web site does not qualify,’ he said.”

The good and bad of broadsheet

http://reportr.net/2008/02/22/a-misguided-approach-to-electronic-paper/

The above blog post fueled ridicule of a questioner who, during a presentation for E Ink at the Future of Science Journalism Symposium, gave voice to a fundamental divide between print and electronic media that must be reconciled. Could the marketing director’s electronic-paper-display software and device, the journalist in the audience asked, do for her what a traditional broadsheet newspaper does, enable her to scan through its content? Clearly, many have missed her point in asking such a question. Surely this woman does not suggest that commuters lug with them on the subway an over-sized gadget. And unless she intends to then print out the displays so she can “feel” the pages between her fingers (my History of Journalism professor actually once said this in class), she is not some member of a new race of troglodytes, averse to computer screens and electronic text.

Until a more “human-like” graphical user interface (GUI) is developed, new-media apologists should admit that print journals still trump their digital counterparts when it comes to presentation of the news. There are rumblings of slow developments in this arena, such as “zooming” (zoomable user interface or ZUI), which is said to be closer to the human model of scanning and narrowing in on information. This could solve one of the major drawbacks to on-line news: interfacing. The first Web news source that adopts this technology will be a hero and leave its competitors leagues behind, competitors who still won’t have asked themselves, “what about broadsheet worked“. Our questioner wasn’t longing for the past, she was learning from it.