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May 20, 2009
In his post, The myth of the parasitical bloggers, over at Salon.com Glenn Greenward challenges the standard argument of the mainstream media that bloggers and other online writers are "parasites" on their work; and that their organizations bear the cost of producing content and others (bloggers and companies such as Google) then unfairly exploit it for free. This has been, and still is, the standard position of The Australian in Australia.
Greenwald says that this is more myth and stereotype propagated about political bloggers mostly by establishment journalists, eager to demonize what they perceive as their competitors):
The reality has always been far more mixed than that, and the relationship far more symbiotic than parasitical. Especially now that online traffic is such an important part of the business model of newspapers and print magazines, traffic generated by links from online venues and bloggers is of great value to them. That's why they engage in substantial promotional activities to encourage bloggers to link to and write about what they produce....Many, many reporters, television news producers and the like read online political commentary and blogs and routinely take things they find there. Traditional media outlets simply take stories, ideas and research they find online and pass it off as their own. In other words -- to use their phraseology -- they act parasitically on blogs by taking content and exploiting it for their benefit.
If there is a dynamic between establishment journalists and blogs, then the media reality is that, unlike the political blogs in the US, the political blogs in Australia do not engage in substantive original reporting. Nor do they claim to do so. However, these blogs do offer a substantive punditry or commentary, and it is recognized that these offer something that is missing.
Greenward adds that while bloggers routinely credit (and link to) the source of the material on which they're commenting, there is an unwritten code among many establishment journalists that while they credit each other's work, they're free to claim as their own whatever they find online without any need for credit or attribution. Greenward adds that:
The tale of the put-upon news organizations and the pilfering, parasitical bloggers has always been more self-serving mythology than reality. That's not to say that there's no truth to it, but the picture has always been much more complicated. After all, a principal reason for the emergence of a political blogosphere is precisely because it performed functions that establishment media outlets fail to perform. If all bloggers did was just replicate what traditional news organizations did and offered nothing original, nobody would read blogs.
Apart from the ideas and commentary there is the critique of the false balance (he said, she said) and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin in the lapdog media. However, it is true that political blogs, with their unpaid writers, are analogs to the current media system rather than gamechanging or disruptive technologies that change our fundamental ways of relating to the media world.
The myths and stereotypes will quickly change as the old media companies increasingly downsize, and they lose their grip on the “we-control-everything” media status quo. The key question, as Dan Conover says in 2020 vision: What’s next for news is what comes next? We know that the next decade will see great diversity in terms of media funding, mission and identity. Conover says that it will be a decade of experimentation, opportunity and chaos and that we can safely expect that this diverse open-source, networked-media future is going to be radically reorganized by media techologies currently in formation.
This means that our media horizons are expanding, the bottlenecks put in place by the media gatekeepers are being blown up. The new world is much better than the old one.
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though the big mainstream newspapers in Australia may be failing as advertising revenue migrates to the internet, they (eg., The Advertiser in Adelaide) still do a good job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro paper in Adelaide is very limited--eg., The Adelaide Review or the Independent Weekly. It's not much.
Hopefully, these alternatives may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by the decline of the old monopoly media giants, such as The Advertiser.