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August 2, 2009
Michael Massing in The News About the Internet in the New York Review of Books takes up the issue of the relationship between declining newspapers and emerging internet bloggers. The conventional perspective from the world of the newspapers is a put-down of the Web and the bloggers in that the latter are held to contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth.
Massing points out that:
This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet. The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. And unless the editors and executives at our top papers begin to take note, they will hasten their own demise.
Blogging has gone beyond the snip-it-and-comment approach that riffs on the journalism of others while doing no conventional reporting of their own in the sense of gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. The commentary has broadened into a concern with subjects that newspapers are no longer interested in.
Massing is primarily concerned with news and investigative journalism than commentary. So we have the usual US blogosphere mentions, such as Talking Points Memo, ProPublica, FireDogLake, Informed Comment, Mondoweiss, Brad DeLong and Glenn Greenwald to make his case that new ground is being broken by those working in the blogosphere. With respect to the financial crisis he says:
For the most part, though, the coverage of the financial crisis in the daily press has been episodic, diluted, cloaked in qualifiers, and neutered by comments and disclaimers from businessmen and their paid spokesmen, to whom mainstream journalists feel obligated to give equal time.The bloggers I have been reading reject such reflexive attempts at "balance," and it's their willingness to dispense with such conventions that makes the blogosphere a lively and bracing place.
He argues that such initiatives suggest a fundamental change taking place in the world of news. Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions; that the emergence of the Internet is loosening the grip of the corporate-owned mass media and that a profound if unsettling process of decentralization and democratization is taking place.
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re the Broken Hill example. Newspapers, such as the The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald, would give us a tourist travel feature that tells us about he places to see, stay and eat. These pieces written by journalists on a road trip are for us to read as tourists. So they are a tourist guide with some personal reflections.