Nick Carr and Dave Winer are arguing about something having to do with bloggers, Iraq and murdered journalists.
I think blogs are important ways to distribute certain kinds of information, but they are not even close to being a substitute for traditional media for certain news topics. People have a distrust of old, established media when it comes to political topics- do you really think people are going to embrace a bunch of online diaries by people they don’t know as a reliable substitute for the Washington Post and CNN? Of course not. It’s farcical to suggest they will.
I think the idea that blogs, as important to a few of us as they are, will replace traditional journalism is straight out of Monty Python.
“Go away or I shall blog about you a second time.”
I also think it’s ironic that Dave is taking the role as the champion of citizen media. One of the oft-cited benefits of citizen media is the interactive nature of blogging. Dave rarely engages people outside of his inner circle, which makes him more like the old media he is trying to replace than the new media he claims to embrace.
The other fact that seems to be overlooked here is that people who risk their lives going to Iraq to write news are generally getting paid for it. There is an assumption by some of the blogging evangelists that making a living is less important that spouting off about the latest Google acquisition. It is a whole lot harder to make a living blogging that some people want to admit.
Which means that most of us who blog don’t do it as a living. As Nick points out, it’s one thing to toss up a post or two about Iraq from the comfort of our living rooms, but it’s another ball of wax to risk your life in the name of a blog post. I wish more people read my blog too, but I’m not quite ready to risk my life to make it happen.
Blogging as a content management platform may, in fact, be the future of news distribution, but it won’t be guys like Dave, or Nick, or me writing the content. It will be the same journalists who get paid for doing it now- they’ll simply be doing it in a different, more immediate way.
Newsome.Org 