Brian asked this question on the BBC World Have Your Say and I wanted to address it, “Not enough talk today about how the two sides [Main Stream Media and bloggers/citizen journalists] can collaborate to produce better news/information”
The two sides will not collaborate. There will — and should — constantly be a dynamic tension.
The Main Stream Media (MSM) is now universally “fact checked” in much the same as the “New Yorker” is. Called Fisking in the blog world, the job of blogs (and citizen journalists) is partially to keep the MSM honest, accountable, and to premasticate source reporting into a medium (regurgitation, mush, gruel, mash AKA analysis, opinion, pattern recognition) that a readership (fanbase) considers important.
And this is where MSM lacks: there is a very condescending noblesse oblige — an inheritance — that reportership insists on forcing down our throats: the news the Main Stream Media considers important and we “need to read” — their civic duty — versus the news we consider important and choose to read.
We have that choice now and we never had it before. It is no longer a civics lesson and the Times and the Journal and the Post are no longer at the head of the room with the God-given responsibility of informing the Mother Culture. The influence, the message, and the medium is no longer perceived pure.
There have been too many opportunities for the curious citizen to “follow the money,” to see that the Media Empire has no clothes, and to have a light bulb go off that I, Chris Abraham, blogger and curious bugger, now have cheap and plentiful tools allowing me to participate in the this cultural conversation in the way that I want to. With closer to equal footing with the MSM than I have ever had, and truth-be-known, we bloggers exert a disproportionately large influence on society.
And MSM is nervous and playing catch-up.
