Missing the Link

Back to The Introduction

1. Blogging is a medium, not a practice

All too often, those in the print media pejoratively label everything written online as ‘blogging’ and consequently dismiss the competition as a mob of ‘amateurs’. Unfortunately, this definition is premised on both quantitative and qualitative errors.

The quantitative problem is a miscount of the competition. The numbers certainly sound impressive: over 70 million blogs, 120,000 created daily and 1.5 million new posts every day (about 17 posts per second). This is a tremendous amount of content. But not everyone who publishes content on a blog competes with journalists. Blogging is merely a medium, a tool that allows content to be published online easily, and at little or no cost.

Consider another medium, such as books. Hundreds of thousands of non-fiction books are written every year. Do print journalists compete against all these books? Obviously not. Some, although relatively few, are journalistic in nature. But even here it is unclear if print journalists compete against these books or if journalistic books increase interest in journalism and the print media. Like books, blogs are merely a medium. Journalism, in contrast, is a practice that some people use the medium of blogging (or books) to disseminate. It is true that blogging may facilitate a different type of journalism (as do books), but let’s not confuse the medium with the content. Blogs are just the new pen and paper; it’s what’s written on them that matters.

Needless to say, not everyone with a blog is producing journalistic content. As the notorious ‘Gawker’ website once declared—“until we get off our asses and out of bathrobes, we are not competing against journalists, we are just making fun of them.” More importantly, it isn’t helpful to try to distinguish between journalistic and non-journalistic bloggers because, as we shall see later, people don’t read blogs like they do newspapers. What is relevant is the number of journalistic posts. Consequently, the first quantitative cut should be one that reduces the total number of posts down from the total published to those that are journalistic. While this number is unknown, it is certainly less than the 1.5 million (and growing) daily posts. However, even a relatively small fraction (say 1%) would still yield 15,000 posts, a number that rivals the total number of newspaper articles published daily in most major industrialized countries. Journalists may not be competing directly against millions but they do have some new competition. Furthermore, an increasing number of those writing online are out of their pajamas by noon.

The qualitative error made by print journalists is to assume that they are competing against the average quality of online content. There may be 1.5 million posts a day, but as anyone whose read a friend’s blog knows, even the average quality of this content is poor. But this has lulled the industry into a false sense of confidence. As Paul Graham describes: “In the old world of ‘channels’ (e.g. newspapers) it meant something to talk about average quality, because that’s what everyone was getting whether they liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. Consequently, print media isn’t competing against the average quality of online writing, they’re competing against the best writing online…Those in the print media who dismiss online writing because of its low average quality are missing an important point. No one reads the average blog.”

Take, for example, our previous number of 15,000 journalistic blog posts (again, this being 1% of all blog posts published daily). Now let’s say that only 1% of those posts, or 150 posts, are of high quality. This is more articles than in an average issue of the New York Times (NYT). Just as the NYT does not compete against every local newspaper editorial, it is not competing against all journalistic content on the internet. It is competing against the very best content on the web. The problem, as we shall discuss shortly, is that unlike a world in which people only read their local newspaper, the internet makes it easy for large numbers of people to locate and access the very best online content, no matter how obscure. More interestingly, the early adopters of blogging tended to be technically savvy people. As more mainstream writers and ordinary citizens take to blogging, the range, diversity and quality of posts will improve. Finally, the number of blogs doubles every 300 days. This problem will not go away. The situation is going to get much worse, or depending on your perspective, much better.

2. Aggregators and bloggers are the new editors

Many have correctly pointed out that generations Y and Z will become their own news ‘editor-aggregators’. This is a critical development and important insight, but one that has dramatic implications. There is really no reason to believe that aggregators will respect the division between the online versions of print media and the rest of the “wild web.” As David Weinberger points out in Everything is Miscellaneous, what makes the web interesting, compelling and democratic is that data doesn’t get organized based on where it came from, but on how interesting each individual reader believes it to be.

This is a perfect example of how traditional media’s model blinds it to an effective reassessment of its utility and strategy. Accepting the reality and implications of online aggregators would mean accepting that the role of newspaper editor is under threat. For many traditionalists, this challenge to the pantheon of journalism is simply too much to bear. However, competition in news aggregation is real, evolving rapidly, and transformative.

This new competition can be seen as two interrelated, but quite different internet-based phenomena: Aggregators and bloggers. Algorithm-based aggregators, such as Google News and Delicious, and human-run websites such as Drudge and The Huffington Post provide powerful alternatives to the newspaper editor. Indeed, as Paul Graham notes, “The NYT front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. It is only now that you can see the two side by side that you can see how little overlap there is.” This is, of course, subjective. The implication, however, is dramatic. Aggregators, both human and algorithm, don’t care where content is from and so can draw it from virtually anywhere. This capacity to ferret out the best content from across the web and deposit it on your computer screen begs the question: if you could choose to read the best articles drawn from a pool of 100 authors vs. a pool of 1.5 million, which would you choose? Can any editor compete?

The second threat is the very networked nature of the internet itself. The web’s interconnectedness allows news items to spread virally as opposed to centrally. Younger readers increasingly read articles found through links from blogs. This does not mean that the news itself is written by bloggers, although that too is increasing. Instead, it is their community, not the editor of the New York Times, that influences their reading. This is not simply a quirk of the net. It turns out that readers like choosing their editor. And now, because the blog format allows readers to forge relationships with authors/editors, they can. Take for example, our relationship with the prominent political blogger Andrew Sullivan. While we have never met in person, we know his perspectives; we know his biases; and we have lived through his daily struggle with the Iraq war. It is this personal connection that keeps us, and his 80,000 daily readers, coming back. Who we don’t know is the editor of the New York Times. Indeed, the top-down dictatorial process of traditional media establishments is designed to prevent us from ever getting the chance to. As everyone knows, traditional media editorials are anonymous.

Consumers now have a choice. Use aggregators and a blogger community to draw content from over 1.5 million posts every day, or rely on faceless editors who can choose from 50 pieces. This isn’t some hypothetical world of tomorrow. Aggregators are the new editors.

3. Free markets are good fact checkers

One oft-repeated critique of blog journalism is that it is not subject to the same rigorous fact checking procedures used by newspapers. Without experts, researchers and editors, how can online content be trusted? Journalists accustomed to the structured and hierarchical nature of a newsroom probably can’t imagine how the ‘wild web’ can yield reliable content. However, it turns out that the internet’s principle attribute—its ‘open source’ nature—makes it a surprisingly good fact checker.

The point is not to undervalue the utility of traditional fact checking. There should be no doubt that the mechanisms in place in most major media outlets results in a product that is far more trustworthy and accurate than information available on the average blog. However, there are also limits to the single-source fact checking model. As good as a 21 year-old Ivy League intern may be, they’ll never be as clever or as knowledgeable as the combined fact checking capacity of thousands of readers. The internet provides both the research tools to fact check and the technological opportunity for knowledgeable readers to comment on other people’s work.

Open source fact checking works in two interconnected ways, both bottom-up. First, anyone anywhere can comment on a piece, analyzing contradictions, typos and factual errors. In short, an online writer’s audience is also her editor and fact checker, providing feedback with which she can update and refine her work in real time. Second, good posts filter their way up though the blogosphere. In order to make it to the large blogs and aggregators a piece must first be seen by hundreds, if not thousands of readers—all of whom are evaluating, judging and commenting. The process is brutal, ruthless and market driven. However, once a post starts getting picked up, its readership might reach tens if not hundreds of thousands of readers within days. In such cases the content is generally as compelling and accurate as what can be found in any major daily. This is the world of open source fact checking, and it may be the most undervalued attribute of New Media. Together, we would argue that these two pillars of open source quality control rival the best professional fact checkers.

Media companies need to adapt to what many software engineers have known for years—much of the best, and most reliable, content is now open source. Much like the large entrenched dinosaurs of the software world, traditional media has been hesitant to embrace the clear merits of this model. Online collaboration is significantly more than the sum of its parts. It
creates, promotes and filters content better than any one source ever could. It may be messy to the uninitiated, but it works.

4. Newspapers: great creators, poor distributors

Newspaper editors generally feel confident that given the opportunity most journalists would prefer a column in a traditional daily than on an online-only forum. This confidence rests on the credibility of traditional media, which allows writers to put a recognizable brand on their work and provides them access to the marketplace and to a particular audience. But the online world is maturing. Already eight of the top fifty news web pages are New Media sites. The credibility gap is shrinking. Over time writers will gravitate to those places that either pay the best, or more likely, ensure their work reaches the most (or the right) eyeballs. Andrew Sullivan, the aforementioned blogger, epitomizes this future. In response to an opinion piece we wrote in 2007, he wrote, “What would I rather be doing? A lucrative op-ed column or a blog that racked up 3 million page-views this month? Put it this way: no regrets.”

Sullivan is merely pointing out a cold hard fact: the distributive capacity of the printed page, or a restricted newspaper’s website, is a fraction that of New Media sites. Even newspapers that do share their content freely, such as the Washington Post, will remain burdened by their expensive print assets and won’t be as financially competitive as their New Media competitors. Compared to the online world, newspapers have a costly and severely limited distribution model.

For over a century newspapers have vertically integrated content creation with content distribution. Benjamin Franklin pioneered this strategy in America’s early years. As a printer he forged one of North America’s first media empires, publishing content such as news stories, almanacs or flyers—to ensure his printing presses were constantly busy, and profitable. Prior to the internet this integration also made sense to consumers. Readers needed a channel (in this case the newspaper) which made content easy to digest. The challenge is that newspapers have performed these two functions—creation and distribution—for so long that people often conflate them, believing them to be a single activity. They are not.

The New York Times is a great content creator. But what advantage does it gain by continuing to serve as a distributor? In the old model, distribution channels competed against one another, so it made sense to monopolize your channel’s content. Today, there is only one channel, the internet, and it is hard to imagine anyone owning it. It is true that alternative channels, like the newspaper, remain familiar to some people, and is probably still more portable then the best electronic devices, but these are not long-term advantages. As older readers stop reading and better, more portable technology allows people to surf the internet from anywhere, what is the competitive advantage of being a newsprint distributor? The answer is… very little. Investing in the print medium (or worse, creating custom mini-computers that can only read your content, as the New York Times has done recently) is an expensive distraction.

It is understandable that newspapers lament the passing of this old, cozy world. But they should take heart. Distribution was always exogenous to traditional media’s real value. New Media may deliver content more effectively and efficiently than newspapers, but then, why would traditional media want to compete on distribution? All those resources, employees and infrastructure can now be redirected towards what newsrooms really care about—finding, reporting and talking about the news. If you are a newspaper that loves the news, and you are willing to let go of distribution, this is the start of a golden era.

5. Objectivity is condescending

Blogs do more than just report or opine. They often do both. For traditional journalists this is an anathema—something they claim they never do.

For better or worse, many readers want more than objective facts. They want informed, intelligent commentary mixed in with their news. The print newspaper’s practice of separating editorial from objective news was never real or viable. Readers, particularly the media savvy Gen Y and Z, are smart enough to see through and appreciate the perspective and voice that comes with bias and opinion. Maintaining the illusion of objectivity requires a control over production and dissemination that is unnecessary, time-consuming, and expensive.

The NYT’s decision to put opinions behind paywalls represented a misunderstanding of this artificial division between news and editorial. It also took them out of the online discourse. An elitist attitude may rationalize that this doesn’t matter, and to a certain degree, it may not. But the move is akin to saying, “I’m leaving this crowded discussion for my own private room so that I can be better heard.” The underlying assumption is that intelligent content can’t be heard in a crowded room where everybody is screaming. But we’ve already discussed how bloggers and aggregators are excellent at locating the best content on the web. Thus, as online political discussion became increasingly important, the NYT’s isolation ensured it became less and less influential. Unsurprisingly, the NYT’s opinion pieces are no longer behind a paywall.

Sealing off content, particularly opinion pieces, makes little sense for other reasons too—talk is cheap. Which only begs the question: why pay for it? People will only buy content they can’t get elsewhere. This means highly specialized, niche content that is constantly updated. It’s not clear what that space is going to be, or even if it will exist. But it is probably safe to say that political commentary isn’t going to be in it.

Generation Y is perhaps the most news savvy generation in history. Having grown up inundated with media, its members naturally pull out and separate editorial content. This means they don’t have a problem with it being there in the first place. Indeed, this accounts, in part, for the popularity of The Daily Show, which regularly mocks the editorial perspective Old Media pretends doesn’t exist in its news pieces. Like Jon Stewart, Gen Yers simply do not accept the pretense that media is objective. Now that is condescending.

6. Nostalgia is not a growth model

Only baby boomers are nostalgic for newsprint, and they are not a growth industry. Sure, there are some holdouts. But these are generally students of the Columbia Journalism School, not those they hope to write for. More seriously, media traditionalists often cite two examples— incidental reading and ideological objectivity—to explain why physical newspapers will and should remain the main distribution channel for print media. However, the purported value of physical newsprint simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Scanning the pages of a newspaper is indeed a virtue. It exposes readers to articles they might not seek out, broadening their range of news and opinion. However, this process is no different from what happens online. Links, aggregators and email steer readers to a far broader range of articles than they could conceivably imagine by simply flipping through a newspaper. Indeed, the internet enables this incidental reading better than newspapers. Take the BBC website, where any given article has links to related pieces both across the internet and in different sections of the site. A political article might cause a reader to click on a link to a related piece in the Science/Nature or Africa sections. Once there, they are confronted with an array of ‘incidental’ headlines. The tunnel syndrome argument simply doesn’t hold weight.

The other oft-cited example of the value of newspapers is that they prevent readers from falling into self-selected ideological silos. The argument follows that, when left to their own devices, innocent readers will gravitate towards the poles of their ideological bias. What they need, and should pay for, is a physical entity that provides them with a limited, but ‘healthy’, range of information.

This argument ignores the fact that many newspapers operate as ideological poles themselves. The New York Times clearly favors the left whereas the Wall Street Journal appeals to the right. More importantly the internet, unlike print media, provides tools to overcome these silos. Not all content delivered through an aggregator will be consistent with a reader’s perspective (indeed, one can imagine a customized aggregator that specifically targets news pieces that challenge its readers). More importantly, the internet gives readers the freedom (and safety) to select content from a broader range of perspectives. Most liberals wouldn’t be caught dead with an issue of the National Review in their hands, and when was the last time you saw a pinstriped Wall Streeter reading the Nation? But thousands of liberals read the Corner (the group blog of the National Review). This is because the ease, speed and anonymity of the web stimulates exploration that the physical world prohibits. In addition, many posts are written in response to other pieces, to whom they inevitably link (imagine the Nation sending readers to National Review!). Neither traditional nor New Media can single handedly mediate or resolve political difference, but at least New Media links the poles to one another, rather then creating isolated playgrounds where pundits can safely take shots at one another.

While sometimes seen as nostalgia, these arguments are simply a proxy for a deeper set of concerns felt by elites who fear the day the unkempt masses are finally freed to choose and read what they will. Controlling your customer has a never proven to be a sustainable business strategy, and for a business deeply concerned with freedom, it is disturbingly anti-democratic.

7. Newspapers’ decline is a sign of democracy, not a symptom of its death

A recent Columbia Journalism School panel on the future of the newspaper industry ended with a solemn and bold pronouncement: “If print newspapers disappear, it will be a fundamental threat to our democracy.”

Such statements made many of New Media participants roll their eyes—and for good reason. Are newspapers really a precondition for democracy?

This type of irrational hyperbole discredits traditional media’s claim to rational objectivity. Newspapers are not a precondition for democracy—free speech is. This is why the constitution protects the latter and not the former. It is also what makes the internet important—it provides a powerful new medium through which free speech can be transmitted. As we argued earlier, the internet offers its own democratic way of filtering content, allowing what people think is important, relevant and interesting to be aggregated and heard. It may be messy and far from perfect, but then, so is democracy.

Newspapers, in contrast, are many things, but they are not democratic. They are hierarchical authoritarian structures designed to control and shape information. This is not to say they don’t provide a societal benefit—their content contributes to the public discourse. However, how is having a few major media outlets deciding “what is news” democratic, or even good for democracy? The newspaper model isn’t about expanding free speech; it is about limiting it to force readers to listen to what the editor prescribes. When is the last time you had an opinion piece or letter published in a newspaper? There are many more voices in America that deserve to be heard aside from Ivy League educated editors and journalists.

The “necessary for democracy” argument also assumes that readers are less civically engaged if they digest their news online. How absurd. Gen Y is likely far more knowledgeable about their world than Boomers were. The problem is that Boomers appeared more knowledgeable to one another because they all knew the same things. The limited array of media meant people were generally civically minded about the same things and evaluated one another based on how much of the same media they’d seen. The diversity available in today’s media—facilitated greatly by the internet—means it is hard to evaluate someone’s civic mindedness because they may be deeply knowledgeable and engaged in a set of issues you are completely unfamiliar with. Diversity of content and access to it, made possible by the internet, has strengthened our civic engagement.

Far from a prerequisite, traditional media is to democracy what commercial banks are to capitalism. Are banks necessary for capitalism? No. Have they sped up its growth and made it more effective? Definitely. But could some better model emerge that performs their functions more effectively? Absolutely. Much like claiming “you’ll never get by without me” rarely reignites a relationship, fear mongering and threatening your customers won’t bring readers back. This approach merely demonstrates how scared old media has become of its readers, their free speech, and the type of democracy they want to build.

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