For the people who follow, study, analyze -- and, in more cases than not, obsessively consume -- the media, it's easy to separate the journalism of today into new and old. "New media," the vague neologism after which this course was named, is the bottom-up, decentralized, institutionless blogosphere. Old media is everything else: Newspapers, magazines, even the cable TV networks (which, not long ago, were new media themselves).
This semester, we traced the evolution of the old media -- its various revolutions, changes and evolutions -- and consumed and analyzed the new media. Our goal, as I saw it, was to understand how the new media has altered today's political world; how the power is shifting to this new group. But after a semester of thought and reflection, I've come to terms with one overarching revelation: the issue is not that simple.
For all of the rhetoric between bloggers and traditional journalists (each group tends to deride the other), the truth is, they are becoming one in the same. The lines between the two groups are blurring. "Bloggers" used to be defined by their independence from institutions; they and their audience spoke directly without a filter. Today, bloggers are forming institutions to organize and filter themselves. "Journalists" used to be defined by their organizationalism (the newspaper, not the reporter, was credited for a scoop); now, many of them post on individual blogs.
What that means, in essence, is that the two groups are merging. The difference between them is shrinking as bloggers adopt the more successful aspects of conventional news organizations and news organizations adopt many of the innovations that bloggers pioneered. To me, then, the issue is not that power has shifted to bloggers. Instead, bloggers have altered and been incorporated by the rest of the media. This macro-level change, as we've seen, has altered American journalism and electoral politics in both good and bad ways.
Bloggers and journalists vs. blogging and journalism:
Today, the newspaper industry -- a key backbone of America's founding -- is falling apart. Papers everywhere are folding, firing, and on the verge of collapse. Even the New York Times is taking out a mortgage on its Manhattan headquarters to make up for plummeting profits.
Almost the entirety of this collapse can be attributed to the Internet.
Because news is now available for free online, most newspapers are basically forced to offer their content free-of-charge on their websites. Classified ad sales have fallen sharply because of Craigslist, and the online ad market, while burgeoning as an industry, doesn't produce nearly enough revenue to make up for falling ad sales. There's a very good possibility that most of the top print newspapers will be out-of-business or severely scaled back within the next five years
The question is: Who will pick up the slack?
It's very easy to answer that question by saying that bloggers will drive journalism in the 21st Century, but I don't think the answer is that simple. In following a group of blogs throughout the semester, I noticed that different bloggers can do very different things. Some, like Teagan Goddard or Matt Drudge (I'm counting him as a blogger, at least in some sense), just point to and summarize content elsewhere on the web; I call this group aggregators. Others, like Talking Points Memo and The Daily Kos, summarize news from elsewhere and analyze it, injecting their opinion; I call this group the commentators. Finally, some bloggers actually seek out and discover stories through their own investigation (Marc Ambinder, Ben Smith, Jon Martin); I call them the reporters.
The structural problem right now is that, by and large (and with some notable exceptions), most of the bloggers doing actual reporting are supported by a traditional media institution, like a newspaper or network. That's because, while blogs have reduced the cost of publishing information (and thus opened up the process to anyone with a keyboard), they haven't reduced the cost of journalism. Journalism is expensive: it requires travel and legwork. Investigations often involve expensive fees for public records requests and document analysis. Newspapers haven't yet found a way to effectively monetize their web operations on a scale that would cover the cost of journalism as a process. And without newspapers or other traditional media outlets, today's bloggers would have much less to talk about.
To me, there's no clear answer to how journalism will be conducted as more newspapers die out. One possibility is the Politico model; a Web-heavy operation that utilizes blogs as a medium for original reporting, and is supported by wire-service fees and a small, cost-efficient print operation. But only time will tell.
What blogs do well: Aggregate, spin, interact, mobilize
Even though I see flaws in today's bloggers' ability to perform investigative journalism, I don't mean to write blogs off as a fad, or even as a small factor in today's politics. Quite to the contrary, the 2008 election news cycle was driven by blogs as a medium. Blogs, regardless of who posts on them (be they traditional journalists or "new media" personalities, offer a three advantages that no print product ever will: constant publishing, the ability to point readers to information housed elsewhere (without republishing that information), and the ability for readers to interact with each other in one central place.
In this election, we saw blogs keep certain stories going while abandoning others. Obama's decision to forego public financing left the news cycle quickly, while McCain's decision to "suspend" his campaign did not. "Lipstick on a Pig" became a major news story while most of Biden's gaffes flew under the radar. That's because, while most news sources determine what their readers/viewers are talking and thinking about, many blogs are driven by what their readers/viewers are talking about. It's an important difference, and it has positive and negative implications. On the one hand, it democratizes the news, freeing consumers of the elite media's corporate filter. On the other, it tends to augment conversation about that which is trivial, entertaining, salacious or controversial -- but not necessarily that which is important.
Bypassing the filter: New media as an organizing tool
Far more important to this election than the change in the news cycle (in reality, it has been constant and trivial since the advent of cable news) is the change in how political supporters are organized. The Obama campaign became the first presidential campaign to truly leverage the power of the Internet in organizing its supporters, turning a simple e-mail list into its most valuable asset.
Ironically, though, Obama's operation was not an example of Shirky's "here comes everybody" thesis. It was a new model -- a synthesis of the bottom-up approaches cited by Shirky and the top-down approach of conventional organizations. They had paid staff managing volunteer "neighborhood captains," who in turn managed volunteers from their area. The entire process was monitored and led by the Obama campaign.
No article has expressed this distinction better than this one, from the Huffington Post a few months ago. Here's an excerpt:
Other recent attempts [at organizing] have failed because they were either so "top-down" and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or "bottom-up" organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization.
What the Obama campaign recognized was the distinction, once again, between process and medium. Social networks (like MyBO) are a tool that can be used to help people communicate. What they do with that communication is a process -- a goal. The Obama team allowed users to access the tool for their own purposes in a very bottom-up model, but managed the process -- organizing volunteers -- in a top-down fashion. I would be far from surprised if this model became the standard for campaigns going forward.
So what?
If I had to boil all of this down to a single thesis, it would be this: "new media" is a collection of tools that have altered how actors in today's political world -- be they journalists, campaigns or in-office politicians -- can communicate with the public. Some bloggers are part of the equation in that they are a group of actors in today's political world who previously were not involved. Others are part of the equation in that how they approach their goals -- be it organizing, reporting, publishing or some other pursuit -- has been altered by this new set of tools.
We'll see where technology takes us going forward. But for now, it is an amazing and exciting time to be entering the world of news, politics and media. Thanks to everyone for a great discussion this semester!
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