Burnt Orange Report

The "Declining Sovereignty" Of Professional Journalism

By Vince Leibowitz

Guest Post By Vince Leibowitz

Via "Blogging, Journalism & Credibility," which I came across through this post by Atrios, some of Academia is hosting a conference entitled "Blogging, Journalism and Credibility," at which this paper by Jay Rosen of PressThink will be delivered.

Rather than re-hash much of the content, I just wanted to post a few interesting quotes from the paper I thought other bloggers and blog readers would enjoy.

Here they are:

And so we know they're [blogs] journalism-- sometimes. They're even capable, at times, and perhaps only in special circumstances, of beating Big Journalism at its own game. Schwartz said so. The tsunami story is the biggest humanitarian disaster ever in the lifetimes of most career journalists and the blogs were somehow right there with them.

The question now isn't whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn't whether bloggers "are" journalists. They apparently are, sometimes. We have to ask different questions now because events have moved the story forward. By "events" I mean things on the surface we can see, like the tsunami story, and things underneath that we have yet to discern.

[...]

They all sense it, what Tom Curley, the man who runs the Associated Press, called "a huge shift in the 'balance of power' in our world, from the content providers to the content consumers." If there is such a shift (and Curley didn't seem to be kidding) it means that professional journalism is no longer sovereign over territory it once easily controlled. Not sovereign doesn't mean you go away. It means your influence isn't singular anymore.

Orville Schell, dean of the University of California at Berkeley's journalism school and a conference particiapant, told Business Week recently: "The Roman Empire that was mass media is breaking up, and we are entering an almost-feudal period where there will be many more centers of power and influence."

When 90 percent of the op-ed style writing was done on actual op-ed pages, editorial page editors had sovereignty over that region of public diaogue. With blogging and the online space generally, that rule is gone. Opinion in reaction to the news can come from anywhere, and the bloggers are frequently better at it than the sleepy op-ed page ever was. Newspaper op-ed pages can still have influence; they can still be great. But they are not sovereign in their domain, and so their ideas, which assumed that, are under great pressure.

When Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and a figure in the news, wants to speak to fans, players or the community, he doesn't do it through the reporters who cover the Mavs. He puts the word out at his weblog. For the beat writers who cover the team this is a loss; Cuban hardly deals with them anymore. Here, however, the balance of power has shifted toward a figure in the news, once known as a source. (A weblog helped shift it.)

If my terms make sense, and professional journalism has entered a period of declining sovereignty in news, politics and the provision of facts to public debate, this does not have to mean declining influence or reputation. It does not mean that prospects for the public service press are suddenly dim. It does, however, mean that the old political contract between news providers and news consumers will give way to something different, founded on what Curley correctly called a new "balance of power."

[...]

Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between benefitting from a built-up asset, the St. Petersburg Times "brand," and building the asset from scratch. Bloggers are "building their reputations from the ground up," as Hiler said, and to do this they have to focus on users. They have to be in dialogue. The connection between what they do and whether they are trusted is much alive and apparent. In journalism that connection has been harder to find lately. Journalists don't know much about it. They do know their rules, though.

[...]

The price of professionalizing journalism was the de-voicing of the journalist. The price for having Big Media was the atomization of the audience, who in the broadcasting model were connected "up" to the center but not "across" to each other. Well, blogging is a re-voicing tool in journalism, and the Net's strengths in horizontal communication mean that audience atomization is being overcome.

In particular, I liked the comments about the "almost feudal period" of shifting influence and the "de-voicing" of the journalist.

And, for all bloggers, the discussion about building credibility is important. It's true that bloggers--unless they already come from the mainstream media or political power structure (or the power structure of whatever parts of society they blog about)--most often have to start from ground zero in terms of building credibility. I think that's done most often by breaking news first, getting the story right, with many little "exclusive," and especially when bits of well-connected "gossip," is reported and shortly thereafter comes to pass. Obviously, if the blogger was in on the gossip and trusted it well enough to report it and it comes to pass, that blogger has boosted their reputation as being "connected" and "credible."