Washington was hit with a blanket of snow last
night. And in today’s editorial section
of the Washington Post we got hit with a snow job. Jim Brady, editor of the WashingtonPost.com,
uses the better part of a full page to complain about the bad behavior of a
handful of bloggers several weeks ago. Jeff Jarvis reacted aptly with his response. “If you can’t stand the heat, Jim, get out of
the pressroom.”
Not being a
professional journalist but instead one of those rabble-rouser bloggers, my
message to Mr. Brady is slightly different: you can’t have it both ways. Jim
Brady and other members of established media organizations want to benefit from
the diverse audiences delivered to them via the Internet but they don’t want to
tangle with the “ugly downside”: the
consumer has taken control.
The beauty
of what’s happening today with the blogosphere (and all the other forms of
consumer generated media) is that people are actively engaging in thousands of
millions of conversations about topics they’re passionately interested in. They aren’t just submissively reading or
listening to whatever the mass media wants to churn out. They’re challenging the response to Hurricane
Katrina, objecting to the use of malware to enforce digital rights management,
and questioning the validity of our ongoing presence in Iraq.
Today there
are 27.7m blogs. The blogosphere is
doubling every 5 1/2 months, and that doesn’t even begin to count all the
podcasts, videocasts, moblogs, etc. With
all due respect, what Mr. Brady and his peers need to realize is that old media
models are giving way to new ones. Brady
et alia are reacting the same way the powers that be did when the Gutenberg
press was invented 1500 years ago. They’re trying to assert editorial control as a means of ensuring
quality … and their own livelihoods. But
the fact is that across the country newspapers subscriptions and advertising
dollars are dropping, and consumer faith in journalism along with it.
The
Washington Post wants to rise above the noise without engaging in the
conversation. As Dan Gillmor points out, the Washington Post opted out
of the problem of irrational, outrageous debate instead of trying to elevate
the dialog to a higher level. I don’t
know what the blogosphere/consumer generated media world will look like in
twenty years. But I can guarantee you
that traditional media will become extinct unless it learns how to leverage its
tremendous talents in collaboration with the new, active citizen journalist.
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