j's scratchpad

Tuesday’s (9/16) Berkman Center lunch is, as the title suggestions, about blogging, journalism, and reality. Tune into the webcast. It’s too late to RSVP for the lunch. (One of these days, I’ll post one of these notices so there’s enough time to RSVP and attend.)

Blogging, Journalism and Reality
Persephone Miel, Berkman Fellow

Tuesday, September 16, 12:30PM
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 PM ET on 9/16.

The Media Re:public project has been studying the impact of participatory media on the overall news environment, looking at how the ability of “the people formerly known as the audience” to produce media is and isn’t revolutionizing the sphere, especially how new models are being adopted and adapted by traditional media organizations. Persephone Miel presents some preliminary conclusions for discussion.

Addendum: Persephone began by describing some differences between journalism and blogging, like bloggers aren’t worried about losing their jobs and people at blogging conferences are much happier than people at journalism conferences.

She cited sources indicating blogs still aren’t as popular as mainstream media sites and that by far, people still primarily get their news from newspapers, television, and the radio—sources considered to be traditional news sources. Though the number of people who are using online sources has grown a few percentage points in the last few years, it’s still around 26%—fewer than 1/3 of people surveyed. She hypothesizes that while old media seems to be broken, it’s not the online world that is breaking them. While people have ideas about how to fix the media, many people are afraid to try.

Persephone observes that mainstream media are focused on the bottom line, bloggers are happy doing what they’re doing, civic-minded projects often miss how people use the media and how involved they want to be in the process, and public broadcasting is in its own world.

Her fear isn’t so much that newspapers will die, but that they’ll begin doing all sorts of things to try to stay alive, like cutting back on how and what they’re reporting as their budgets change. Web-based media is often not covering the gaps mainstream media leaves. “Efforts to address public needs for news and information and evaluate their success are based on incomplete information, anecdotes and intuition rather than rigorous empiriccal evidence.” Credibility is an even bigger problem [j here: on at least two levels: consumers aren't as worried about the credibility of their sources as they should be and sources aren't necessarily doing what they should to inform consumers of their credibility.]. How do people evaluate information, especially commercial information sneaked into an article? Democracy is a challenge because many groups aren’t necessarily democratic. And, of course, how do we know what’s not on the Web? How do we study absence instead of presence? How do we know why people aren’t on the Web?

Lisa Williams threw out a challenge to journalists. She doesn’t think current news room technology can answer the question “How many veterans, especially those returning from the Iraq war, have a prosthesis issued by the government?” She uses that question to answer why journalists doing research, especially hands-on research, provide value to their news organization.

(I’m sitting on the floor in the back of the room because that’s where space is available. I can hear because I can hear the feed from the webcast from the headphones of the fellow running the webcast who is sitting behind me. I can’t see the bottom third of the slides. That’s not a complaint; it’s just meant as a warning that I’m going to miss parts of this presentation. You might want to listen to the archived webcast.)

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Blogging, Professional Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.