Blogs and big media: together again at last?

Jane Galt via Ezra Klein:

Blogs are a very efficient filter for odd stories, really big stories, and policy arguments. They are a very bad filter for stories you want to know about, but not to argue about: local transportation bills, burglary rates, hospital corruption scandals. In short, blogs are a pretty good substitute for an op-ed page. They are rarely good substitutes for news reporting. This is especially true of politics, because bloggers by and large simply do not have the access or the historical relationships with enough insiders to make an informed judgement. If you've ever spent any time around lobbyists, politicians, or political staffers, you know that legislation and regulations are crafted in a web of complex power relationships unbelievably more intricate than it looks from the outside. There is simply no substitute for spending an enormous amount of time listening to tedious and often petty arguments from all the various stakeholders.

That's why I was so surprised by the New York Times' TimesSelect strategy. It seemed unbelievably ass-backwards to me. The Times has always had a distinctly mediocre editorial page (at least since I've been a reader), populated largely by household names whose schtick had already begun to wear a little thin when they joined the page. Its news gathering organisation, on the other hand, is probably the biggest and best in the world, with the exception of the wire services and the BBC. So it decided to give its content away for free in the one area where it has a serious competitive advantage over its rivals, and put a pay barrier in front of its opinion journalism.

But it seems to me that with the possible exceptions of Paul Krugman and David Brooks, people read the columnists because they are in the nation's most widely circulated paper, not the other way around. The NYT confused what people read and email each other, with what they will pay for. If those two things were the same, poems about Jesus and pictures of animals dressed up in costumes would have displaced porn and gambling as the internet's biggest industries.

Bloggers are making the same error when they talk about displacing the mainstream media. People like op-eds, but they buy newspapers because they want to know what is happening in the world. That implies an organisation that steadily churns out not just flashy stories about global geopolitical summits, but also not-particularly-interesting items on the EU agricultural ministry and flash floods in Arizona--even if the editor's cat has died.

In a way, I think blogging has the same trouble that I think open source will continue to have: without the profit motive, there is no incentive to invest in the dull-but-necessary, or cater to outsiders. I doubt many of us would go down and check out what the city council is doing about the sewers voluntarily, so it's a good thing that the local paper pays someone to do it. Similarly, open source user interfaces tend to be powerful and less-than-intuitive to non-technical people, because open-source developers produce what they want, not what some hypothetical customer needs. Newspapers, and software companies, are a very efficient way for us to each chip in a tiny sum to pay people to develop knowlege we want to have, but don't want to take the trouble of getting for ourselves. They work because they are centralized. There are drawbacks, of course, but I think the model will still be with us for some time to come.