The blogosphere is the Associated Press of the 21st Century
Industries have certain structures for a reason. There are industries like steel and autos, which have a small number of large competitors, and industries like retail clothiers, which have both large and small competitors, and lots of them. The structure of an industry depends on what the economics of the industry are — how capital intensive, how innovative, how subject to consumer whim, etc.
It is both no surprise and no accident, therefore, that the New Media resemble the Old Media as much as they do. The New York Times and Washington Post serve a similar market to the New York Post and Washington Times. Old Media have radio news broadcasts at the top of each hour on the AM band; often the other 55 minutes is filled with New Media broadcasts. Fox News has 20-22% market share in a daily news cycle, depending on how you count; the liberal Old Media, and their cable affiliates, have the rest.
But what to make of the blogosphere? The Old Media seem thoroughly puzzled by it — at times in wonderment, but mostly dismissive. They should not be puzzled at all, however. The Old Media created the the blogosphere’s direct antecedant.
The Associated Press was created by ten newspapers in New York in 1848 to deal with the challenges imposed bt the new technology of the telegraph. It was too expensive for a single newspaper to station reporters at distant outposts, even though news would now be available from those places almost instantly. So David Hale of the Journal of Commerce organized a meeting of the largest New York papers to pool resources to be able to capitalize on the new technology without going broke. Thus was born the AP. Reuters had a similar origin, founded in the desire to get stock quotes communicated swiftly. The Old Media were quite capitalistic when they were the young media.
The blogosphere was not created in a top-down fashion, and its birth has been more chaotic, which perhaps accounts for part of the confusion about finding an appropriate metaphor to describe it. Often, it is said, the blogs are scribblings; there are no controls, there are no editors or fact checkers. To address the last point first, the blogosphere is a fact-checking machine, as was perhaps best demonstrated in the Rathergate episode.
As for editors, some distinct trends are emerging. Law professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who now has a semi-Old Media gig, writes at length on only a few topics, and chooses the items he links to with care, mostly from trusted sources with proven track records. Instapundit is often exactly the same as a wire service, only better, in relaying information on the topic that’s hot, such as the situation in the Ukraine. Powerline’s lawyer/commentators tend to write more feature articles on areas that interest them; they have outstanding political commentary, and have cornered the market on beauty pageants — clearly mimicking the trend in wire services towards specialization in reporting. Hugh Hewitt has pioneered using blogs to conduct group studies of an issue, among his many other contributions. Thomas Lifson in The American Thinker has created a blog magazine of high quality, effectively separating the wheat from the chaff in what he prints and links to (while always being kind to the chaff, by the way). Roger Simon is one of the premier op-ed writers of the blogosphere. I use these examples because these blogs either receive high traffic, or are influential for other reasons, or both; the blogosphere is in the process of sorting itself out into the most useful forms for the delivery or reliable news and informed opinion, a process that will take a few more years to complete.
Put these various functions and perspectives together, and it resembles this:
The Associated Press employs some of the best and most experienced journalists in the world. Each is dedicated to the same standards — fairness, balance and accuracy. With a robust network of more than 3,700 employees around the world, AP provides breaking news coverage and compelling enterprise pieces that can’t be found anywhere else. AP’s news report reflects the full breadth of international, national, state, sports, business and entertainment news and AP’s specialized coverage is widely used at length on newspaper section fronts across the United States and around the world.
However, the blogosphere’s editors and publishers named above have to date hewed close to the truth of the stories they have reported, while the AP has often lost its way of late, and reported false stories with a partisan axe to grind.
Expect to see the blogosphere continue to evolve into a form that is competitive with the AP, Reuters, and the New York Times News Service. The structure of the industry is there because it works.