The future of news

I love it when a blog post writes itself. You might think I’d been searching all day for this, but I stumbled on it at the end of the day as I was skimming for news.

Editor Len Downie of the Washington Post seems to have a really good grasp on how blogging and news should interact and interrelate.

Reporters love newsroom blogs, said Downie, because they put writers in better touch with their readers: "Everyone in our newsroom wants to be a blogger."

And the blogs that pick apart every article that the Post produces are a good thing, said Downie, because they "keep the paper honest" and, even if their commentary isn't positive, bring people to the site.

"Blogs are not competitors and not problems," he said. "Instead we have a very interesting symbiotic relationship. Our largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge."

When newspapers first came into being, they existed to bring the facts (only the facts) of the news to the attention of people it directly affected. With a small circulation paper, a significant percentage of the readership had enough information to verify the credibility of a story. If the paper made up their facts, they didn’t last long. That is, unless there was nobody in town knowledgeable about that topic - then they could get away with murder.

When newspapers went from local to regional to greater-metropolitan, a certain amount of dialog and cross-checking by the public was lost. The number of people who were close enough to the story to cross-check it got smaller, and with no useful way for that small minority to sound the alarm, the value of the news diminished as well.

Business travel and frequent flyer miles created the niche for USA Today and phenomena like national delivery of the New York Times. With so much power, newspapers have become whatever they want to be without the checks-and-balances afforded by reader interaction.

Enter the internet, newsroom blogs, and personal blogs. Now that everyone can be a publisher of their own little small-circulation paper, the landscape has shifted, and I think this is overall for the better. Where once the local readers would provide the cross-check on a story, now bloggers can identify when a story smells and tell people about it more widely than ever before. PowerLine owes a great deal of their popularity to the Rathergate incident.

Better still, “not having an expert in town” is pretty much a thing of the past. If you can think of a topic, there’s bound to be someone out there who calls it their passion. More than likely, there’s a website devoted to the topic, or even a webring. If those people get wind of the issue, they’re likely to comment, either on the news site or their own. Truth wants to be free and - so long as we still have freedom of speech - is very likely to be out there.

[via - who else? - Drudge]