Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
There seems to be a single story from mainstream media pundits when they consider the issue of blogs and other forms of new media. That story has become so commonly repeated that one must wonder if Microsoft Word has produced a template for the story that allows the byline to be changed and the simplistic arguments to remain the same. The thesis goes like this:
"Newspapers, that bastion of objectivity and rigorous investigation, are dying. They're being replaced by blogs and online news outlets that are all written by untrained interlopers sitting in their boxer shorts in their parents' basement, interlopers who do not hold to the deeply thought out and always followed ethical standards of Real Journalists. This is a national tragedy."
Michael Gerson provides the latest example of this literary genre in the Washington Post. And like most such screeds, there is a kernel of truth in the story that is being blown way out of proportion by vastly exaggerating the virtues of the traditional media and vastly understating the virtues of the new media forms. He makes the typical "blogs steal from Real Journalists" argument:
And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain. But newspapers are expected to provide their content free on the Internet. A recent poll found that 80 percent of Americans refuse to pay for Internet content. There is no economic model that will allow newspapers to keep producing content they don't charge for, while Internet sites repackage and sell content they don't pay to produce.I dislike media bias as much as the next conservative. But I don't believe that journalistic objectivity is a fraud. I was a journalist for a time, at a once-great, now-diminished newsmagazine. I've seen good men and women work according to a set of professional standards I respect -- standards that serve the public. Professional journalism is not like the buggy-whip industry, outdated by economic progress, to be mourned but not missed. This profession has a social value that is currently not reflected in its market value.
Balko rightly points out that while this is true of some blogs, it ignores the fact that the same thing happens in the other direction - and he's personally been the target of that in a major story where his reporting brought down one of the most corrupt aspects of the Mississippi legal system:
In 20 years, the Gannett-owned Jackson Clarion-Ledger never got around to investigating Steven Hayne, despite the fact that all the problems associated with him and Mississippi's autopsy system are and have been fairly common knowledge around the state for decades. It wasn't until the Innocence Project, spurred by my reporting, called for Hayne's medical license that the paper had no choice but to begin to cover a huge story that had been going on right under its nose for two decades.Take note, Gerson: That's when the paper starting stealing my scoops. Me, a web-based reporter working on a relatively limited budget. Like this story (covered by the paper a week later). And this one (covered by the paper weeks later here). Oh, and that well-funded traditional media giant CNN did the same thing.
I believe I've told this story before, but the New York Times indirectly reported on the Cory Maye case a few years before I did. Longtime crime reporter Fox Butterfield was in Prentiss, Mississippi to write about how the drug trade was devastating the rural South. He referenced Maye's case on the front page, but because he'd already committed to the conceptual outline of his story (drugs are bad, and the government isn't doing enough to fight them), it didn't occur him to wonder why a man with no criminal record and no significant amount of drugs in his home would intentionally kill a police officer. Butterfield admitted as much to me when I spoke to him over the phone. The same can be said of the initial coverage of Maye's case by Mississippi media. No one dug a little. No one went beyond interviewing the police and Maye's attorney. It took a libertarian policy analyst in Washington looking at the case from a different perspective-one much more skeptical of law enforcement-to see the story, here.
And he sums up the argument:
You don't need a ton of money to do investigative journalism. Nor is journalism necessarily tainted when its done with an agenda. In fact, some of the best investigative reporting has historically and still comes from the likes of Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and Harper's. More recently, on the web at places like Talking Points Memo or the Center for Independent media sites. Tim Carney has done great work exposing corporate rent seeking and corruption in Washington over at the Examiner. These are all publications that most certainly have a perspective. Accuracy and fairness are what's important. The idea that anyone can approach a beat or a story with a detached, sterile objectivity is a farce.Newspapers are still important. But it's ridiculous to suggest that only newspapers and their pretense of objectivity can do effective or important investigative journalism. Frankly, what investigative journalism needs is more people who haven't spent 10 years in a newsroom getting too familiar with government sources, growing too wedded to the idea of pure objectivity, and too hamstrung by the way things have always been done.
Amen, brother. Let me add a few examples of my own. It wasn't the New York Times or the Washington Post that broke the story that the Bush administration had reached an agreement allowing them to continue their crusade against online gambling that puts public safety and possibly national security at risk. It was me, with a clear axe to grind about those absurd anti-gambling laws.
It wasn't the Detroit News or the Lansing State Journal that exposed Sovereign Deed and its founder Barrett Moore as a fraud and prevented them from locating their headquarters in Pellston, Michigan last year. It was the Michigan Messenger, a Center for Independent Media outlet, and our brilliant and dogged reporter Eartha Melzer.
Let me add something that I think has gone largely unnoticed in such discussions: It is much, much easier to do investigative journalism today than it has ever been before. Why? The internet. The tools that we have at our immediate disposal today was unheard of for investigative journalists in previous generations.
Want to find out which corporations are funding which legislators to do their bidding? 20 years ago that required going down to the FEC or the Secretary of State's office and getting hard copies of all the disclosure forms, spending untold hours pouring over them and cross checking the data. Today that information is available at the click of a button, in searchable databases broken down every imaginable way.
The same thing is true of court filings, tax records, transcripts of public meetings and other sources of information that are crucial to investigative journalism. Cell phone cameras and voice recorders are cheap and affordable, as are tiny spy cameras and recorders, allowing an individual to do a sting operation today that only a well-funded organization could have pulled off in the past.
The problem, as Balko says, is that Gerson lumps all new media together and all old media together, ignoring the disparities in quality. I love newspapers. I'm sad that they're dying. And no, I don't think new media organizations like CIM can replace them entirely; we simply don't have the resources. But it's time to put away this absurd notion that the traditional media was a bastion of objectivity and relentless journalism while the new media is just a bunch of kids ranting on Twitter.
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Not to mention that non-journalists have been doing stuff for decades now. Just look at the National Security Archive as a prime example.
Posted by: History Punk | December 3, 2009 9:31 AM
Ed:
Three Words (I think):
"Survivor: The MSM"
Posted by: democommie | December 3, 2009 9:36 AM
For some reason, it's the writing that will make me read newspapers. At one time I preferred reading the New York Times,even their local sections and the WSJ (pre Murdock) than my local newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer. If I want to get the skinning I will check out several sources.
I don't know the scene enough to know the true journalist on the net.
Posted by: Hathor | December 3, 2009 9:46 AM
A lot of the content in some newspapers is just reprints of AP articles.
Guess what? Google News is perfectly capable of doing that on its own. You have to do your own legwork if you want unique content - and if you don't have unique content, why would anyone read your newspaper?
Posted by: Tacroy | December 3, 2009 9:52 AM
Newspapers are dying and on-line content is contributing to that. But surely bigger factors are the 24-hour a day news channels like CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, etc. The morning newspaper contains nothing but old news. If you watch those TV stations you find out who won a primary election five minutes after the polls close.
The percentage of people who get their news from blogs is still fairly small. The percentage who have cable or satellite TV is much higher.
Posted by: Randy Crum | December 3, 2009 10:03 AM
"while the new media is just a bunch of kids ranting on Twitter."
Funny thing about twitter is that "kids" don't use it. It's mostly older folks. Kids today mostly communicate via lamebook, in what is probably the fastest emerging new dialect in the history of the evolution of language: http://www.lamebook.com/keyboarding-101
Posted by: Drew | December 3, 2009 10:15 AM
There is actually a simple anser: It's Clippy. The MSM has never upgraded from Windows98, so they are stuck with that version of Word. Which features Clippy.
Every time a Republican politician gets caught in a sex scandal, why does the Fox crawl-line always put "(D)" after the name? Clippy won't allow an "R". It's that simple.
Why does the book of Isiaih predict that the Evil One shall fall into a place called Redmond, Washington? What is the Mark of the Beast? It's Clippy.
Posted by: kehrsam | December 3, 2009 10:52 AM
Like most things, it depends. I simply don't see how a blogger could have broken Watergate. Sure the break-in was public information and bloggers could have gone to town speculating that the White House was behind it, but getting enough actual evidence to get Congress to investigate required painstaking access to and cultivation of inside sources beyond the abilities of even the best bloggers. And particularly at the level of scandals in local government or police forces, almost all the ones that have been exposed in my area were done by the local paper.
In fact, I see the real niche for local papers when the actual "news" is available 24/7 is in investigative stories, something that local TV does almost none of.
Posted by: JusticeLeague | December 3, 2009 10:59 AM
Kehrsam, don't you ever get tired of winning threads? ;^D
~David D.G.
Posted by: David D.G. | December 3, 2009 11:01 AM
Shorter MSM:
"Competition makes us butthurt!"
Posted by: Pat Donohue | December 3, 2009 11:17 AM
I've read a lot more nonsense in the Washington Post than I ever did from a ScienceBlogger.
And why exactly can't they make money on the web? Yeah, people don't want to pay. So what? People hardly pay anything for the print edition. I think it costs more to produce then what it sells for. It's the advertising that makes money. Online, you may lose the (token) cover price, but you also lose the printing costs.
Posted by: Nemo | December 3, 2009 11:40 AM
Ed Brayton and Balko's complaints about larger outlets "stealing scoops" is deeply misguided, and really sounds more like sour grapes. Brayton and Balko broke the stories they refer to (and kudos to them) but they don't have the sole rights to these topics. If they did, then no one who doesn't read "The Michigan Messenger" or "Reason" would know about it.
Consider the alternative: The Washington Post broke the Watergate break in and much of the illegal shenanigans of the Nixon administration. If, as Balko and Brayton seem to imply, the Post had exclusive rights to cover the story just because they first broke it, then no one who didn't reat the Washington Post would know about it. If it's a big story, other outlets are going to pick up the story and run with it. And that's a good thing.
No one credible is saying that "New Media" can't report new and breaking news. However online media is so fractious, usually with very specialized readerships (Reason is a perfect example of such a specialized outlet) that if outlets had exclusive rights to stories, no one outside the small specialized readership would hear about it, and nothing would get done to fix it.
Posted by: quantos | December 3, 2009 11:52 AM
@ Nemo #11
In the abstract your plan might work, however the (current) economic realities are such that internet ads don't make nearly as much money as print ads do. Unfortunately, income from online ads alone can't cover the running of most papers, even if printing and delivery costs are eliminated. If internet advertising increases in value in the future this could change, but there are few indicators they will to a sustainable level any time soon.
Posted by: quantos | December 3, 2009 12:09 PM
I see a couple of problems. I consider myself at the tail-end of the newspaper age in terms of age at 49.
Pre-Internet, I'd say a majority of the tail-end of the boomers gravitated towards TV news. TV News historically relied mostly on newspapers for both their news, how to prioritize the news, but most importantly - how much legs stories had. In spite of this demographic move toward TV News, there were enough folks my age and older to allow their decline to be on a modest descent.
When the Internet first became prevalent, I found it interesting that all my associates older than me linked to stories from newspapers, all my associates younger than me to stories from TV News, typically CNN or the three major networks. Few viral emails existed. That has changed, older associates now link to Fox News and viral conservative emails exclusively, they're convinced non-Fox outlets are fatally flawed due to "bias" (they aren't into nuance).
Where newspapers and TV fails and where blogs have become indispensable is analysis. Traditional journalism rarely employs people who seem to have anywhere near the critical thinking skills someone like Ed, Andrew Sullivan, or Eugene Volkh possess. Their reporters are also under-educated and lack the ability to ask the obvious questions to get a well-framed and accurate story rather than a fatally framed story.
In addition, the dinosaurs like George Will or Thomas Sowell become even more evidently idiotic given a large swath of the population interested in current events is far better informed and can therefore see through their charade. The Internet age has both better exposed these intellectual frauds and aggravated their condition by providing them with more material to feed their fraud and communities to reinforce it.
I am concerned about the fact that the media still does not get that the public will no longer tolerate poor analysis or reportage that actually mutates our understanding rather than enhancing it.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 3, 2009 12:12 PM
Even the "aggregator" sites can have real value. For instance, I follow Nakedcapitalism and Calculated Risk, both of which depend on MSM reporting for material, but the critique and knowledgeable added detail provided by those sites is deeply revealing of the limitations of the MSM as it exists today. If the MSM wants the bloggers to stop, they need to start doing a better job.
Posted by: Moopheus | December 3, 2009 1:02 PM
I'm older than 49, and I've seen "dead tree media" (DTM) blame their decline successively on Radio, TV, Cable, and the Internet. I've never seen them innovate in any one of those "blameworthy" media, despite the fact that the same opportunities were largely available to the DTM as were available to those who did innovate.
Andrew Sullivan (on his blog, not in "his" DTM) has pointed out, (paraphrasing) that the DTM suffered from their business model, which, they believed, was not delivering news to subscribers and other readers, but rather delivering subscribers and other readers ("eyes" in modern parlance) to advertisers.
Innovation was impossible because it had the potential of (temporarily, probably) diminishing the DTM profit margins.
I'm in the DTM's last remaining demographic, and I get most of my news and opinion from bloggers and aggregators. I have described my local DT newspaper to its editors as a "diet newspaper: I can finish the day's edition before I finish my breakfast."
Posted by: PoxyHowzes | December 3, 2009 3:02 PM
http://waxman.house.gov/UploadedFiles/speech_-_ftc_workshop_-_12-2-2009.pdf
Waxman wants to bail out newspapers, make public finds available for them. Says that newspapers are essential for strong democracy, so obviously the answer is to make them dependent on the government for income.
Posted by: Juice | December 3, 2009 4:18 PM
Today's print media cou;;dn't have broken a Watergate type story because the bosses would kill it. Anyway, Deep Throat would rather give his information (investigative reporting) to Wonkette.
Posted by: teammarty | December 3, 2009 4:19 PM
teammarty-Name a Watergate-sized story broken by bloggers. With all due respect to Ed, online gambling and Sovereign Deed don't quite reach that level.
And yes, I don't think today's WaPo would break Watergate, but I don't think the bloggers would either. And that is very worrisome.
Posted by: JusticeLeague | December 3, 2009 4:25 PM
GERSON?! Are you fucking kidding me? Michael Gerson is part of the problem: he's the Bush speechwriter who contributed to that huge lie about Saddam's WMD capabilities, and the Post has absolutely no excuse to have such a proven bigoted liar on their payroll. He's lied about liberals, lied about science, lied about evolution, lied about eugenics, and lied about atheists; and that's just in his first year at WaPo. He is, in fact, one of the main reasons I'm no longer paying for the Post daily, and am, for the first time in my life, thinking of dropping it altogether and switching to the NY Times. (If anyone else here has any other suggestions for a more reliable daily paper that covers world news, I'm all ears. Seriously, WaPo's national and world news sections have shurnk, and so has its integrity.)
And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting.
At least the bloggers are actually stealing REAL INFORMATION. That's more than Gerson, Krauthammer and their fellow liars can say.
But I don't believe that journalistic objectivity is a fraud.
No, you just pretend it doesn't exist when the facts contradict your party line.
I was a journalist for a time, at a once-great, now-diminished newsmagazine.
Then Bush got elected, and suddenly making shit up became more profitable than honest work.
I've seen good men and women work according to a set of professional standards I respect -- standards that serve the public.
Standards you abandoned to champion a war that got thousands of Americans killed and stretched our military past the breaking point, for no purpose other than making Republicans look manly and brave. Yo, Mikey, did you ever do any investigative reporting to find out exactly how many Iraqis died in our war? Did you even ASK?
Fuck Michael Gerson. He has no more integrity than Sal "Wormtongue" Cordova.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 3, 2009 4:31 PM
Raging Bee and I have disagreed from time to time (such is the nature of the democratic forum of ScienceBlogs) but on one thing we most assuredly agree: Michael Gerson is a lying fuckbag's lying fuckbag.
Posted by: democommie | December 3, 2009 6:42 PM
Geez, that's not even hard. Contemptible though he is, Matt Drudge broke the Lewinsky scandal.
Posted by: Nemo | December 3, 2009 6:47 PM
What he doesn't bother to address is that there are thousands of specialized sites that most laypersons would never have had access to before. Let's take legal blogs: The best the MSM has to offer is relatively brief reports by journalists who happen to also be lawyers. Nina Totenburg, say. There is no money to made by offering more, so they don't.
In contrast, there are a dozen or more legal blogs such as SCOTUSblog, Balkinization, or Volokh that offer expert opinions by prominent academics in the field. The MSM literally cannot compete.
This same pattern is true on countless issues. To take a fairly random topic, if you were interested in homosexual issues, which would you rather have, the whole MSM coverage of the issues, or just the coverage provided by the three sites Andrew Sullivan, Americablog, and Pam's House blend? It's not a close call.
I am a reader, so I lament the failure of th industry. But free, open information is far better than even paying a nominal subscription fee.
Posted by: kehrsam | December 3, 2009 7:42 PM
Historically the media have been biased, look at Hearst talking the US into the Spanish American war. To go back further there were typically republican and democratic papers in most cities and you knew which was which. Before the steam press when there were no significant barriers to entry, political parties sponsored newspapers. What is happening now is that the barriers to entry have come down again. (Even if you want to publish physically its a lot cheaper than it used to be) This of course means that the main stream media has to downsize. If you look at Washington events why do so many photographers need to take shots of when the president makes an announcement. 1 photographer would suffice.
Posted by: Lyle | December 3, 2009 8:44 PM
Funny. MSM journalists always accuse Web-based medias of collecting and diffusing rumors, unsubstantiated stories and mere PR. But recently (here in France at least), the flurry of false news that was all over the media didn't start on the Web, but in newspapers, on TV and on the radio. Some of those stories were just ridiculous, but others were devastating for the life of people accused, for instance, of being pedophiles, industrial spies or terrorists. They happened to be innocent, but their names and pictures were front page news for a while, which surely didn't make their life very easy. Also to be mentioned are some cases where the false news were actually launched by officials, then repeated by the media. Generally the online media are far more critical and far less likely to repeat unproved information than the richer and more "respectable" papers or TV news journalists.
Posted by: Christophe Thill | December 4, 2009 7:00 AM
But free, open information is far better than even paying a nominal subscription fee.
As a consumer, I like free information. But what about the information that always, inevitably, costs an arm and a leg to get, such as war news from Afghanistan, ANY news from places where bloggers and Internet connections are too thinly spread, or inside information on suspicious corporations like Blackwater or Sovereign Deed? What about information from inside China, where control and censorship of the Internet makes independent blog-journalism unreliable if not impossible? If we're not willing to pay for that sort of thing, who will? Advertizers and corporate sponsors? Would information paid for by that lot be trustworthy?
And what will happen when regimes like China establish tighter control of the Internet through technology -- which they're already starting to do? Can we trust technological advancement to always favor the free flow of information?
Perhaps interest groups and political parties should form their own news services, and pay for them through donations. Or maybe such groups should just buy up newpapers and use them as information/propaganda organs. The Washington Times did pretty effective work for Sun Myung Moon, at least for awhile. Isn't it about time we liberals started pushing back on that front?
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 4, 2009 9:00 AM
Raging Bee:
"Perhaps interest groups and political parties should form their own news services,"
You mean, I take it, someone other than the GOP/FoxNews?
Posted by: democommie | December 4, 2009 9:07 AM
Radley does excellent work. Highly recommend following his stuff. Thank you very much, Mr. Brayton for posting this!
Posted by: VikingMoose | December 4, 2009 4:33 PM
Yes, this! And as much as I really appreciate the bloggers, I also enjoy a lot of the commenters (like Michael Heath) who also help analyze, clarify and make me lol.
Posted by: twincats | December 4, 2009 6:11 PM
quantos -
Ed Brayton and Balko's complaints about larger outlets "stealing scoops" is deeply misguided, and really sounds more like sour grapes. Brayton and Balko broke the stories they refer to (and kudos to them) but they don't have the sole rights to these topics. If they did, then no one who doesn't read "The Michigan Messenger" or "Reason" would know about it.
Sour grapes? It sounds more like a response to the idiotic blathering of MSM outlets about bloggers doing that to them. Though at least when bloggers do it, they often credit their motherfucking source - hell they usually post a link to the original story.
Posted by: DuWayne | December 5, 2009 8:43 AM