Three Wise Bloggers Bear Good News for Newspapers

By: Jesse Oxfeld There's a tempting metaphor to be drawn about descending on Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley -- going to the city in which once-mighty Bethlehem Steel turned off its furnaces in 1995 -- to consider how the once- (and perhaps still-) mighty American institution of the daily newspaper is competing with one of its own postindustrial competitors: blogs.

Still, I'm not sure there was any deep meaning behind my drive to Bethlehem earlier this week. That's simply where the Allentown Morning Call, a 120,000-circ Tribune paper, the area's major daily, hosted an interesting panel discussion called "Blog the Vote." The paper shelled out some cash to fly in three of the country's top political bloggers -- Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos, and John Hinderaker of Power Line -- to discuss the election, politics, journalism, and the role of blogs.

There was a certain hold-your-enemies-closer aspect to the Morning Call's embrace of the three major bloggers that night, because, truth is, newspapers don't quite know what to do about these newfangled Web logs, and they're a little nervous.

Editors and executives have spent years just getting comfortable on the Internet; they've been building Web sites, determining how much original content to post there (and how to pay for that online staff), and considering how much a paper's site should simply replicate the print edition. Publishers have been busy trying to figure out if there's any way to make money from people reading their papers online. And there is, finally, perhaps good news on that front: An article Monday in London's Guardian noted that advertisers are finally taking the Internet seriously and spending real money on the medium.

But with the suddenly surging popularity of blogs, online news habits are changing once again. Newspaper folks worry (especially in these very polarized times) that readers increasingly turn to partisan bloggers with whom they identify -- bloggers unbound by doctrines of objectivity and fact checking and double sourcing -- instead of turning to their daily papers. There's a real concern that blogs are taking away readers, damaging journalism, and -- this might be the scariest part -- providing instantaneous fact checking on whatever newspapers write.

You could pick up a scent of that fear when the results of the a recent survey by the Associate Press Managing Editors' National Credibility Roundtables Project were presented at the APME convention in Louisville, Ky., last week. The survey, which examined whether, and to what extent, readers trust newspapers and other mainstream media, also asked about blog habits, finding that 20 percent of respondents read blogs for news. The blog-reading respondents "urged caution but suggest the new medium offers great potential as a watchdog of mainstream media," according to the survey (as reported last week by my colleague Joe Strupp).

But that watchdog point is exactly the key part. Because, contrary to some worries, blogs and newspapers aren't competitive media. In fact, they're entirely complementary.

"I consider myself to be a media filter," Daily Kos's Moulitsas told the audience in Bethlehem. He doesn't do reporting, and he's adament that he's not a journalist. He needs newspapers and their staffs to do what they've always done -- report, write, produce articles -- that he can use raw masterial for his blog.

"I think of blogging as throwing spitballs from the back of the class," said Cox, aka Wonkette. And she knows she needs the journalists at the front of the room, as targets for her spitballs.

At its best, the relationship between traditional newspaper reporters and bloggers is a very successful and effective feedback loop. Reporters learn something and write an interesting article about it. (We even do it here at E&P.) Bloggers use that article as the basis for commentary or comedy or whatever, and, in so doing, direct readers to the reporter's article, getting his or her work more attention. Then, using what Power Line's Hinderaker called the "incredible power of the Internet to bring together thousands of bits of information from people around the country," more information relevant to the original article comes back to the reporter, helping his or her understanding of the topic covered become even more accurate and nuanced.

This last part is what reporters find scary -- that the article isn't the final word, that other people will be able to call attention to discrepancies or inaccuracies. But to a fair-minded and confident reporter, that shouldn't be a bad thing; it's a way of ensuring the record is right, that errors are corrected, that reporters' understanding is deepened.

Blogs aren't separate and apart from traditional media. They're part of it. Many leading bloggers -- Joshua Micah Marshall, Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivanare traditional journalists. And those who aren't, in my experience, would like nothing better than to use the attention they get from their blogs to land real, paying gigs in real, traditional publications. The popular New York blog The Minor Fall, The Major Lift (the name is taken from a Leonard Cohen song) shut down not long ago "after years of pseudonymously mocking the major media," as The New York Observer put it. Soon enough, its unmasked author, Alex Balk, showed up with a byline in The New York Times -- and the blogosphere was atwitter.

Sitting on Moravian College's stage in Bethlehem, Cox, Moulitsas, and Hinderaker fielded questions on journalism ethics, the political race, and Jon Stewart's recent run-in with the Crossfire guys. They were sober, thoughtful, and sharp in their analysis. If this panel had featured, say, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and William Safire, the conversation would not have been substantially different.

Especially for younger readers, "blogs are key to the relevance of newspapers," Chris Krewson, the Morning Call multimedia editor who helped put the panel together, told me. He's absolutely right. Newspapers shouldn't be worried about blogs; newspapers should embrace them.