Washington Post Dings Bloggers
March 1, 2009
Marc Fisher, Washington Post, wrote “Bloggers Can’t Fill the Gap Left by Shrinking Press Corps” here. The title did an excellent job of summarizing this article. Newspapers have tough financial hurdles to get over. Journalists have been told, “Don’t let the door hit your ankle on the way out.” But newspapers have other problems as well. For me the most interesting segment of the write up was:
Many bloggers say that far from being able to replace professional reporters, they actually suffer from the diminished flow of state news. “What I can’t offer on my blogs is the relationships, the institutional memory, the why, the history that reporters who know the capital can bring to their stories,” says Waldo Jaquith, who blogs on Virginia politics and runs a site, RichmondSunlight.com, that tracks every bill. “Newspapers can describe the candidates for governor in a more balanced, deeper way because you don’t have a dog in the race. We bloggers do.” A combination of media revolution and economic collapse is dismantling our news infrastructure, especially at the state and local levels. “Someday, people will wake up to the depletion of the press corps,” Gibson says. “I don’t know if the result will be corruption or demagoguery, but the interests of the people are not being represented anymore.”
Whether bloggers can or cannot fill the gap is an interesting question to debate. The addled goose will find out because the dead tree outfits are toppling. Newspapers have fallen from favor among the demographic that was the core of daily newspaper consumption. The grade and high school students are not too keen on newspapers. Twitter brings real time news to anyone with a network connection. Traditional newspapers are, in my opinion, sliding down the mountain on their backs. Scary ride. I will read about it on Twitter.
Stephen Arnold, March 1, 2009
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