When Blog Networks Make News, Silence Abounds

1sockchuck writes "It's been a bad week for transparency and disclosure in the blogosphere, demonstrating that once blogging starts making money, the rules change. Nick Douglas was dismissed from ValleyWag, Jason Calacanis bolts from AOL, and co-founder Duncan Riley abruptly departs from b5media. Where do we get the real story? From The New York Times, or not at all. If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons, it's because so many blogospheric leaders have told us we should. And now suddenly we're getting the snarky insider accounts of blogospheric dirt from The New York Times?"

Duh

You're laughably naive if you thought it would be any other way. The media (including blogs) is only answerable to other media. They keep each other honest. This is why you see papers like the Times printing lots of stories about themselves when they catch a reporter plagarizing; because when you out yourself, you get to keep a little face. People give you a little credit, even though you screwed 'em, when you own up to it and try to make amends.

But mostly, and by mostly I mean 99% of the reason, is because you do not ever ever want to give that kind of ammo to your competition. You will be found out and when you are, they will make you pay...Remember the Bush papers?

This is a prime example. The Times breaks it, but everyone and their dog will jump on the bandwagon about how the oh-so-transparent Blogs are perfectly willing to bury information when it comes to themselves. Can you really trust them? Is it just a passing fad? News at 11:00.

This is a good lesson for them. It's not easy to gain credibility, but it's easy as pie to lose it, and when people catch you in a single omission, they'll wonder how many omissions they failed to catch, and no amount of assurance will convince them that the answer is zero.

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However, this is a difference between media, and news sources. Generally, one can think of The Times, and such as sources for news (okay, you can argue that as well, but you know what I mean). Blogs, really, are nothing more than personal accounts. Taki

Re:Duh

Well, in my opinion, most media these days plays too fast and loose with the truth *cough* television *cough cough* and Blogs are really just more of the same. No one really holds them accountable, so while Blog A) may be honest and fair Blog B) could just be a complete partisan shill, lying his ass off, knowing no one can prove he's definitely wrong.

I think pretty much any story that doesn't include solid research into publicly available documents or primary sources who are willing to go on the record, is worthless, and this includes most Blogs, most television news, and not a few print news sources as well.

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Other blogs tend to hold bloggers to account, but they degenerate into flamewars, and blogwars, because there's no "professional" courtesy extended, or national advertising contracts to lose if they are seen as bickering children by the public.

I write on m

Re:Duh

Blogs, really, are nothing more than personal accounts.

More than personal accounts, many blogs are deeper analysis than mainstream media provides. Look at what Groklaw has done to educate the masses on some legal topics. Plus today some mainstream media supplement their news with blog posts from editors and reporters. That has the opportunity to offer more insight than just an news article.

And even if blogs are nothing more than personal accounts, who to better tell a story than a person who was there? I'd rather read blog posts from debating House Representatives than a news article that merely summarizes it. I sometimes read the blog of a former pharmaceutical CEO because his analysis of that industry and its political influence is far more informative than any news reporter.

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Just out of curiosity, which blog would that be?
I think it would be rather interesting.

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My mistake, he was a VP. But I just noticed he hasn't posted in months: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-rost/ [huffingtonpost.com]

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Look at what Groklaw has done to educate the masses on some legal topics.

and the masses are aware of Groklaw? in the numbers that are drawn to the New York Times, CNN, Court TV, etc? the name itself screams Geek.

Re:Duh

Really hard to press libel against a person who's making statements about a public figure. I mean, if I say, "I've heard that Dick Cheney falsified reports about WMDs" what could you sue me for? I just said I heard it, I didn't attribute it, I didn't claim it was true, or from a reputable source. Hell, most of the 24 hour news channels say crap like this in the form of speculation all day long.

I could claim, "Joe Lieberman today failed to deny reports that he was an affectionado of child pornography" without even asking him the question, and I could say he did deny it, as of course he would if someone asked him, then I could crop out anything except the sound bite of him saying, "I do not watch child porn!" and play it over and over and over again until "Lieberman" and "Child Porn" are forever linked in your brain.

It's a dirty dirty world, and there is a lot of stuff you can do that's not quite libelous or slanderous that is nonetheless dirty as hell. Any half competent blogger should be able to skirt that line with no trouble at all...But don't try it with non-public figures! The standard there is a hell of a lot lower.

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Also works with question marks. [youtube.com]

Re:Duh

This is why you see papers like the Times printing lots of stories about themselves when they catch a reporter plagarizing; because when you out yourself, you get to keep a little face.

Oh, yeah, right. That's why the Times was all over Judith Miller and Armstrong Williams and their conflicts of interest when they were acting as shills for the White House and uncritically publishing their lies as fact... Oh, wait. They weren't.

It was the blogs that reported on these developments honestly and incisively. The Times has an Imperial assload to answer for.

Schwab

Wait a second...

.. are you saying that MySpace and Livejournal aren't reliable sources of information?

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yup, somebody should have told Rupert Murdoch.

Speak for yourself

If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons, it's because so many blogospheric leaders have told us we should.

Huh? Wha? I have no idea what or who you're talking about here. Are you telling me that your criteria for whether or not a person is honest is if they tell you they are? If so, please use the pronoun "I". Where on earth did you get "we" from?

Alaska Jack

Re:Speak for yourself

If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons

Huh? Wha? I have no idea what or who you're talking about here. Are you telling me that your criteria for whether or not a person is honest is if they tell you they are? If so, please use the pronoun "I". Where on earth did you get "we" from?

Well, that's where the "if" comes from. It's also possible that the pronoun "we" refers not to all of us, but rather the subset of us that has come to expect honesty and straight talk.

As for me, I expect as much honesty and straight talk from a blog as much as I expect the same from any politician at the state or national level... not at all.

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Just to point out:

That is a cut and past from TFB. that said blog seems to be a blog, about the blogging community (I refuse to use that stupid word), by the blogging community, thus "we".

As for the rest of it.

I dono, possibly I am just to tired to really

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If we've come to expect honesty and straight talk from blogging icons,...

then we're idiots. Critical thinking should apply to all forms of communication - including "blogs".

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Hell, I don't know who any of these people are!

Nick Douglas? Jason Calacanis? Duncan Riley? Why do these people matter?

I guess I've been living under an Internet connected rock...

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The blogospheric leaders, sure. But the blagospheric leaders are much better.

I prefer blogs to the NYT

...for the main reason that I've never seen a blog worth anything that requires you register with some dumb pointless "Elmer Fudd at 90210" registration just to be able to read it like the NYT does.

to bring it back to apples and apples

"NYT is primarly print, while blogs are strictly web based. Sort of comparing apples to oranges (I get my news from blogs and print)."

I was referring to the NYT web site, not to the newspaper.

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Meh. The print media business is pretty conservative by nature, even if their views run the spectrum. The "internets" are a little more than a decade in the public consciousness, and print media rightly fears what they represent in terms of their long term

Blind Trust

This just serves to illustrate that we should never blindly trust what people tell us, and that critical thinking skills can't be dispensed with just because we think some author somewhere is above reproach.

But don't just take my word for it.

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I think it serves to illustrate that, no matter how we use are critical thinking, we're dependant on second-hand interpretations from people we believe to be trustworthy authorities. We have no choice to trust the mainstream media unless there's someone e

It doesn't have to be about the money

The rules didn't change because blogs started making money. Rather, now bloggers have something to lose, and they don't want to lose it. And worse than losing something would be throwing it away by pointing out your own problems to the world. People's first instinct is hide, not voice, their own problems. Unlike traditional news sources, blogs haven't had the longevity to know that transparency is the best policy.

Journalism meets Economics

The NYT also likes to cite 'blogghorea" as well .

There's some truth to this, because bloggers have a "can't get no respect" problem that often gives them an attitude that opposes 'legitimate' journalists. 'Legitimate' journalists, in turn, decry bloggers.

At some point, bloggers are useful and convey good information, if not aligned with both legal and journalistic principles. Now journalists are becoming bloggers, and the distinctions are becoming exceedingly blurred.

What we wanted is truth, or opinion, but clear distinctions between the two, and referential rather than specious information. The quality of both journalists and bloggers is now emerging, and there's a price tag for that quality-- and we're willing to pay for it, because we need the truth, we need opinion, and we need referential integrity.

It's all natural.

blogosphere, blog this, blog that...

Anyone else nearly vomit seeing the word "blog" that many times?

I Heard Something

What a total misunderstanding of both blogs and mass media. The only reason any media outlets, however interactive, publish stories about each other is competition among them, and defense from such competition. Blogs publish stories only because they're interesting to the blogger. Bloggers aren't so much in competition with each other yet. And blogs' personalities aren't the main interest yet, compared to newspaper writers. So stories about those bloggers changing publishers is just "insider baseball", not even interesting enough for practically any blogger to cover.

Although I note that we're discussing those stories in Slashdot, a (ginormous) blog.

The story made it to this blog once it became interesting enough to the blogger, the submitter, and the publisher, Slashdot's "author", that it got written (in 3 minutes) and published (typically <30s). It got covered by the NYT, because the NYT is threatened in its power as its circulation further declines, and it transforms into a mainly online publication. It's in competition with AOL, and struggles to exert power over the influence of those name brand bloggers.

The age where an editorial board of a mass (one-way) publication like the NYT controls the definition of "what's news" is drawing to a close. If you think an event is news, blog it, or get a popular blogger to blog it. If that's not a good enough system for you, produce or contribute to a project that produces another layer, like a weighting system for an RSS aggregator that can amplify tiny blog stories (and cache/loadbalance them) that do cover these events, when they're interesting to you and people like you.

The new age of P2P journalism is here. Since it was built with the tools of the old centralized journalism, it will resemble the old regime at first. But its agendas, the way its agendas are served, "what's news", and how it becomes "news", not just "new", are a quantum leap from the old regime. In what directions has yet to be seen. It's still up to us.

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The new age of P2P journalism is here.

I'm not so sure of that.

On any given day, look at Slashdot's front page, and I guarantee most of the news stories will have first been reported by professional journalists. Most of the blogs most of us read are lik

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I think you're interpreting DocRuby a little too literally, Watts. You're focused on news-as-facts, while DocRuby seems to be more focused on news-as-what-we-care-about, i.e., the editorial side of things. The distinction is a bit blurry, but if you appl

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I'm not so sure the difference is entirely in the meta level of the content, though I do think that aspect is relevant, as I replied [slashdot.org].

I meant what I said "literally" (pun appreciated ;). But I think the difference is more in "the news" as "the stories we he

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You're giving the mass media too much credit for the journalism done by a very few. Even the newspapers are largely reprinting the AP and Reuters. When they're not, they're usually just getting their own rewritten version of those stories under their own w

hey folks

technological advancements don't change fundamental human behavior, whether good (for those who believe the internet would be a utopia) or bad (for those who believe playing video games makes people murder)

news at 11

Who are these people, and why should I care

Excuse me if I don't get it, but this story seems to be about the fact that some bloggers I never heard of got fired and some other blogger I never heard of thinks that some unnamed additional bloggers should have blogged about it before the NYT reported on it, and we know this because....

...he said so in his blog.

Ok, maybe I'm different from most blog readers, but I:

• Tend not to read/trust/care about blogs I've never heard of
• Use blogs as a source of information that I might not otherwise have encountered but not as proof that that information is factual or unbiased
• Expect that there will be gaps in what I hear even if I had the time to read all the blogs on the planet every day
• Not care a bit about meta-blogging, and even less about this sort of meta-meta blogging

Other than the fact that this item seems to fit the "blog related flamebait" template, I frankly don't see the point of it. Does anyone really expect that blogs will give them complete and accurate behind the scenes information about the blogging carriers of every blogger on the planet? Does anyone seriously want them to? (Other than this guy who obviously cared enough blog about it I mean.)

--MarkusQ

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No, whats worse is like these people / posts are acting like they ARE talking about wellknown and/or people. I mean, I know who the Calanis guy is because hes' he was accused of spamming with his blogs (weblogs inc, a network of blogs) before. Even then I

The brighter side of blogging

The blogosphere is all about collective jerking off to their own made up sense of how famous and good they are.

Some, but not all of it. There are also the people who care deeply about a subject, and for whom the facts matter much more than the personalities. A year or so ago I decided to try my hand at cheese making. A little bit of google led me to a cheese makers blog, in which I found several years of detailed first hand accounts of his efforts at amature cheese making, along with interesting comments, questions, and (in a few cases) differing opinions from his readers.

This is where bogs really shine. Care about SCO v. IBM? Or the Plame outing and coverup? Interested in making your own Victorian christmas ornaments? Or a trebuchet? There's a blog out there for you. Ditto if you're dealing with some strange (to you) illness, trying to learn a new language, or planning a vacation off the beaten path.

Yes, there are a lot of bloggers whose sole topic seems to be "Look at me ma, I'm a blogger!" but they are easy to ignore. Don't cast out the interesting ones along with the loudmouths who have nothing to say.

--MarkusQ

OT: In answer to your question

It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here [uc.edu] and here [countrylife.net] which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.

Cheese

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What makes this bizarre is the apparent belief that the "blogosphere" is somehow cohesive and all contributors follow some sort of code of conduct. Sure, there are people who are all about leading an information revolution, the "never change a word of wh

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Yup, definitely a case of DFKDFC.

Anyone read Foundation?

There is this charming piece there, written a long, long time ago, concerning a "researcher" that spent all of his time reading and re-interpreting the writings of other "researchers". There was a statement to the effect that going and looking at original sources was too much trouble and way too difficult. Besides, all the real work had already beend one once, why simply repeat that?

Well folks, we are pretty much there. Journalists now spend probably equal amounts of time covering each other, gossipping and relying in innuendo and hearsay rather than facts. Little wonder we have the sort of news media we have today with this.

And the "internet journalists" are probably the worst. We have "aggregator sites" on the web which simply dish out stories rehashed from other web sites. We have bloggers writing stuff about aggregated news sites and other bloggers.

Read the bit about the "Old Empire" in Foundation and see if you think it is happening here now.

Mutually Assured Deconstruction

The best thing about the media today is that it's so easy to get to the truth. Not only that, but you can find whatever version of the truth you are looking for!

I seriously question whether these groups do in fact keep each other honest. If you have mu

THAT's what makes The Times a "paper of record."

if you read it in the times, it really happened, and you got it straight.

bloggers are basically loose cannons rolling across the public landscape with zillions of their own agendas.

there will be no "blogs of record" when the next chapter of history is put

Blogs have an identity crisis.

I think one problem is that people keep fooling themselves about what blogs really are. Make no mistake, blogs are, of course, a great way for people to communicate - for example, for managers to communicate with their employees, or people to communicate with relatives in other countries -, or to cover rapidly changing topics. Further advantages are that you don't need significant amounts of money to reach an audience, and that blogs are easily accessible and always readily available. Blogs are good (even though they started out as an annoying buzzword).

But what blogs are not, even though some people just won't stop claiming it, is some sort of radically new media that solves most of the problems of traditional media. Blogs aren't really news outlets - 99% of them get their news from other sources, e.g. the established organisations that they decry as the "old media". 99% of blogs don't give you any new facts, they simply pass on facts that they have picked up elsewhere. And some blogs deliberately spread misinformation. After all, it only takes very little to create a good-looking blog, so a reputable writer will look just as serious as a complete charlatan.

At the end of the day, blogs are basically nothing other than your good old-fashioned soap box brought into the 21st century - or maybe I should say, soapbox 2.0. Blogs might give everyone a chance to make his voice heard, might be a great solution to the problem of censorship, might be great to spark a good debate in the comments, might be a lot better for diversity of thought and opinion, and blogs might be a really convenient way of publishing things - but blogs are NOT by definition more reputable than "old media". Perhaps even less so. At the end of the day, if you want a balanced opinion, there is no one source of information you can use. You still need to get as many views on issues as you can, consider your sources objectively, and make up your own mind. And no new trend or technological advance on the web is going to change that.

I think if people took a moment to think about it and understand this, they wouldn't be so surprised when stories such as this one come up.

As soon as....

as soon as any medium goes commericial -- I.E. -- "has a payroll, makes money, etc." it enters the same realm of censoring and forced ignorance as the rest of them. Mainly because people go into a self preservation mode to protect their ability to keep

Douglas DID announce his departure

See post
here [valleywag.com].

Excerpt:
It's traditional for an exiting Gawker Media editor to write a farewell post. I don't have anything to get across, other than that I'm free for lunch and gig offers for the next few weeks, so I'll just thank the people who, as my friend Paul put it, "write Valleywag for free."

cut off the top

Whether you're listening to an overpaid talking head on CNN, at the NYT, or "in the blogosphere", of course, the same mechanisms are at work about how these people make tradeoffs between money, popularity, access, and influence.

Diversify your blog reading

No

When blog networks "make news," it's not news.

Maybe in the navel-gaze-o-sphere, it is. But not in the real world.

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You trust the one class of writers who CANNOT be held accountable if they should deliberately lie??

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And yet they're still more trustworthy than the mainstream media. That's how bad the far-right-wing Fox News and the barely-to-the-left-of-Fox-News CNN are.

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Here you are [mobygames.com].