I’ve been following some of the coverage of the Blog Credibility Conference at Harvard (from, Weinberger, Jarvis and Winer, among others). It continues to amaze me how much of this debate is a retread of the mid-’90s, when journalists first moved online and discovered that the Web moved really fast, had different norms, gave their readers new voices and made their own voices sound stuffy and institutional. First I think, “Come on already!”; then I think, “Oh, it’s okay.” Lessons that change one’s professional habits need to be learned from experience, and a much wider population of journalists is being exposed to these changes now that blogging software has drastically expanded the universe of personal media.
This post by David Weinberger puts some of this in a smart perspective — focusing, as I and many others often will, on the critical fact that the vast majority of blogs (like the vast majority of the Web itself) represents stuff created not to “aggregate eyeballs,” build traffic, produce revenue, compete with the pros or otherwise challenge or replace the existing order of the media. People are building something fundamentally new, something that had no opportunity to exist before, and that will — as all such new developments in media do — end up changing but not replacing what’s already here.
There’s another disconnection between the “we’re-changing-everything” bloggers and those newsroom veterans who don’t understand what the fuss is about, and it has to do with scales of time. If you run a newspaper or a TV news operation you have spent your whole professional life in a stable structure, one whose supporting beams of business and technology have never fundamentally shaken or broken under you. The world of professional media has experienced such changes only across the span of a century. But the world of the technology business experiences big changes on a scale of decades — an order of ten faster. Dominant companies rise and fall, new technologies change the rules of the game, and habits of doing business get tossed in the trash every 10-20 years instead of every 100-200 years.
As a lifelong professional journalist who jumped headfirst into the tech-industry world a decade ago, I’ve made my choice. I don’t see getting anywhere by putting one’s money on the idea that change in this field is going to slow down rather than speed up. Which means that, if I were sitting in a newsroom today, I might think it prudent to listen a little less to the voice that says, “Who are these upstarts telling me what’s wrong with my work?” — and a little more to the one that says, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do things differently?”
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