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Open sores media

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There’s plenty of room under the sun for all sorts of experiments in putting blogs together into new kinds of media products. It looked like Pajamas Media was going to be one more, with maybe something of a conservative leaning, but enough variety to not be a pure party-line effort.

Then they went and changed their name to Open Source Media, which has two problems: (1) Somebody else — Chris Lydon’s experiment in blogging-fueled radio — was already using the name. (So, for that matter, were JD Lasica and co.) (2) As far as I can tell, the outfit actually has less than nothing to do with open source media, open source software, or open source anything. It’s a blog network, and not even an open one.

Right now, the chief distinguishing trait of Open Source Media is that they’ve got a paid staff of editors who try to keep up with the news by writing little introduction paragraphs according to the following formula: First, provide a news lead; second, state that “Bloggers reacted quickly!” or “Bloggers weighed in!” Which is, you know, never going to be a stop-the-presses sort of observation.

Pajama people, this is going to get very old very quickly. And you’ll never do it as quickly or usefully as Memeorandum, anyway. Just lead with the blog posts themselves and you’ll feel much better in the morning.

Dell and the megaphone

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Over in Slate, Daniel Gross has this to say about blogger Jeff Jarvis’s now-celebrated chronicle of “Dell Hell”:

  Dell had the bad luck to tick off a very powerful blogger. The company is justly known for its fantastic customer service. But any time you engage in tens of millions of customer contacts, there are bound to be errors. It was Dell’s misfortune that one of those errors affected a person with a huge megaphone, blogger Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis’ blow-by-blow account of his Dell hell has become an Internet phenomenon.

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Set aside the idea that Dell is “justly known” for great service. Known to whom? This sounds like boilerplate from an analyst’s report or the company’s own marketing literature. I’ve never bought a Dell computer. But in my circles and reading — an admittedly totally subjective smattering of hearsay, but what else does “known for” mean? — Dell is known for being a giant corporation that hands over its customer service to bored, ill-treated, underpaid people desperate to move on to better jobs.

Still, that’s not really the point. Maybe you have a circle of friends who have all had peachy-keen customer-support experiences with their Dell boxes. The point is, Jarvis’s experience was not a fluke; if it had been, his tale would never have made waves.

Gross is wrong because what gave Jarvis’s complaint wasn’t the size of the blogger’s megaphone — it was the chord of recognition his message struck with his readers. If Jarvis started bitching about Dell and his experience really represented a statistically insignificant lapse in an otherwise exemplary service record, then Jarvis’s readers would have stepped in and said, “Jeff, stop whining, it’s too bad you had a bad experience but we all love Dell! Dell’s done great by us!”

Instead, a lot of people read Jarvis’s account and said, “You know, that sounds familiar.”

Credit report

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I was amused recently by an ironic juxtaposition of two blog posts.

First, there was Jason Calacanis complaining that CNET had failed to credit Om Malik for “breaking” the story that the RSS aggregator FeedDemon had been bought by Newsgator. Business 2.0’s Malik had posted the news at 5:31 PM on Monday, May 16. CNet ran a story at 9:27 AM on Tuesday, May 17.

A few weeks later, the esteemed Dan Gillmor complained about how the Wall Street Journal, in its coverage of the Apple/Intel deal, self-servingly quoted a line from Steve Jobs implying that the Journal had the story first, when, in fact, CNET had it well before the Journal.

There’s no older complaint in the world of journalism than a reporter (or publication) that believes it broke a story feeling “ripped off” by another reporter (or publication) that follows on. Inevitably, this sort of complaint flows up the journalism food chain. CNET gets carped at for failing to credit a blog; the Journal gets carped at for failing to credit CNET.

Big fish eat little fishes’ stories — stop the presses!

I’ve seen this in action for a good 25 years now, ever since my days on the Harvard Crimson, where we believed we “owned” the university beat, and resented how national papers and magazines would swoop in to gather the fruits of our reporting labors — almost never giving us striplings credit.

Maybe I’ve mellowed, or maybe I’m just callused, but I’ve come to view this species of complaint as a waste of time. I can’t count the number of times over the past decade that Salon has broken real news and not been credited. Ultimately, so what? Whining doesn’t get you very far, and if you’re doing your job, you should be onto the next story anyway.

The type of story matters, too. If you invest the time and energy to do a long-term investigation of some scandal or underreported problem or issue, and emerge with something extraordinary that’s never been reported before and that wouldn’t be known if you hadn’t chosen to pursue it, it’s reasonable to expect some credit. But if you get wind of a business deal a handful of hours ahead of the competition, and the news is about to break wide anyway, well, okay, you’ve served your readers well, good work — but don’t expect a Pulitzer, or think you “own” the story.

No reader is an island

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You can’t open your RSS reader these days without finding another thoughtful essay or exhaustive report on the troubles confronting the news business and profession.

These critiques are valuable and necessary. Still, sometimes I think the situation is much simpler. Reading Larry Lessig’s pained response to New York Times coverage of a recent panel he shared with Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) and Steven Johnson (of Feed and several great books, including the forthcoming “Everything Bad is Good For You“) reminded me of why.

Lessig read the Times piece and, despite the number of people who told him they thought it was great, reported his disappointment in David Carr’s coverage — specifically, Carr’s failure to offer his readers a full understanding of the issues in the copyright controversy, which are far more complex (and interesting) than the dull-brained dichotomy of “I support piracy” vs. “I think artists should get paid” that the Hollywood content cartel promotes, and to which, Lessig felt, Carr’s piece reduced Tweedy’s position.

This disillusionment happens every day, even with publications at the top of the heap, like the Times, the Post and the Journal. (Our expectations for broadcast journalism are so minuscule that there’s less room for disappointment — we assume the worst going in.) We’re happy with what we read in the paper until we’re reading about something we know really well. Then, too often, with all but the very sharpest and most conscientious reporters, we see all the small errors, distortions, omissions and problems that are daily journalism’s epidemic affliction.

Of course we experienced our share of this over the years at Salon, during the period when every little sneeze and twitch of our business — as well, to be sure, as some more significant seizures — seemed to call forth an avalanche of coverage. If you bothered to complain about problems in coverage, the common reaction of most journalists followed a sort of Kubler-Rossian sequence of stages that rarely cycled all the way through to the end:

  • Denial: There’s nothing wrong with our story. You’re blaming the messenger.
  • Anger: Ingrate! You should be glad you’re getting any coverage at all.
  • Bargaining: Okay, we did mis-spell that name, but does anyone really care about the distinction between “losses” and “debt”?
  • Acceptance: The correction will run when we get around to it. (And we’ll remember what a pain in the butt you are the next time around.)

When our own stories were challenged, I always tried to remind our staff of how they felt when we were on the receiving end of sloppy coverage, and to work past the inevitable human reaction of defensiveness toward a more disinterested stance: if we got something wrong, we should be the most eager to find out what “right” is and fix the record. (This is one of those discussions where it remains useful to try to uphold the fast-eroding distinction in the language between “disinterest” — meaning, you can be neutral because you don’t hold any interest in the matter — and “uninterest,” meaning you’re bored.)

Of course, many complaints about coverage aren’t about simple facts but rather about emphasis, scope and slant, and the correction process doesn’t really help there, anyway. Lessig’s issue is probably in this category.

The problem is that writing on deadline is hard to begin with. Writing on deadline about a subject you’re only modestly knowledgeable about is even harder. The newsroom is a place of generalist bravado, in which most reporters feel perfectly qualified to write about anything, even if they’re flying blind. They’d better feel that way, since their editors ask them to do so all the time.

Until recently, each reader who saw the holes in the occasional story he knew well was, in essence, an island; and most of those readers rested in some confidence that, even though that occasional story was problematic, the rest of the paper was, really, pretty good. Only now, the Net — and in particular the explosion of blogs, with their outpouring of expertise in so many fields — has connected those islands, bringing into view entire continents of inadequate, hole-ridden coverage. The lawyer blogs are poking holes in the legal coverage, while the tech blogs are poking holes in the tech coverage, the librarian blogs are poking holes in the library coverage — and the political blogs, of course, are ripping apart the political coverage in a grand tug of war from the left and the right. Within a very short time we’ve gone from seeing the newspaper as a product that occasionally fails to live up to its own standards to viewing it as one that has a structural inability to get most things right.

Blogging potentially allows CEOs and politicians, companies and institutions to tell their own stories in their own words, and that’s dandy, but I’d never trust it as the only record. Coverage of important news by smart generalists — disinterested generalists — remains of great public value. But too many practitioners of this venerable art have grown (figuratively) fat and lazy from their monopoly position. They’re not used to being challenged, they don’t like being challenged, and too often their first reflex when challenged is to question the motive of the challenger.

Now the monopoly is fraying, the challenges are coming on in a wave, and the entire field is at a crossroads. As a profession, journalism has a choice: It can persist in a defensive, circle-the-wagons stance, pretending that nothing has changed. (The public has spontaneously and inexplicably decided to withdraw its trust from journalists! How strange! Let’s wring our hands and wait for the madness to pass.) Or it can accept the presence of millions of teeming critical voices as a challenge to shape up and do a better job.

It’s hard work, and it requires a level of humility that is not yet in wide enough supply in the newsrooms I’ve known. But most journalists are, or once were, idealists, and I think enough of them still wake up in the morning wanting to seek out and tell the truth that there’s hope they’ll come to understand that the Internet can be their ally in that quest, and not just a channel for random noise and personal invective. (It helps to have a thick skin and a functioning “ignore” filter for such invective when it’s encountered.)

As a business, journalism has a choice, too: It can ride out the monopoly’s sunset, delivering the dregs of a once-profitable position to investors until the business sputters out, replaced by a whole new system with new opportunities, problems — and owners. Or it can get entrepreneurial, invest in some new experiments, knowing that many will fail, but that the few successes could point a way out of today’s cul-de-sac.

Almost inevitably, incumbent business franchises choose door number one, the cul-de-sac. There are just too many reasons to say “no” to change, and too few guarantees of a payoff if you say “yes.” So, while I’m hopeful for the choice that the journalism profession will make, I’m skeptical that the business management of most media corporations today will will hear the alarms through their profit-drugged stupor and rouse themselves to do the unexpected.

After all, if they did, it would mean admitting that some of those ragtag bloggers might have been, you know, right.

Apple vs. the press

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As long as I’ve written about blogs I’ve made the point that blogging and journalism are separate activities that may or may not overlap. Since this debate has now entered the legal realm, let’s restate this with mathematical precision: Bloggers can be journalists; journalists can be bloggers. Neither state — I Am A Journalist, and I Am A Blogger — excludes the other, but neither guarantees the other. There is an axis of blogger to not-blogger, and an axis of journalist to not-journalist. The two axes are orthogonal, not parallel.

The legal matter that forces us to contemplate such a graph is Apple Computer’s suit against three online journalists in an attempt to get them to reveal the sources they used to publish some advance scoops about forthcoming Apple products.

We’re fortunate to be at a moment in history when changes in technology, begun a decade ago by the rise of the Web and accelerated by the introduction of anyone-can-publish software, mean that the spectrum of journalism has been broadened in ways that were previously unimaginable. The danger in the Apple suit lies in the possibility that a bad court decision — like one a lower court has already delivered in this case — might careless and foolishly decide that in order to be a journalist one has to receive a salary from some operation that some legal authority has defined as a journalistic entity.

That such a definition would be not only wrongheaded but actively harmful to the vibrant and lively democratic free-for-all on today’s Internet is the point of an amicus curiae brief filed today by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. I’m proud to be among the signers of this document, which was written by Lauren Gelman of the Stanford center. (Here’s a full list of the amici, with links.) The brief argues that, when the courts need to determine who receives the various legal protections available in some circumstances to working journalists, it should decide who is a journalist by looking at what putative journalists actually do, not who pays their salary or what membership cards they carry or what degrees they hold:

 

Amici come together to urge this court to hold that Internet publishers, including webloggers who are engaged in the reporting and dissemination functions a journalist performs, may invoke the protection of the journalists’ privilege on equal footing with traditional reporters and news organizations….

The applicability of the newsgatherers’ privilege is determined not by the reporter’s formal status as a ‘professional journalist,’ but rather by the reporter’s functional conduct in gathering information with the purpose of disseminating widely to the public.

If you take the time to read the somewhat confused state court decision that is now under appeal, you’ll see that the judge’s initial ruling, in favor of Apple and against the Web sites, declares that it doesn’t really matter whether you consider the Apple news sites to be conducting journalism or not, because, the judge seems to be saying, journalists have no business publishing trade secrets anyway.

I’m not enough of a lawyer to try to predict where that argument is headed; it seems of a piece with a variety of assaults taking place today on the rights of journalists to protect their sources. (The parallel amicus brief presented by the AP, a long list of California newspapers and the Reporters’ Committee for the Freedom of the Press tackles this issue.)

What I do know is that, if the New York Times or Time magazine published a scoop from an anonymous source about a forthcoming Apple product, the company wouldn’t be suing the press. So it’s important here for people who do journalism at all points along the spectrum from “pro” to “citizens” to step forward and say: If you ask questions with intent to publish, and you publish information someone considers news, you’re a journalist, and should be treated as one by the courts.

Gallup’s half-empty blog glass

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I’m a long-term believer in blogs; three years ago, I wrote, “Weblogs expand the media universe. They are a media life-form that is native to the Web, and they add something new to our mix, something valuable, something that couldn’t have existed before the Web.” That column was written three years after my first column on blogs, back when you had to call them “Web logs” and explain what they were to everyone each time you used the term. (Just as those of use who were writing about the Web for mainstream publications in 1994 had always to append some boilerplate phrase every time we mentioned “The World Wide Web,” like “…the popular, graphical network of Internet sites…”)

So blogs are having their moment in the media sun today, and that’s just fine. But Gallup now has a poll out that tells us that “relatively few Americans are generally familiar with the phenomenon of blogging.” Gallup wants us to stop and realize that blogs aren’t so big after all. Its headline is dripping with contempt: “Blogs Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues: Very few Americans read them with any frequency.” But really, this is a glass half-empty or half-full kind of thing. And the glass is filling up awfully quickly.

You can tell Gallup is a little uneasy from the phrase “relatively few”; since it appears that we are talking about nearly half of Americans, I’d like to know, relative to exactly what? Gallup’s numbers say that one out of four Americans are “very or somewhat” familiar with blogs. I think that’s extraordinary, but Gallup seems to thinks it’s some kind of weak showing.

Gallup tells us the following: “Three-quarters of the U.S. public uses the Internet at work, school, or home, but only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs (the shortened form of the original ‘Web logs’). More than half, 56%, have no knowledge of them. Even among Internet users, only 32% are very or somewhat familiar with blogs.”

I think what we’re supposed to be hearing here is, “Forget all the hype about blogs, this isn’t a big deal, the majority of Americans don’t even know what the hell they are.” But you could take these exact same numbers and present them in the inverse light if you wanted: “Though the Internet has been around for almost forty years, only 3/4 of Americans use it. Yet blogs — which have only been around 6-7 years, and have been popularized under that name for half that time — are already a phenomenon recognized by nearly half of the U.S. population. And fully one-third of Americans who use the Internet, or one quarter of the entire U.S. population, say they are very or somewhat familiar with blogs — an impressively high number, given their novelty.”

The interpretation of polls, in other words, is really a matter of the assumptions you bring to them. The Gallup write-up starts with a chip on its shoulder; it sets out to prove that blogs aren’t as big as the hype, though if the hype were as big as all that, you’d think there’d be a much bigger group of “heard of ’em but don’t read ’em” respondents (i.e., there’d be more people who’d at least have heard of the phenomenon thanks to the hype, without having spent time actually reading blogs).

At some point over the last couple of years blogs crossed the threshold from niche to mainstream. Gallup’s numbers confirm that. The bias in the company’s article is like what you could find in a music industry trade publication of the 1980s that might have said, “Though CDs are growing in popularity, our survey shows that less than half of Americans actually own a CD player, and most still purchase their music in the form of records.” The trend line had already crossed the point of no return, but the statistical snapshot made it look like the LP was king.

Of course blogs won’t replace the old media with anything like the thoroughness that CDs drove out vinyl (new media channels of communication don’t kill their predecessors the way new physical delivery formats often do). But the news from Gallup is clear: Blogs have now become part of the mass culture. Too bad the company chose the wrong headline.

“On the Web but off the record” does not compute

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When you post something on a public weblog, you’re posting it to the open Web, which is to say, you are making it public to anyone who follows a link to it. So I was a little taken aback, as I followed the blogosphere chatter over the Microsoft-Groove deal (here’s the commentary by Groove investor and former board member Mitch Kapor), to come upon this comment by Ed Brill of Lotus / IBM.

Brill labels his post as a “not-for-quote-by-press observation.” He boldfaces the phrase, so clearly he means it seriously, he’s not joking. In a follow-up post he explains that “the posting isn’t my complete perspective on the announcement. … In a press interview, I’d offer a broader view of the deal, and, more importantly, put it in the context of what we at IBM/Lotus have to offer the market.”

But, um, Ed, you’ve posted words on the Web that are readable by hundreds of millions of people. I’m afraid the cat’s out of the bag. If a reporter (or anyone) wants to quote you, you can’t say, “Sorry, that was off the record.” If you don’t want to be quoted, post your comment in a private forum! Put it in a private e-mail labeled “Do Not Quote”! Call your friends and tell them what you think, and don’t let any reporters on the line! If you need time to compose your “complete perspective” on an announcement and don’t want your quick initial scribblings to be quoted, don’t post them.

This is a small point, and there’s nothing particularly incendiary in Brill’s posting that would cause any fuss. I’m just finding it impossible to get my head around the oxymoronic notion of a public Web posting that is “not-for-quote-by-press.”

UPDATE: Read Ed Brill’s reasonable response. Looks like, as an IBM employee, he’s feeling his way through this complex and still-evolving landscape.

Are telephone callers journalists?

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Despite its having been on the table for at least six years now, this question of whether bloggers are journalists won’t seem to rest, and now that the courts are getting involved, we don’t have much choice but to revisit it, as Slashdot, among many others, has done today. Dan Fost’s San Francisco Chronicle story provides a good summary of the issue, as Apple Computer pursues its suit to get some bloggers to reveal the sources of anonymous information they published. But the article misses the most basic distinction at work here.

A blogger is someone who uses a certain kind of tool to publish a certain kind of Web site. The label tells us nothing about how the tool is used or what is published. We went through this discussion a decade ago, when people first started asking whether Web sites were journalism. To understand this, just take the question, “Are bloggers journalists?” and reframe it in terms of previous generations of tools. “Are telephone callers journalists?” “Are typewriter users journalists?” “Are mimeograph operators journalists?” Or, most simply, “Are writers journalists?” Well, duh, sometimes! But sometimes not.

That is the only answer to the “Are bloggers journalists?” question that makes any sense. Bloggers sometimes engage in journalism, just as they sometimes engage in diary-writing, art-making, essayizing and many other forms of communication.

This answer is inconvenient, as we face the question of whether bloggers should receive the same legal protection as more conventionally defined journalists; it doesn’t provide a clearcut legal rule. But, let’s face it, legal protections for journalists have always involved a certain fuzziness. Since, thankfully, the U.S. government doesn’t legally charter journalists — that would be difficult to square with the First Amendment — everyone is free to apply the label to themselves. You don’t need a journalism degree, either. (I’ve been a journalist for three decades and I don’t have one.)

You can try to define journalists by applying the filter of professionalism, by seeing whether people are actually earning a living through their journalistic work — but then you rule out the vast population of low-paid or non-paid freelance workers, and those who are not currently making money in their writing but hope to someday. Apparently most of the existing shield laws use some version of the “you are where your paycheck comes from” definition of journalist (see Declan McCullagh over at CNET for more). That’s one good reason for thinking that they might need some revision.

There’s a good definition of “journalist” sitting right at the top of Jim Romenesko’s journalism blog today (is pioneering blogger Romenesko a journalist?), where CNN/U.S. president Jonathan Klein says: “I define a journalist as someone who asks questions, finds out answers and communicates them to an audience.” By that standard, a hefty proportion of today’s bloggers qualify.

Does this vast expansion of the journalism population mean that the courts and legislatures are going to have second thoughts about protecting the confidentiality of journalists’ sources? Perhaps — and maybe those shield laws need tweaking or amendment, given the transformations underway. But any attempt to draw a narrow line around the journalism profession in order to preserve those laws is doomed to fail. There is no way to draw that line — income level? circulation? corporate size? forget it! — that is not ridiculous on its face.

So we’re left with the pathetic spectacle of beloved Apple Computer chasing down some bloggers to find out which of its employees leaked some early peeks at product information. Apple may win, and the laws may contort themselves to exclude the vast new throngs of online journalists from the protected club. But is there any doubt that, in the long run, it’s Apple’s dam-building effort that’s doomed? Whether protected by law or not, the teeming network of the blogosphere is not going to shut down, any more than online music file sharing could be ended by the legal campaign against Napster. In this sense, the whole “journalists or not?” debate is an irrelevant, backward-looking theological dispute.

[I wrote this post this morning but the computer that I run Radio on died for some reason, so it’s going up late, and with some revisions…]

Personal publishing

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Jason Kottke, a Web veteran and longtime blogger whose work I’ve always respected and enjoyed, has quit his job to blog full time, and rather than go the advertising route, he’s passing a patronage hat. I kicked in a wee bit and encourage you to do so as well if you are one of Kottke’s readers, or if you become one.

Making blogging pay is not easy; making any kind of online publishing pay, when you’re hand-producing content, is hard, I can safely say, after a decade of trying. Sponsorships and advertising raise the same sorts of ethical concerns in blogs as they do anywhere else; even when you’re ethically alert, you can’t help facing tough calls pitting your duty to your readers against the demands of your advertisers. (J.D. Lasica’s recent piece in the Online Journalism Review thoroughly explores this ground.)

Some high-profile political bloggers (e.g. Sullivan, Marshall) have made a go of it as independent blogger/publishers outside of any institutional framework. But the passions of partisanship help open people’s pocketbooks; it’s brave of Kottke to try this from a perch largely outside the political fray.

Personal publishing is a grand dream. Exactly ten years ago, in February 1995, I posted the first (and only) issue of my own Web magazine (warning: ancient HTML alert! Prehistoric navigation scheme ahead!). It’s what I thought I’d end up doing, and if Salon hadn’t come along, I probably would have given it my all. Today the tools are better, and our understanding of the power of the network is stronger and subtler, and if folks like Jason Kottke can make a go of it, we’re all going to feel a little more free.

A tale of two scalps

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When two high-profile stories surface nearly simultaneously and share some superficial traits, the news media will lump them together. The blogosphere, it seems, shares this understandable reflex. And so we have the parallel buzzes over the resignation of CNN exec Eason Jordan and the exposure of a dubious character in the White House press room sharing mind-space as examples of the ascendant power of blogs to make and break careers, expose error and deception and generally cause a ruckus. I Am Blogger, Hear Me Roar!

But these two stories are fundamentally different, and, I’d argue, of radically different import.

Jordan, the CNN exec who quit on Friday, apparently shot his mouth off at the Davos conference, making an overly broad statement of some kind (the Davos management won’t release a video or transcript of the event so there’s no record to refer to, only hearsay) suggesting that U.S. troops had targeted journalists in Iraq. He backed off almost immediately, it seems, but his mea culpas weren’t sufficiently earnest.

Over the years at Salon I’ve been on the inside of stories like this enough times to know that, when you’re on the outside, you never have the full story, and the idea that angry bloggers alone laid Jordan low seems extraordinary unlikely to me. If you have your organization’s confidence, this sort of thing rolls off easily; if you don’t, then you’re vulnerable to the first controversy to come along.

I’m not shedding tears for the CNN executive. I’m always amazed at the stupid things CEOs, politicians, news honchos and other people who hold public responsibility will say in public (and do in private), thinking that the inherent power of their position grants them carte blanche and wraps them in Teflon. If they need to be beaten up over and over again until they really, really understand that — as the saying goes in blog-land — “off the record is dead,” fine.

Jordan joins Dan Rather and Jayson Blair and many, many other journalists now off-duty or just waiting to be disgraced someday. His story is now a routine one — that of the media pro who does not realize that the world has changed around him, that there is a new activist sphere of journalistic review and criticism happening collectively in real time, and that no gaffe, error or deception is likely to remain hidden. Until media people fully and deeply learn that they are responsible for their words and their work, and that this scrutiny is a good thing for their profession, careers will continue to fall casualty.

But this weeding-out process doesn’t take place in some sort of scientific vacuum, wherein the flaws of the profession can be precipitated out, leaving behind the pure essence of journalism. It is happening in the heart of a political storm. Jordan was a target for the right because conservatives think CNN is a liberal network. (That’s a joke, but let’s leave that partisan controversy alone for now.) And the conservative blogosphere is now claiming his scalp with a whoop.

It seems simple to equate that whoop with the glee on the left that preceded it, as bloggers unraveled the strange tale of “Jeff Gannon” — a fellow who mysteriously leaped from the obscurity of a right-wing Web site into the heart of the White House press corps, where he became a ringer for the Bush administration’s press secretary, who regularly turned to him for “questions” that hilariously echoed the Bush party line. It turned out Gannon was using a fake name, had only the most dubious claim to press credentials, and was plainly more of a shill than a reporter; when the collective investigations of the blogosphere began to turn up personal details that were embarrassing for an avowed conservative, “Gannon” publicly quit his job at “Talon News.”

So the score is tied, right? But this isn’t a game, or a battle with a body count; if the only significance here is — to borrow and twist a phrase from last decade’s partisan trench warfare — the Journalism of Personal Destruction, then it’s all pretty trivial.

Eason Jordan’s trial-by-blog is simply the latest example of the convulsive and painful but inevitable and long-brewing transformation of professional journalism from a protected sphere into a more open environment. That’s important, but it’s hadly news any more. The Gannon story, on the other hand, offers us a peek into the next chapter of the story — the one in which an opportunistic political establishment, sensing the vulnerability of the media, grabs the moment to reshape the public’s very grasp of reality.

Let’s remember that, while its press secretary is calling on the Jeff Gannons of the world for cover, the Bush administration is also offering under-the-counter payoffs to columnists and sending out video press releases in which PR people masquerade as reporters. This isn’t a simple matter of a gaffe here and there; it’s a systematic campaign to discredit the media, launched by an administration that desperately needs to keep propping up its Potemkin Village versions of reality (We’ll find weapons of mass destruction! We’ll cut the deficit! We’ll save Social Security by phasing it out! Really!). When you’re pursuing an Orwellian agenda, your first target must be anyone who has the standing to point it out. Messengers are a pain — but if you shoot enough of them (figuratively speaking!), and send out enough impostors, you can have any message you want.

Journalism, of course, has done so much on its own to discredit itself that the administration’s assault has an easy path; the timbers it’s battering are often rotten already. But while those of us who cherish the freedom, the liveliness and the free-for-all energy of the blogosphere — and I happily include myself — sit in our conferences and muse in our postings about the finer points of the transformations around us, the machinery of realpolitik is grinding away. It doesn’t care about the ethics of transparency or the abstract debate over “who is a journalist?” It simply seizes an opportunity to reduce the supply of what Ron Suskind calls “honest brokers.”

While we discuss how the “end of objectivity” means we have to find new ways to earn the public’s trust and pursue the goals of accuracy and fairness, the White House is laughing at its new opportunity to mess with the American people’s heads. While we consider the implications of an era in which everyone has access to a virtual printing press and anyone can be a reporter, the people in the White House press office are busily figuring out how they can dragoon more pseudo-reporters into the front row. While idealists post and fiddle, realists in power are burning down the house.

Accountability is a grand principle. The Eason Jordan story shows us how journalists are still having a hard time getting used to the fact that they are being asked to follow it, too. The Jeff Gannon story shows us how easy it is, once the journalistic establishment has begun its self-destructive implosion, for public officials to engineer a reality that suits their own agenda. To me, that’s the bigger story.