By Alan J. McCombs
Saturday’s closing panel questioned the mainstream news industry’s ability to work with an expanding field of non-traditional news providers.
Bloggers resent mistrust from media colleagues
The group discussed and challenged the perception of bloggers as unreliable. Mike Arrington of TechCrunch said that bloggers are often on the forefront of breaking news topics.
“There’s this assumption that all of us bloggers are writing about something we originally read in the New York Times and that just isn’t the case,” he said. “For a certain subset of blogs we are the ones creating and breaking the news -- not the Wall Street Journal and not the New York Times.”
Arrington had just broken the news of Google’s negotiations to buy YouTube.
Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com said that existing media must be open to acting as equals with bloggers on the Internet. He said that the old media needs to be willing to reference bloggers as online news providers, rather than treating them simply as sources.
Arrington agreed. “We’re all part of a global discussion. You don’t have to be the definitive news source and you don’t have to be afraid of your competition,” Arrington said.
Bloggers deal with credibility issues
Each panelist said online journalists have increased efforts to comment, rate and report on each other’s content. They pointed out that this helps maintain their credibility and compared it to traditional media practices.
Adam Yamaguchi of Current TV said that at his organization, not only do user-submitted videos have to be ‘greenlit’ by other Current TV users, but also, editors at the network must do extensive research and fact-checking before a video is aired.
But some audience members continued to question the credibility of the blogging world.
“If you just find a blog, it’s written by an anonymous person. There’s no way to know its veracity. There’s no way to know either the passion of the person writing it or his or her financial involvement in the companies he or she is writing about,” said Tom Mallory, breaking news team editor at the San Diego Union-Tribune.
The panelists also discussed the average reader, and how they could receive good general knowledge of important events. Mike Davidson of Newsvine suggested this as an area where the editor and the front page of a Web site have value.
“It’s important to get a stream of information that you’ve already homed in on and information that others think is important,” Davidson said.
The new news user
The panel said that the main problem is that the mainstream media often are unable to fully understand their audience, which causes them to lose readership.
Jarvis, Arrington and Davidson said users in the near future would simply seek news on their own, but they debated the role of the media.
Increasing wireless access will create a world where traditional print journalism is unnecessary, Arrington said.
“We’re not that far from a point of being online all the time,” Arrington said. “As soon as we have ubiquitous WiFi on airplanes and trains and things like that there’ll be no point.”
But, Yamaguchi said, the future of print journalism may include more collaborative content among professional reporters and amateurs.
“If newspapers want to maintain some relevance in the years to come we’re just going to have to embrace it,” he said.
Jarvis said that existing electronic efforts by news organization are behind the curve. He said that the nature of the Internet has encouraged a different kind of news reader.
“People have their own space. They control their own world and we’ve got to find ways to make connections among them,” Jarvis said.
Despite this, Jarvis said that he felt a greater sense of optimism about the future of traditional media in the ever-changing online world.
“What I’ve started to see here, this year, is that there is less of an effort to hold the opinions at bay,” Jarvis said.
He said that the difficulty now for online journalists and old media is finding ways to be reliable and service the people.
Katherine Greene contributed to this story.
