Army of Davids

[prog]

Excerpt from this past week's Gene Weingarten chat:

Alexandria, Va.: "We are heading for a period of indeterminate length where there will be insufficient eyes on our government, on business, and on the powers that be in, in general. Where official pronouncements will be accepted and printed as news. Where the heart-and-soul changing stories of human interest are going to remain unnoticed. I think it's bad, and I think it's going to take a while before we realize what we're missing."

Gene, you are so dead wrong about the effect of use of the Internet -- in fact, citizens are now armed with much more information about government, business and society than ever before. The only difference is that the WaPo, NYT and other major media are no longer the gatekeepers of information and have no monopoly on the questioning of authority. You should buy a copy of "An Army of Davids" and get ready for the new world.

Gene Weingarten: The army of Davids do not have people paid well to cultivate sources over years, people like Dana Priest, who will expose malfeasances via years of training as investigative journalists. With an army of Davids as protectors of the realm, I guarantee you Richard Nixon would have served two terms. Possibly succeeded by President Spiro Agnew.

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Gene Weingarten: I don't mean to overstate this, cause it sounds defensive, but: People who think we will be protected by bloggers really have no idea what they are talking about. David Simon made this point eloquently yesterday on WAMU.

He noted that when he recently broke a story about police malfeasance in Baltimore, he wasn't having to push past all the bloggers working the story.

This particular exchange has stuck in my head for several days. I find it very hard to dismiss, and rather chilling.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

What we need is a new business model for funding something like a wire service. The physical paper isn't important, but paying someone to investigate and report full-time, in the readers' interest, is.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

The current media outlets have lost one of their most valuable assets: credibility. Without this, reporting and investigation are unimportant: no one believes you did the hard work to find out the truth when you so often just present made-up news you got off YouTube.

Credibility is a marketable commodity, and something that established, high-reputation newspapers built their business on. Along the way they got lapped by low-reputation ad-driven entertainment, and soon everyone thought that it was distribution that was the money-maker. Print whatever you want, as long as people buy it and look at the ads. Now that people won't pay you to hand them big sheets of paper, that market has collapsed.

And I hope that people will return to paying for a combination of accuracy plus timeliness plus presentation, and that somehow this will find a niche in the new free-distribution model of communication, where it is truth elucidation (and not content generation or distribution) that is the expensive part.