News-Record.com

I wish I could have attended the Piedmont Bloggers Conference on Saturday, but family matters called. I'm delighted to see (in my nowhere-near-comprehensive survey of participants' blogs) that a good time appears to have been had by all. I hope, and expect, that a lot of good things will come out of the event.

At least one good thing already has: my friend and colleague Mark Binker's reflections on the event. You need to read his whole post, which isn't all that long, but I was particularly struck by this passage:

... as people disengage from traditional media, it presents a two-side problem: one side for the [newspaper] industry and one side for the bloggers. (This is the point I was trying to stumble through right before I left.)

For traditional media reporters, we are losing feedback by some of our best and most critical readers. Simply put, if people stop calling you up to talk about the news and go somewhere else (their favorite blog) to rant, you are no longer able to service their wants and needs as effectively. We lose some of the natural network a reporter relies on to collect tips and advance the news.

I heard some folks say that newspaper reporters, especially at big papers, don’t pay attention to individuals. Then those folks aren't very good reporters/journalists/newspeople. A good newsman should always accept and appreciate feedback. Does this mean we can go on every adventure that a caller would like us to? No. But it does mean that we should and do listen to feedback and suggestions when they're offered.

For the folks who are disengaging from traditional media, they are silencing their own voices. They no longer are influencing reporters by their suggestions, no longer influencing editorial page readers with their letters, no longer influencing editors with their critiques of coverage. And as unhappy as they are now with traditional media, if they disengage altogether they simply let traditional media drift further away from meeting their needs.

Precisely. But why does this matter -- other than my obvious self-interest in ensuring that my employer stays in business?

For one thing, although a few bloggers do independent reporting for their blogs (one example being Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo), most rely on the mainstream media, defined here to include Fox News as well as the other cable news networks, for their raw material. That's not to devalue the contributions of bloggers who don't do independent reporting; many bloggers who don't report nonetheless help to advance the issue by raising questions the original reporters didn't.

Why do the mainstream media provide such a big proportion of the raw material? For two related reasons. No. 1: The mainstream media, despite loss of audience and market share in recent years, still have the resources bloggers lack. When a New York Times or a "60 Minutes" goes after a big story, it has the luxury of sparing no expense. And when it's not going after a big story, it can use the same resources to go after lots and lots of small and medium-sized stories. No blog in the world can apply that level of firepower to a big journalistic target, and no single-author blog can spread itself that widely.

Reason No. 2, which is intimately related to Reason No. 1, is that no blog reaches that many people -- at least, not yet -- and it's the size of the audience that determines the ad revenue that makes all those resources possible. All the cable networks' audiences combined still constitute a fraction of what even the least-watched news operation for one of the original Big 3 over-the-air networks can pull in.

Locally, the disparity becomes even more acute. When the News & Record puts a story on A1 above the fold, almost 100,000 people are going to buy that story on any weekday, and a couple of multiples of that number are at least going to glance at it, if not read it all the way to the end. If you want to get a story in front of a big segment of this community quickly and with authority, depth and context, you don't blog it and wait for Greensboro to beat a path to your door: you come to us. And for all the good that blogs do, it's far from clear at this point whether even a wide-ranging network of local blogs ever will be able to fulfill the same function as effectively.

I hope that the N&R will continue to exercise this responsibility for a long, long time. And I expect that it will ... as long as the paper continues to ensure that its stories matter to readers. But I also expect that we will rely increasingly on blogs to help us note stories bubbling up in neighborhoods, issues that might resonate citywide or even more broadly, and to provide feedback on our coverage of those issues so that our coverage remains fearless, independent, useful and relevant.

No new medium has ever wholly replaced another. What happens instead is that each medium adapts, to a greater or less degree, to the presence of the newcomer. Blogs being a kind of hybrid medium, their effects are a bit difficult to predict with confidence. Still, although I'm not an optimist by nature, there is something about blogging that makes me optimistic. You, too, I hope.