December 18, 2002
A Whole Lott of Blogging Going On
Mark Glaser writes in the Online Journalism Review that "the Internet is slowly changing the rules of journalism." Glaser is the latest voice in the chorus singing hosannas to the host of bloggers, led by Josh Marshall in his Talking Points Memo, who leaped on the Trent Lott's Dixiecrat-ism and beat on it until the mainstream press took note.
Now columnists from the New York Times to the two posts - the one in New York and the other one in Washington - credit bloggers with breaking the story. Even Time chimed in: "If Lott didn't see the storm coming, it was in part because it was so slow in building. The papers did not make note of his comments until days after he had made them. But the stillness was broken by the hum of Internet "bloggers" who were posting their outrage and compiling rap sheets of Lott's earlier comments."
The alarm clock has rung again for newspapers. Will they continue to sleep through the information revolution or will they finally wake up and realize that new media means more than having an IP address?
Update, Dec. 19: Staci Kramer, an editor at the Online Journalism Review, says bloggers don't deserve all the credit for the Lott story. She writes in the "The Perfect News Incubator": "The romanticized story has the weblogs beating the drums until the media was forced to pick up the rhythm. That doesn’t explain how the bloggers who didn’t have an invite to Strom Thurmond’s party heard about Lott’s Dec. 5 comments."
Links
Mark Glaser Online Journalism Review
Staci Kramer Online Journalism Review
Talking Points Memo
Howard Kurtz Washington Post
John Podhoretz New York Post
Time Tripped Up By History