ChasNote

Nicholas Lemann in the Aug 7 issue of the New Yorker compares today’s citizen’s journalism phenomenon to several similar movements in English-language journalism starting with British pamphleteers in the late 17th and early 18th Century through the urban penny presses in 19th Century America. His key point: Internet publishing innovations (aka, blog platforms) are certainly shaking up the power structure in journalism and communication (a shake-up, though, that isn’t all that different, in relative terms, from previous revolutions), but that quality will — as it always has — separate the wheat from the chaff.

“To live up to its billing, Internet journalism has to meet high standards both conceptually and practically: the medium has to be revolutionary, and the journalism has to be good. The quality of Internet journalism is bound to improve over time, especially if more of the virtues of traditional journalism migrate to the Internet. But, although the medium has great capabilities, especially the way it opens out and speeds up the discourse, it is not quite as different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying….”

“The Internet is not unfriendly to reporting; potentially, it is the best reporting medium ever invented. A few places, like the site on Yahoo! operated by Kevin Sites, consistently offer good journalism that has a distinctly Internet, rather than repurposed, feeling. To keep pushing in that direction, though, requires that we hold up original reporting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of presenting fresh material—which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by people who do that full time, not ‘citizens’ with day jobs.”

I agree with much of the above: Quality is king, and commitment to quality is almost always a full-time job. But there seems to be another aspect to Lemann’s argument. As in previous eras, a new media power structure will emerge in place of the old one. Ie, less-power-to-the-people than is promised by the citizen’s journalism movement. I’m inclined to think that, while big players will emerge in the new media, their grip on power will be more tenous than previous media empires’. Audience can provide their media suppliers with fast, easy feedback on what they need and want; if those media suppliers choose not to listen, audiences can change the channel more easily than ever before. In either case, power has moved out from the center.