The Blogosphere: a Giant Engine for Finding Meaning

We've posted a number of items attempting to measure the iimpact of blogs. Now we've encountered an insightful post presenting these many of these ideas better than we've been able to, and factoring in concepts we hadn't considered. A must-read for anyone following where blogs go from here. One idea which in hindsight should have been obvious to us: There are two distinct segments of the 'sphere. The largest is that of the personal weblogs, written mostly for family and friends. They typically have a few dozen readers.... Then there is the segment of wide-appeal blogs, written on subjects of general public interest. These can have a wider readership, in some cases in the hundreds of thousands. The number of these is smaller, perhaps in the tens of thousands. The Truth Laid Bear ecosystem is currently tracking about 16,000 such blogs.. He's right. We hear about millions of sites being created, but very few of these are 'authoritative' sites. They're personal/public sites. These have a real place, and even have some impact on mainstream opinion, but they are a different animal. Only a relatively small number of blogs, not millions of them, drive opinion.

The post's author, Vik Rubenfeld, is also spot-on regarding the blog/MSM relationship - and it is a relationship, not merely a tolerance on both sides. He maintains that bloggers need MSM, which we wholeheartedly acknowledge. What's not mentioned, though, is why mainstream media needs bloggers. Let's focus on that.

Bloggers (and as Vic says, we're talking about the 'wide-appeal' bloggers here) provide a forum and a focus that mainstream media cannot do without. At one time, a few media companies controlled a relative handful of distribution channels. If your news/movie/book was not distrubuted via one of these outlets, it was a non-starter. Today, we have multiple means for reaching large numbers of people. Equally important, the public is increasingly willing to accept many of these new outlets as trusted sources of information and entertainment.

This means that 'marginal' MSM outlets are stretched thin. Smaller players such as (using local NYC newspapers as examples) the New York Observer, the Daily News, and the New York Press, distinguish themselves from the big boys (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal) by their approach. To a lesser degree, they are also distinguished in the types of stories they cover, although by and large all general-news media covers the same stories. Stories are chosen on the basis of what the target audience has historically shown interest in. If there is a fire, a scandal, or a war, it's certain that all these outlets will mention it.

Papers also follow the same stories because coverage by some media outlets confers automatic status. If the New York Times gives an otherwise obscure story prominence, it becomes news for that reason alone, and smaller outlets will follow suit.

The competition for attention and the sheer number of media outlets means the lowhanging fruit gets picked. Occasionally, a smaller player decides to try to gain an advantage by covering a story its rivals won't touch.

The challenge here is twofold. First, it's likely that the media outlet is choosing a subject the public won't show an interest in. (Which is why the larger outlets aren't covering it.) That means the outlet (we'll just call it a paper from here on, but it could be TV, radio, etc.) believes that either the story will turn out bigger than it first appears, or that the story can be 'sold' to the public.

Papers might take more chances on stories, but it's the second factor that prevents smaller outlets from pursuing marginal but promising stories. That is: the resistance offered by the story itself. When a paper moves outside the herd and tries to tackle a story on its own, the degree of difficulty in gathering a satisfactory story iincreases. Stories 'outside cultural boundaries' tend to resist coverage.

Let's illustrate with a local example. The indictment of Hoboken Mayor Anthony Russo was the culmination of years of corrupt acts. Yet his recent incarceration was not the result of a series of newspaper stories exposing him - in fact, it happened despite a nearly-total lack of same. One might think that a paper would want to distinguish itself from the pack by breaking some stories on a corrupt administration, but in fact the papers preferred to stay within the safety zone of that pack. Just prior to the 2001 Hoboken election, we were in touch with Alan Cohen of the New York Press, who wanted to cover a particular aspect of Hoboken's municipal corruption. (We mentioned this in our post on Street Fight.) The paper killed the story - they felt too exposed, too far out of their safety zone. Newspapers, like everyone else, have to live within the 'culture of corruption' so often associated with New Jersey.

Today, there's more competition for attention among MSM outlets than ever. Compounding the pressure, ad dollars are leaving traditional media in favor of the internet. Smaller papers have to find ways to distinguish themselves, and even large papers are challenged to maintain their share of attention. Blogs are widely viewed as siphoning that attention away - but they may be having another effect entirely.

Let's use the Air America scandal as our example here. Once again we have a story that has the potential to distinguish smaller papers from their larger rivals, in particular the New York Times. But look closely and you'll see an important divergence from similar, past situations.

Two papers, the NY Sun and the NY Daily News, picked up the seed of the story from the blogosphere (or vice-versa depending on how you track this back). Unlike such a story pre-blogosphere, follow-ups appeared in rapid succession in both papers. In the past, this would only have happened because a larger outlet (the Times, CBS, etc.) ran with the story, or because it struck a public nerve. SInce neither of these things happened, what drove the papers to follow this story so closely?

What happened is that bloggers picked up on the story, and it quickly became evident that they would link to the Sun and Daily News each time a story update appeared. Between updates, the blogs would mull over what was already known, keeping the story alive and broadening its market. In this way, the Daily News and Sun received the readership support and attention they needed to pursue this story. The blogs enabled the Sun and Daily News to reach out beyond their NYC reader base, where liberal sympathy toward Franken and Air America would have buried the story. In turn, the papers gave the blogs the fodder they needed for an enormous amount of high-traffic commentary. (Last we looked, Air America was the 5th-most searched term on Technorati.) On this story, MSM is doing the research bloggers need, and the blogs are finding MSM the audience it needs. While blogs have always acknowledged the media (in one way or another) we have a sense here that the Daily News and (especially) the Sun are tailoring their coverage to the bloggers' needs. This is the first story we've observed where we've had this sense of collaboration on the media's part. It would be interesting to debrief the journalists involved at the conclusion of this story, to learn what they felt their relationship to bloggers was in this instance.

So far, the Air America story has been a win-win for bloggers and MSM - and a lesson in how smart media outlets need to go about their business today.

{UPDATE: Bill Quick frames the Air America scandal as the blogosphere vs. the New York Times, and a commenter says "who needs the print media?" Obviously, we think the solution is more complex.}

Categories: Blogging, Air America, Corruption