Quick report: I went to Dave Winer’s panel at the Seybold conference on how independent webloggers covered the disaster compared with the big media powers. Everyone seemed to agree that amateur news publishers provide the service of filtering the huge torrent of information that we all have to deal with. An infinite smorgasbord of filter providers you can choose from to make up your own personal news diet. Two problems with this: One, the part about filtering is true as far as it goes, but all media provide filters. It is the essential value they add, the reason we pay for them. The question that keeps on not getting asked is, what are these filters? What are the particular filters a newspaper editor uses to pick and edit wire service stories? What are the particular filters Jason Kottke uses? What do those filters say about the value of a particular weblogger’s news work? Thanks to weblogs, we get to talk about these things even if we’re not the editor-in-chief of a big newspaper. We should go ahead and do that, explicitly.Two, we actually don’t all live with this vast oversupply of information. About the end of day two, when all the basic events were basically reported, the broadcasters had very little more to offer. For visuals they kept on cycling through the same clips (including the inflammatory and one-sided celebration segment), and a large portion of the talk content they used was filler. One “national security” bureaucrat after another, saying the same things, often verbatim. The papers were not much better, although the newspaper format, thankfully, sometimes allows them to actually say nothing when they have nothing to say.People in the audience made it clear that they had felt let down by the papers’ inability to get the story right instantaneously, given their 24-hour cycle and all the other well-known problems of getting a daily paper out. The panelists, too, spent a lot of their time arguing about who got what information out first. That’s not immaterial, but it does drop in importance as days go by and we start wanting some richer stuff. When I was a reporter we were drilled to act like Right comes before First, by a hair. Sometimes you don’t get the latter; occasionally you don’t get either. Oh well.What’s true is that newspapers are now expected to provide both breaking news and heavy background, and that’s OK. They should try to do that, and when they succeed they are heroes. But I still go to weblogs first, because I want one more thing on top of integrity and professionalism, and that is independence. Much as I like and respect the Times, I trust Jason Kottke’s or Doc Searls’ independence more than the Times’s. Certainly lots more than that of Time, or Useless News and World Distort. I may trust the resources and the professional journalism standards of the big outlets more, much of the time, and those things are very important to me, but independence comes first. I want to be 99 percent sure that what the reporter is telling me is what that reporter has personally judged to be true, and not something they typed up after a phone chat with Donald Rumsfeld.On the other hand, independence doesn’t assure integrity or professionalism. Look at APTN and Reuters, each independent and each implicated in that celebration shot that CNN (also independent, in its own way) used to try to rally us for war. And being an independent doesn’t immunize you to self-censorship. I’m not sure I heard this right, because if I did it was a pretty shocking thing to say, but I think Dave said at the panel, “I usually think for myself, but around these issues I’ve decided not to.” That gave me a little bit of a spine-tingle.
Saturday, September 29