Post Looks at Impact of Internet on Journalism

The lead opinion pieces in today's Washington Post online edition look at the impact of the web, particularly of blogs, on mainstream journalism ten years after major mainstream publications began posting content on the web. In the lead piece by Jay Rosen, Associated Press head Tom Curley says that big media was at first unsure about how to see internet technology.

"When the Web was born as a commercial content enterprise back in the mid-'90s, we thought it was about replicating -- that is, 'repurposing' -- our news and information franchises online," Curley said. "The news, as 'lecture,' is giving way to the news as a 'conversation'."

The earlier idea of re-purposing content was not innovative, but it was rational and cost-effective. The Web is flexible. It can "kinda/sorta" replicate an older format, if that's the goal. It's useful as a cheap, fast mass delivery system. "Trusted brands," the thinking went, could establish trusted sites, and transfer their reputations to the new medium.

Newspaper, radio, television ... Web! It made sense at the time. But in the 10 years following the birth of washingtonpost.com, the Net and its publishing platform, the World Wide Web, have proved harder to master, scarier to get wrong and more thrilling to get right than expected. Wilder, and discontinuous with the past in a way those coming out of traditional journalism never could have imagined.

Simple example: The Net radically shifts principles of news distribution as all sites become equidistant from the reader.

While I think there's a lot of grandiose and self-congratulatory talk from the blogging world, asserting that bloggers are morally superior to mainstream journalists and that the world doesn't need mainstream media to get information about the world--both assertions being absurd, it is true that the "equidistance" of web platforms and the conversational quality of blogging change the ways that people receive, digest, and discuss information. It also makes many more people disseminators, packagers, and interpreters of information.

Rosen lists the varied impacts of the internet on news-distribution as including the following elements:

• The "closed" system of gates and gatekeepers has been busted open.
• A new balance of power between producers and consumers exists.
• Sources have more power to sidestep journalists.
• The Net exploded the universe in press criticism.
• The Net has exposed "group think" in journalism.
• Legacy media's overconfidence has been disrupted.

Rosen concludes his piece by saying, "To survive you have to be open. That's where disruption in the news business looks a lot like renewal." Read the whole thing, along with the other pieces on the topic in the Post's opinion section today.