Among the topics Posner addresses is the adversarial-yet-symbiotic relationship between online citizen-journalists and their professional counterparts in the establishment press:
What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.
This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions - usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have forgotten the article being corrected - but also of network television news. It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather’s mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like ‘’60 Minutes II'’ who have to be consulted.
The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.
In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It’s as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.
How can the conventional news media hope to compete? Especially when the competition is not entirely fair. The bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media. They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, often at considerable expense, without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of those blogs that provide their readers with links to newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper. The legitimate gripe of the conventional media is not that bloggers undermine the overall accuracy of news reporting, but that they are free riders who may in the long run undermine the ability of the conventional media to finance the very reporting on which bloggers depend.
This is an interesting point, but I think Posner is conflating two separate issues. Bloggers are undoubtedly dependent on the establishment press. A significant portion of what bloggers comment on happens to be the end-product of the news industry, and that end-product would not exist without the news-gathering apparatus of the establishment press.
However, bloggers are not any more “free riders” than people who write letters to the editor. The only difference is, if I write a letter to the editor of The New York Times, the odds are very small that it would be run, and if it is, I’d be lucky to get more than a hundred words printed. But with a website such as this, I effectively bypass the gatekeeper who decides what to print, and I can find an audience for my thoughts.
Posner’s real issue isn’t with bloggers, but with the current business model of the print media. It wasn’t hordes of drooling bloggers that forced The New York Times to publish their articles online for free; they—as did most of the establishment media—decided to do so voluntarily, long before there were such things as blogs. Inherent in putting up a web page is the ability for other people to link to it. That’s what blogs do; they link to other sources, many of which run ads on their pages.
So if I send a reader from this site to The New York Times, I am not diminishing the financial position of the Times unless they’ve structured their business in such a way to take a loss from web-based readers. But considering the prevalence of ads on the Times website, they are likely benefitting—not hurting—by my sending readers their way. Either way, it is not incumbent upon bloggers to devise a working business model for the establishment press. We bloggers haven’t even found a reliable business model in which we can make money, and I don’t see anyone in the old media shedding tears over that.
In the long-run, I think blogs help the establishment press by (1) forcing them to have a better product, and (2) putting more people in contact with that product. Whether people like or dislike what’s produced by the media is not determined by blogs. But blogs are great at shoving potential customers through the doors of sites like The New York Times, CNN.com, etc. If those potential customers feel like they’re being played for fools once they’re inside the gates of Big Media, that’s out of our control.
