WSJ, on the evidence, attributes qualities to print journalism not evenly distributed in the real world. They share their medium with tabloid journalism in varying degrees, and also with a media operation (Bloomberg) and a foreign paper (FT) which are frequently more timely and more substantial than they are.

WSJ’s view of the ‘messiness’ of blogs overlooks the corresponding and similar mire they share with other papers and, at the same time, they fail to recognize their own second-ratedness among their peers.

I think far too much credence is given to the notion of MSM fact checking and the rigor with which articles are researched, and far too little scrutiny is given to the biases that either reporters or a paper as an institution brings to a particular story or topic. Moreover few reporters have shown any willingness to tap the collective wisdom of their readers. In particular, newspapers would deliver a much stronger product if they were to embrace two of Raymond’s tenets that you referenced:

“The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong “

Current news organizations are spectacularly bad at these two things, and that is why their product is often put to shame by bloggers with some domain expertise.

For example, Tanta at CR has demonstrated quite clearly that a star columnist for the NYT regularly makes sweeping statements (with no factual backup) that are clearly wrong, or enthusiastically embraces a story line that seems to fit her world view without stopping to ask some very obvious questions about the facts involved or the motives of the central characters in her tale.

In another example, the NYT’s lead piece in the Sunday Week in Review http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/weekinreview/20mouawad.html?pagewanted=2&sq=the%20big%20thirst&st=nyt&scp=1 was the typical hand wringing affair about the energy “crisis” and went on at length about there being no hope that supply and demand would balance in the future. The growth in third world demand was viewed as unstoppable and the US was portrayed as the shameless oil spendthrift of the world. This was the “news” of the week (April 20) as the NYT saw it.

What was really news, was that gasoline demand in the US is down for the first four months of the year, no one wants to buy an SUV, and miles travelled so far this year are down for the first time in 25 years. All of this information was publicly available and had been talked about on Wall Street in the preceding few weeks, and not one of those facts was mentioned. Blogger James Hamilton does a great job of summarizing this inflection point in gasoline demand growth: http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2008/05/gasoline_prices_4.html

A very modest amount of digging would have exposed these facts. The failure to include them or to consider alternative outcomes to the Malthusian crisis scenario is either the result of very lazy and low quality journalism, or, just as likely, the institutional preference at the Times for administered as opposed to market driven solutions, particularly for things like oil. The notion, which seems to be playing out in real time, that high prices will eventually impact demand, appears to be heretical in the Times world view, and was either never going to see the light of day in the paper of record or wasn’t worth the time to check and see if it might actually be happening. Times’ readers would have been well served by a more nuanced view of marginal energy demand in the US, but the paper wasn’t up to it. Fortunately we have bloggers who can fill in the blanks in what passes for “rigorous” and “high quality” journalism.

Rotbart and his peers would do well to think hard about casting the first stone. From where I sit, they have plenty of sins to answer for.

Whoops. Dunno how that crept in (multitasking maybe). I did cite Raymond first, then somehow switched.

Thanks for the catch, have corrected the post.

As with opensource, the idea is to advance the art , often one bit at a time, and to encourage feedback, enhancement, and yeah criticism.

I am a software developer and I mostly agree with your points. But this is less and less true with fewer and fewer people around to correct things. The most active pages on Wikipedia are like Linux. They get checked a lot. But even in open source software there are some duds – a lot of little projects that get started and no one ever uses, much less checks or debugs the code.

Among bloggers there are probably some blogs that don’t get read and some others that only get read because they rant so much — that is, as a kind of geek show. No one bothers to check their facts.

The traditional newspaper business is still robust but it is eroding at an accelerating pace. It is ironic that the MSM rails against blogs and yet each has created its own melange on site under the banner (legitimacy) of their brand. Indeed most MSM blogs even print subtitles like blogs we are reading.

Bloggers on the other hand operate in the peer review mold of far more specialized users and thus establish legitimacy as stand alone entities in the face of scrutiney. perhaps it is why they are the go to for pre contextualizing their own opinion pieces.

Agree fully with the loss of editorial control…kills the jouro types

Blogging is more honest and open because there’s not very much money it it. Given time (and and increasing sources of revenue) and it will likely begin to appear like more traditional media.

Blogging in general is similar to OSS in the way its output is based on others people input. Blogging is quick and because it is NOT VETTED it presents opinions across the spectrum faster than traditional media. It is the instant commentary mechanism that I find valuable. A news item comes out and the blogosphere churns out an output that is distributed across a bell curve of opinions. In that sense the Bazaar is there.

I like to sense opinion by looking at the distribution. For example let’s say there is a news item on markets movement, I like to read blog commentary to see how much people agree or disagree on whether it will go up or down next week, there is a distribution and to me it is not only the “average” but the actual distribution that is interesting. If the opinions are tightly grouped and there is no dissent then it is a “fairly safe assumption” in how I manage my investments for example, this is the basis for momentum investing. If on the other hand there are drastic pieces (that still make sense I try to discard propaganda) then the issue is volatile and undecided. Then I trade volatility. News driven trading feeds off blogging as a distributed quorum sensing mechanism.

While the COLLECTIVE output has some characteristics of OSS, the individual output really isn’t IMHO. The product of blogging is well… blogs. Individual entries about particular topics. A particular blog reflects the opinions of the individual not the collective. The product of OSS, meaning the ACTUAL SOFTWARE, IS a product built by individuals but what gets selected is done by a collective (or semi collective usually with meritocracy).

But this is where, in my not so humble opinion, Yves Smith’s argument falls apart, the only thing that stands after 10 years in the OSS industry is in fact the peer review. The natural selection that happens in OSS: bad software gets weeded out by a collective brain. PEER REVIEW IS THE ONE AND ONLY MECHANISM IN OSS.

This peer review is in fact COMPLETELY ABSENT from blogging. And that is the mainstay of the argument made by the panel Yves comments on, that traditional journalism is PEER REVIEWED, while blogging isn’t.

With a little patience and a soupcon of luck, I can usually find a range of specialists posting online or, better still, riposting.

But on the WSJ/journalism side, I get fact-checking by staff – no especial expertise. I’ll take Buiter, CR, Tanta, Cassandra and yourself any day, for preference.

No invention since the printing press has been so important to promoting democracy, and as great a threat to the oligarchy, as is the internet.

One only has to take a look at how the oligachy reacted to the printing press back then to foretell its reaction to the internet.

In the 16th century the Church didn’t want–didn’t permit–wide readership of the New Testament. As William Manchester pointed out in “A World Lit Only by Fire”: “Studying it was a privilege they had reserved for the hierarchy, which could then interpret passages to support the sophistry, and often the secular politics, of the Holy See.”

“William Tyndale conceived a translation of the New Testament while reading ancient languages at Oxford and Cambridge. And being the humanist that he was, was adamant about its publication. A Catholic friend reproached him: ‘It would be better to be without God’s law than the pope’s.’ Tyndale replied: ‘If God spare me, ere many years I will cause the boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than you do.’

“Tyndale had been warned that finding a printer for his completed manuscript would be difficult. Luckless in England, he crossed the Channel and found a publisher in Catholic Cologne. The text had been set and was on the stone when a local dean head of it, grasped the implications, and persuaded authorities in Cologne to pi the type. Fleeing with his manuscript, Tyndale found that he was now a plice figure; had post offices existed, his picture would have been posted in them. The Frankfurt dean sent word of his criminal attempt to Cardinal Wolsey and King Henry, who declared Tyndale a felon. Sentries were posted at all English ports, under orders to seize him upon his return home.

“But the fugitive was less interested in his personal freedom than in seeing his work in print. He therefore journeyed to Protestant Worms, where, in 1525, Peter Schoffer published an octavo edition of his work. Six thousand copies had been shipped to England when Tynsdale was again spotted. He was on teh run for the next four years. Then, believing himself safe, he settled in Antwerp. However, he had underestimated the gravity of his offense and the persistence of his sovereign. British agents had never ceased stalking him. Now they arrested him. At Henry’s (VIII) insistence he was imprisoned for sixteen months in the castle of Vilvorde, near Brussels, tried for heresy, and, after his conviction, publicly garrotted. His corpse was burned at the stake, an admonition for any who might have been tempted by his folly.

“The royal warning was unheeded. You can’t kill a good book, including the Good Book, and Tyndale’s translation was excellent, later it became the basis for the King James version. Despite a lengthy “Dialogue” by Siur Thomas More, denouncing the translation as flawed, copies of the Wroms edition had been smuggled into the country and were being passed from hand to hand. To the bishop of London this was an intolerable, metastasizing heresy. He bought up all that were for sale and publicly burned them at st Paul’s Cross. But the archbishop of Canterbury was dissatisfied; his spies told him that many remained in private hands. Protestant peers with country houses were loaning them out, like public libraries. Assembling his bishops, the archbishop declared that tracking them down was essential–each was placing soulds in jeopardy–and so, on his instructions, dioceses organized posses, searching the homes of known literates, and offered rewards to informers–sending out the alarm to keep Christ’s revealed word from those who worshiped him.”