Kristine Lowe (via Roy) made exactly the point I wanted to about David Leigh's piece on slow journalism, which disappointingly revisited some generalisations about web culture - it "degrades valuable principles - the idea of discrimination, that some voices are more credible than others, that a named source is better than an anonymous pamphleteer (that's what they used to call bloggers in the 18th century, when they published, for example, the politically dangerous Letters of Junius). The notion of authoritativeness is derided as a sort of 'top-down' fascism."
Photo by Nicky Pallas on Flickr. Some Rights Reserved.
This is in the context of a much longer, very compelling argument that asserts the influence and cultural clout of traditional, "proper" investigative reporting; he lists stories on tax-dodgers, plans to restrict the Freedom of Information Act and the defence industry that have held to account the people in power. No-one could disagree with the power and impact of those reports.
I think the wider point, however, is that it is not the web in itself, the culture that has built around the web, that threatens this form of journalism but the shift in business models that has created that threat. Leigh thinks that the media is fragmenting into a thousands websites and a thousand digital channels, "all weak financially".
I don't think the future is so bleak, because where there is a global audience of more than a billion web users globally (according to Nielsen Online) and 37.6m in the UK alone, there is money. Google is proof of that, but let's not go down the path of saying that it managed to exploit a growth market that publishers missed.
The mainstream web is barely ten years old, and many business models are still exploratory. But there are some fascinating projects out there and with ad targeting alone, we've barely begun to see the potential.
I don't recognise those specific characterisations of web culture that Leigh listed; the more you participate in an online community around an interest or subject, the less true those observations become.
These communities are incredibly sophisticated networks of people who recognise exactly who is credible and who is not; that credibility and trust is earned through dialogue and by sharing reliable information. Is that so different from traditional news?
Ultimately, some amount of disruption is inevitable but it can be a good thing. Perhaps it's not even about the transition, but how you deal with it.
Source: Guardian
