I just saw "State of Play" (I'll have my review up next Thursday before the film opens on April 17th) and while I thought it was a pretty great film, I was struck by its approach to new media and it’s a trend I've been seeing as print struggles for its life.  The argument seems to be that bloggers are sloppy, real reporting can only be done by newspapers, and that real reporting will die off as newspapers have to give into the pressures of online content and corporate overlords.

For print media, online writers (which have been labeled with the term "bloggers", a word which rolls off the tongue like warm vomit) are the enemy.  Bloggers represent the end of the era.  The work process and business model they know is dying.  Walter Isaacson argues that the online way newspapers can survive is if they charge for their content.  The New York Times tried that and failed.  If anyone should be able to charge for content, it's the New York Times but folks weren't buying because at some level, news is news and if readers can't get it one place, they'll go somewhere else.  One of the main ethos of the Internet is that users, if presented with free content, will rarely graduate to a pay-model.  Like television news, online news will have to suffice on ad dollars.  The flipside is that there's reduced cost for printing (there will always be a printed record, if only for historical purposes) and distribution. 

More frustrating is there are no longer keys to the kingdom.  Anyone can blog.  Anyone can report and have a forum for it.  There's no longer an editor saying "No, you can't write that" or offering corrections.  Moreover, there's the belief that the speed of blogging leads to sloppy reporting, as if sloppy reporting was completely alien to print or television.  Scoops, combined with catering to the largest audience possible, have always dominated the media landscape.  There is still outrage at the media's complicity in the rush to war in Iraq and rightly so.  But let us not forget how Hearst, Pulitzer, and yellow journalism helped lead us into the Spanish-American War. 

This is not to say that blogging is the superior form of reporting.  Far from it.  Blogging is subject to the same flaws and inaccuracies as traditional reporting.  But that's not the fault of the medium; it's the fault of the blogger.  But there are plenty of great bloggers out there and they are, in some ways, superior to their traditional media counterparts.  They have no corporate overlords to serve, no shareholders to consider.  They can attack a story and more importantly, they can source it in real-time.  Worshipers of print media may romanticize the ink on their fingers, but newspapers can't hyperlink you to other stories and send you further down the rabbit hole in an instant.  Yes, blogging facilitates shorter posts but like the argument about inaccurate reporting, that's not about the medium—it's about the writer.  There's no word limit.  There's no need to flip all around the site to complete a story.  It's all there on the page and the length and depth is all up to the writer's discretion.

"But what will happen to the reporters!" Old print cries.  Then we get the same tired stereotype of bloggers sitting in front of their computers in their underwear, never leaving their parents' basement (which sure is a sad image until you find out how much newspapers spend on overhead, printing, and distribution compared to how much money they bring in; I find that a far sadder thought).  But this is where old media and new media have so much to offer each other.  Bloggers (and keep in mind, I'm talking about the good ones here) don't blog because they're lazy.  They put the same effort into crafting a good article as anyone else.  They source the hell out of it and moreover, can get instantaneous feedback from their readers, ask questions, and improve and correct the story in real-time.  But reporting is a skill and it's one that has to be taught.  Someone has to teach the bloggers who didn't come up through print about cultivating sources, journalistic ethics, digging through archives for documents that existed before everything was stored online. 

And just as old media can teach new media these skills, new media can impart the new technology to the service of old-fashioned reporting.  New media knows how to quickly gather information using search, respond to readers, evolve an article, and do it all faster than traditional print which has to chug its way through the machine.  The machine has its valuable cogs in editors and proofreaders but neither of those parts are inherent to print and could just as easily transfer to online publishing.

I'm not trying to put nails in print's coffin.  But the transfer is happening and new media needs old media to stop resisting, quit the old ways, and if they truly care about accurate reporting and quality writing, then they need to embrace the new generation rather than deride it.