Blogging and the changing model of news-delivery

One of my favorite blogs is David Neiwert's Orcinus blog, not least because he is one of today's leading journalistic experts on the militant radical right. And he has good insights into how rightwing extremist ideas are regularly "mainstreamed" into today's authoritarian Republican Party. In this post, he takes on the endlessly-discussed (and sometimes even interesting!) issue of the function of news-oriented blogs - Some thoughts on blogging 02/03/06:

[B]loggers are not journalists, in the professional-craft sense, despite various claims to such status by some bloggers. At times, they may actually engage in reporting work (Josh Marshall particularly comes to mind), but this is something of a rarity. Besides, we bloggers who are journalists too know that it essentially represents a kind of publishing without an editor - which is both part of the pleasure of it (I certainly can't imagine any editor ever approving any of my disquisitions on fascism) and its danger (I think regular readers of my verbose posts would tell you I could use a good editor; and then there are the mistakes that are inevitable when you work without a backstop).

Actually, the function in the old communications model that bloggers come closest to replicating is that of the editor - not in the sense of being an overseer of writing and reportorial quality, but in setting priorities: deciding which stories are important and deserve greater attention, ascertaining which stories are reported upon.

A good blogger is not so much a journalist as a good editor (and remember, most editors are writers too). A blog is thus a kind of publication, and it attracts readers according to the quality of insight its editor brings to it.

But instead of a situation where increasingly we had only a handful of carefully selected editors who worked their way up the ranks by remaining loyal corporate yes-men, now anyone with a good news sense and a way with words can influence the course of our discourse. The Internet has shattered the old bottleneck. It has democratized how information flows in modern society.