thomascwaters.com

I have written a bit about blogging, and my process of blogging, while spending most of my time and energy blogging about the subject matters that interest me the most. I think originally, I thought other bloggers may be a part of my audience- those who want to learn something from my experience of blogging. I haven’t really thought that way for some time however. I believe that most of the bloggers who follow my blog are those who care about the same content areas. It would be cool if someone cared to follow because they want to learn from how I’m doing this, but I really doubt that is the case.I often think I have more to learn than I have to share in that regard.

But do you think I’m a parasite? In one telling of the “old media vs the new media” folks like me are considered the bad guy parasites stealing content and killing the ability for traditional media to make money and survive. Or maybe Jon Hutson, who just started to follow me on Twitter is the parasite, stealing Mashable’s content by Stan Schroeder, which is using Techdirt’s content. Or maybe all of us are the bad guys? Or none of us? So this story (or content) has three different titles :

• Is There Really A ‘Piracy’ Problem For Newspapers? (Techdirt)
• Some Thoughts on “Real” Reporting (Mashable)
• What is “real” reporting? Traditional media fails to “get” blogs (jonhutson)
• Am I a Parasite? (thomascwaters.com)

But I don’t think it is accurate to call this one story or the same content. Each level of this discourse has had a different perspective or reason for writing. Techdirt comments on the myth that news aggregators and bloggers harm news sources by taking ad revenue from the real publishers. On Mashable, the focus is on what it means to report, or be a reporter. Jon, reframes that slightly with an implied commentary that traditional media does’t understand new media. I’m starting to wonder if I have any point to make here. Ha ha.

I decided to jump into this one because I think the dichotomy of traditional media/reporting vs new media/aggregating really misses the mark entirely. The internet and new media provide a greater venue for both the act of reporting a story, as well as the distribution of the story. It allows more people to be reporters and more people to be publishers and disrupts the hard line that used to separate these tasks or roles.

As a blogger, my first intention was to share my own opinion and perspective on things, believing that my voice would be useful to others. Thus I started with a theory, that there were more voices needed in the public discourse and no one was already sharing my perspective- mine was a voice missing from the discourse. Quickly however,it becomes clear that some are not even aware the discourse is happening or are not aware of elements of it. So, a natural transition begins where the blogger introduces other’s ideas and perspectives and then comments either directly on them, or in conjunction with them. Some aggregation begins.

Now that I’ve been blogging for close to a year, I’ve begun to also recognize the need for more reporting. Traditionally, someone (the publisher??) decided what did or did not get presented to the consuming audience. Some traditional news sources continue to do an awesome job of this. For example, I have written about the same-sex kiss incident in a Texas Chico’s taco business. Here is a case with the local paper, the El Paso Times has done an excellent job reporting. In other cases, it is less clear. I wrote about the Charlotte Pride and the counter protest by ultra-conservative Christians. There was far less published about this, and I felt that what I had read wasn’t very objective or had enough of a real story to it.

Maybe that’s the bottom line- what is the real story?

My minimal excursions into reporting have been increasing. Some of these have been fact checking. For example, I found a quote attributed to a Philadelphia elected official that seemed strange to me. I contact the official and found that they had been misquoted. I was able to write about this. That was real reporting in my book.

I think another aspect of real reporting is the very act of considering “what is the story.” In the past, the story was however it was handed to the consumer. Today, more people are asking if there are other perspectives- new directions from which to see the story, and therefor, new and different stories to tell.

The controversy arrises less over the reporting and the publishing, but in the realm of how any of it is monitized. I’m just a little blogger with a small audience, doing what I do in the mornings before work, in the evenings and the weekend. My house is a wreck, laundry undone, and the grass not cut, but I’ve blogged al week. To grow my audience however, I will need to spend more time researching, investigating, fact checking and otherwise reporting as well as more time improving my ability to publish. I will need to consider how do I monitize what I do now, all for nothing. Aggregating news is one way to build your site to attract more visitors. More visitors means more potential to distribute the story and build accountability. Or I can keep being a small blogger doing what I do now. Either way, I am not a parasite.

Resources:

jonhutson: What is “real” reporting? Traditional media fails to “get” blogs – Mashable.

http://mashable.com/2009/07/31/thoughts-on-real-reporting/

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090730/0423325715.shtml