This is one the things I like least about the supposedly "professional" media: narrative is far, far more important than fact. Take Larry Dignan, who was interviewed for the "blogging kills" story, but didn't make the cut. Why?

And that brings me to my point with Matt. Yes, blogging is stressful. Yes, it can be insane. But is it any worse than being a corporate lawyer? How many of those folks dropped in the last six months? How about mortgage brokers? Hedge fund traders? FBI agents? Any job where you gnash your teeth together? We write for a living, yap all day and don’t have to wear suits. You could do worse than blogging.

But that didn't fit the narrative, so it didn't make the story. To read the Times' story, you would think that everyone blogging is desperately trying to push out "one more post" in order to get the maximum amount of Google juice possible. Heck, they didn't even produce the classic "on the one hand, on the other" type of story - it was lazier. Yet another reason to realize that most reporters don't have better skills than the average college grad of 21, much less the average blogger.

Technorati Tags: reporting, blogging

Doc Searls posts a lament about what "blogging has become", and ends up pining for something purer:

So I want something new. Something for which the making of money is at most a secondary or lower priority. Not sure what that should be, but I am sure, if it ever happens, it won't be called blogging.

The thing is, the same sentiment surrounded the internet itself back in the early days, right around the time the first browsers were released. Suddenly, this pure, non-commercial thing was going to be ruined by all the money making.

I don't get it. I'm not sure why this changes things for any particular person, or why anyone should think it does. Blogging is really nothing more - or less - than personal journalism. It varies across the spectrum of utility just as print journalism does - recall that for every professional journal out there, there are tons of "National Enquirers" - online, where the price of posting content approaches zero, why would it be any different?

Mathew Ingram pulls the best quote from this story on how people are getting the news (at least, younger people):

“If the news is that important, it will find me.”

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tags: news, social media

Professional media would do well to listen to Doc Searls - he's got his finger on the pulse of where media should be going:

So now comes news from Michael O'Connor Clarke that the CBC is quietly releasing one of their most popular shows on BitTorrent. And that it's DRM free. As it ought to be.

As Doc says, major media here in the US is still mentally bound to the airwave and frequency idea (even as the analog spectrum is about to be reordered). They need to figure out that their current audience, which is bound by time and position is much, much smaller than their potential audience - which would be happy to watch them at times of their own choosing.

Technorati Tags: tv, radio

Spotted in YOUR INNER CEO:

Communications has evolved more in the last 10 years than it has in the previous 100

I see that assertion a lot, but I don't think it holds up. Why? Well, I was thinking about this last night before bed. Let's ponder the communications field 30 years ago, when I was in high school. Sure, there's more person-to-person going on now, but the spread of information hasn't changed that much since 1978 - at least, not if you compare it to the changes between 1878-1908.

People like to say that "change is accelerating", but they're simply wrong. There's nothing going on now that compares to the wrenching changes that took place at the close of the 19th century. That was the time when the industrial revolution really caught hold, and great masses of people left the farm (and centuries of nearly identical manual labor) for urban life.

We like to think our era is uniquely changing, but it's simply not true. Compared to the time 100 years ago, things now are incremental in nature. Pick up nearly any book on the late 19th century and you'll see what I mean.

Technorati Tags: change, history

Two things struck me reading this ancient (1995) piece from Newsweek:

• How many things he got so, so wrong (newspapers, online shopping)
• How common the same kind of complaint is today

Hat tip Michael for the link

This is interesting - Mike Arrington has posted a summary of the Lacy interview with Zuckerberg from SXSW - and it sounds like reality (there's a video linked from his site) is somewhat different from the Twitter view. This reminds me that history is remembered based on whoever gets to write the narrative - and what things like Twitter do is amplify the early reporting. Based on how accurate the early reports tend to be from any large news event, I think we would all do well to take Twitter storms with a huge grain of salt.

Technorati Tags: news, social media, twitter

An interview - even a public one - used to be a simple thing. Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek just learned that things have changed.

The last few conferences I've been to have had a back channel - blogs, IRC, that sort of thing. Twitter has created an even simpler forum for a back channel, since it runs in a browser. So if your style creates a negative riff in the audience, it can just spread like wildfire - and that's apparently what happened today at the SXSW conference, when Sarah Lacy interviewed Mark Zuckerberg.

I started seeing some tweets about a negative reaction this afternoon, and now it's all over Techmeme. I don't think any interview done in front of a wired audience will ever be the same.