The Journal of my Other Self

"It's a different model of investigation and discovering the truth. A lot of the traditional media feel very threatened by blogs. And the web, in general, and blogs, in particular, raise the price of error for journalists, both online and in print. While an individual blog may be inaccurate, unfair, or dishonest, the collective intelligence of the web and thousands of people picking apart anything they see in print makes journalists more careful. When you make a mistake now, there's almost no chance of it going unnoticed. And when it is noticed, you'll be humiliated in public. Blogs have made entities like The New York Times more accurate and forthcoming about acknowledging errors that occur."

How is this anything but good for all of us?

In my News Writing & Reporting class today we discussed Kovach and Rosenstiel's discipline of verification--an inchoate and often personal set of practices for getting at something like the truth of a news situation (and the "essence" of fulfilling the journalistic purpose of providing people with "the information they need to be free and self-governing"). And we discussed this as an example of what happens when that discipline breaks down and isn't backed up by transparency.

This line jumped out at me (I somehow failed to annotate it on my first five or six reads):

In the end, this discipline is what separates journalism from other fields and creates an economic reason for it to continue.

Blogs, as metonymy for the collective online brain, have an important role to play in helping the mainstream media--especially newspapers--achieve what has yet to be achieved: a coherent articulation of the discipline of verification followed by its consistent practice.