Old notes foretell emergence of blogs, new media

While cleaning out a notebook, I found notes I had taken at a N.C. Press Association meeting about four years ago. The topic was new media, such as blogs. At the time, I was not writing a blog, but the topic fascinated me. Bloggers, aggregators and other pioneers in the new media were changing the way people got their information.

I returned to the office and typed up my notes and began bugging my boss and the IT director about adding more user options to our newspaper Web site. A key part of the seminar I had attended dealt with RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and one of the speakers showed how people could use RSS to, essentially, create their own online newspaper devoted only to news that interested them. I asked if our newspaper Web site had RSS capability. No one knew. They would look into it. When I brought it up again later, I was told, "Now tell me again what that is." I don't know to this day whether RSS feeds are offered on the newspaper's Web site.

I learned that blogging, even in that early day of blogs, Flicker, Facebook and all the rest, was threatening to change the entire news environment. Government agencies, for example, could use blogs to promulgate news without having to go through the filtering by professional media. There are millions of blogs out there, but most (like this one) are not widely read. Collectively, they provide a gargantuan amount of information or opinion, so much so that a term has been coined to describe the information overload that any online user faces. "Data smog" describes the fact that there is so much information out there that our brains are incapable of processing it all.

Just as upper-class and even middle-class people once had servants to provide their basic needs (such as cooking and laundry), readers once had traditional media (also derisively called the mainstream media) to filter through the volumes of information and select the most important and most interesting items for dissemination to the general public. Now traditional media are becoming anachronistic, just as household servants are quaint relics of the past. But the work of filtering through the avalanche of information has not disappeared; it has become more difficult as speedier communications increased the volume. The work done by household servants hasn't disappeared; someone still has to do it. Someone — everyone who takes the matters seriously — has to filter through the "data smog" to find those things that are credible, important and interesting.

When I taught journalism classes, I spent a class or two defining news. The textbook would provide a simple, straightforward list of factors that create news: magnitude, proximity, rarity, public importance, human interest, impact, etc. Those criteria have guided the editors and reporters at mainstream media for decades, and I doubt that media critics or bloggers could present a persuasive argument that these traditional criteria are wrong. The new media put bloggers, readers, RSS recipients and others in the position of selecting the information that is important, that is news. But for most people, this is not a full-time job. They don't have 40 hours a week to spend perusing news reports and selecting the best, as traditional editors do, or did. This new media, if traditional media continue to decline, puts great pressure on readers, who must be both reader and editor, with little time for either.

Another problem is that selective news consuming, whether by RSS feeds, blogs or simple Web searches, eliminates the serendipitous effects of reading a newspaper. You might turn a page and find a story on a topic that you knew nothing about — one that you'd never select for an RSS feed or a Google search — but that you find interesting, even fascinating. Such pleasant surprises can happen every day for a newspaper reader, but rarely, if ever, for new media consumers.