President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
50%
50%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
70%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
July 02, 2009 11:55 PM UTC
36 Comments
Individual bloggers vis-a-vis journalists are pretty much a bunch of Davey Crockett’s exploring the wilderness, making our own rules, to exercise our freedom and lead a more interesting life. It’s not a job, but an avocation. Journalists work under very strict rules and have several layers of management pushing, supporting, hectoring and ultimately shaping what they say.
We bloggers don’t report the news as much as we offer our commentary about the news, and most (usually) don’t produce entertainment. What you offer is information, from a clearly personal perspective. I enjoy what you write because it is interesting, but I don’t think of it as journalism because, almost by definition, it can’t really be in-depth or hard-hitting,
That you have the moxy, time and ability to get audiences with politicos is terrific. But you do seem to be attempting an experiment in the next age of reporting. The question is, are you trying to be Walter Winchell, or Louella Parsons? 😉
I believe the criticism you attracted with the Governor’s Q&A was typical of the critical comments that seem to accompany your other interviews, and is because rightly or wrongly, many want to hold you to the standards of a professional journalist.
The charge of conflict of interest was really unfair, as in how many of your previous posts have you already stated that you have written off doing business with the state? So I totally accept your use of your company’s experience as a concrete example of where the state is overlooking a major management problem in at least their IT division.
On the matter of bias, really there are only a couple of options — we can self-disclose the biases that we are aware of, but admit to our amateur status. Or we can actively attempt to adhere to a generally accepted professional code of ethics, which would take a significant commitment of time, energy and money. Then you would be completely correct to call yourself a journalist.
But, regardless, we will always be bloggers, and that’s fine by me. David, please keep pushing, supporting, hectoring and sometimes shaping what is said 😉
I think that’s a really good way to put it. As the term journalist is defined the vast majority of us bloggers (myself included) don’t fit it. Bloggers may by and large replace journalists but if we do, we remain bloggers, we don’t become journalists.
I do hope we see more bloggers report the news. Because with newspapers going away and even local TV News being on the endangered list, we’re about all that’s left. But I also worry if bloggers are going to be able to fill that void.
With all that said though, I do think we report some news. When I interviewed Ritter there was no ground-breaking revelation but I think it did provide some information that was new. And a lot of news is little bits of additional information pulled together.
I also think personal knowledge, like mine about the purchasing habits of the OIT, could end up being one of the strengths of bloggers. The reporter has to go find all those sources. That takes a lot of time & effort which limits what stories are follwed and to what level.
But a million bloggers (and we have more than that number), each able to write on facts they know directly, adds up to a lot more direct information than the MSM will ever get. Again, it’s very different in that it is raw data that has not been verified. But it will be new info.
Anyways, thank you for a reply I think is spot-on.
You know, the problem with bloggers as journalists is that we are completely disorganized, and therefore dissipating whatever expertise we might bring to bear on reportage and analysis of news.
If blogs were like user groups, with the gathering of deep and comprehensive expertise in a narrow area, imagine the focus we could achieve!
As a tech support manager at the time, I had that revelation when Windows 95 first came out, and I needed to install it on two different brands of PCs. I encountered a new problem with the video driver for which conventional vendor tech support was only able to provide partial help, as they were generalists that had to respond to any and all questions at a moment’s notice.
Because I had a specific problem, I was able to concentrate on a single topic. It took the collective experience of several contributors to the Win95 Usenet group for me to get my solution. I then contributed the total answer to the other vendor’s Usenet group, besting what the vendor could offer at the time.
Just think – if Club Twitty’s expertise were shared on an Enviro/O&G-focused blog the level and range of debate that would ensue amongst the like-interested members?
With millions of bloggers engaged globally, with their collective experiences and likely intimate knowledge of specific facts in a narrow field, we could multiply our ability to discover and discern essential truths, rather than today’s scatter-shot approach with the majority of time spent attacking one’s character or rebutting phoney strawman arguments.
Wikipedia might be the better model for blogger/journalists, but with discussions allowed, and then a consensus conclusion published with one dissenting (collaborative) opinion.
Search engine technology would be the key to collecting and aggregating knowledge/news, but would need to be enhanced with a scoring mechanism to rate bias and accuracy of the source material. Then the user could optionally establish a filter to set a minimum for their tolerance of bias, allowing as much or as little dissonance as they desire.
Blogs in my opinion, as currently constituted, are not (and may never be) equipped to replace newspapers.
But assume that Google & others will come up with software to perfomr this aggregation for us. Technology is ever accelerating.
So Twitty won’t need to find & join those other O&G experts, we’ll have software that brings it all together – for him and for us.
We’ve already evolved a lot from the case you listed above (which I used to do too). Now instead of going to a forum we do a google search and find the same info in someone’s blog.
It’ll be interesting to see where we are in 10 years.
God, I hope it doesn’t take Google 10 years to refine their aggregation/consolidation technology!
Do I get a royalty if you decide to develop a Google-beater alternative based on my idea? 😉
Just bill it as what it is and don’t try to be something you’re not.
The top of my page says “Opinion.”
You might want to do something different.
Think of it as the modern equivalent of passing out handbills on the street to anyone who’ll take one, or standing on a soapbox in the park and giving a speech to anyone who’ll listen. In my case, it’s more like a bag lady mumbling to passers-by on the sidewalk, but it all works.
Don’t let anybody tell you it isn’t journalism. As a computer geek, you’ll remember how threatened traditional IT types were when the PC came out. All of a sudden, they couldn’t lock the computer in its own room with its own air behind a cipher lock. All of a sudden, they were no longer special. They were no longer wizards hiding behind a curtain. The mainstream media insulting bloggers is nothing more than a different form of the same reaction.
It’s journalism all right, but it’s “new” journalism–or the oldest form of journalism, depending on how you look at it. People have been passing out handbills since the printing press was invented; people have been giving speeches in the park for lots longer. Citizen journalism has been around for as long as people have had the ability to communicate.
Have fun with it and make your own contribution, whatever you choose for that to be. Someone will read your work.
Hell, they even read mine.
I’m a relative newcomer to blogging, but I’ve been saying for a while now that it’s going to look like yellow journalism for a while. People have their agendas, and they will use the new media to try to realize those agendas.
I liken it to the way newspapers have been run in the past (some continue to be run this way today.) Printed news used to have a very partisan slant. Some newspapers would be outwardly Republican or Democrat–others would be slightly more subtle about it. I think that blogs are going to be run in this way for a long time as well. You’ll get occasional non-partisan, or multi-partisan blogs, but for the most part it will be very slanted toward left or right.
Some of it will be actual citizen journalism–your blog comes to mind. Some will have a partisan slant like Pols and Face the State. Others will make their own niche in the blogosphere.
There’s only one for-sure in blogging: it’s here as long as the internet is here.
As an experiment I just did a google search for governor bill ritter. The top links are state, campaign, image aggregation, video aggregation, news aggregation, wikipedia, 2 spam sites (?), and then my interview (at my blog, not Pols).
Over the next week or two my interview should rop down because of age. But it’s still amazing that an individual blog entry about him sits that high. With Google search being many people’s means to get information, this does mean that blogs may significantly outweigh newspapers in the upcoming election.
The answer, IMO, is answered in this quote from the early days of the formation of our Republic:
“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”-James Madison, FEDERALIST #57 (1787
This leads me to believe that lobbyists need to be controlled, as they have the ear of our representatives, more than the people who elect them do. Lobbyists do not pursue policies and laws for “the common good of the society.”
The Sierra Club, Common Cause, and every group lobbying for single payer and/or a public option are not trying to achieve a common good.
I don’t buy that.
differentiates between lobbyists who work twowards a comon good, versus a those whose special interest are for a corporate….these days a transnational, good. Sorry I wasn’t more clear.
Great example, the pharma company that has the cervical cancer vaccine has lobbied to get all girls to take the vaccine. I’d call that a common good. But it’s Big Pharma.
You’d point out both the benefit to society and the potential profit for the inventor.
I’ll bet your salary against mine that the mainstream media isn’t going to mention both things in the same article.
That’s where you earn the money you don’t make as a blogger.
I agree. Unions should not be allowed to make political contributions of any kind.
political campaigns would unfold on a level playing field, in which each candidate’s message is conveyed through a megaphone of equal size to all others, and the competition is one of ideas rather than of financial backing.
We don’t live in that world for several reasons, one of them being the sometimes inconvenient consequences of our Constitution, and the judicial interpretation of what “free speech” entails. Under such circumstances, making partial but unbalanced moves in the direction of the elusive ideal can sometimes lead to less desirable rather than more desirable outcomes.
For instance, some people are offended by affirmative action because it is not color-blind, and yet disregard that it is a counterbalancing failure of achieving a color-blind society: Eliminating it leaves only “legacies,” inheritance, residual prejudices, and other traditionally non-color-blind aspects of our social institutional landscape. The ideal is a completely color-blind society, but, in the absence of that ideal, we should prefer a balance of failures rather than a skewed set of failures.
I do not have a specific suggestion about how to move forward in the imperfect world of our political arena, but rather only a caution that a good idea in isolation may not be a good idea in the context of “the whole picture.” I am reluctant to endorse any notion of prohiting any one source of campaign funding without considering how it affects the balance of where campaign funding comes from and what interests it represents.
Assuming you add corporations and small businesses along with unions.
I support free speech and that means everyone & anyone should not just be allowed to lobby, but should be encouraged to. I get very worried when people say that only those they feel meet their criteria should be allowed to push their views.
Because at root, most lobbying is a group of like-minded people working together because many voices have more impact than each individually saying the same thing.
Yes the system is imperfect. Yes there generally is no one fighting hard for the common good against each special interest. But that is what democracy is.
Obviously neither one of those entities will ever be barred from donating to political organizations.
I was trying to point out that unions are just one half of the larger institution of business–even though business wants them eradicated.
We’ve now seen reporters for daily newspapers live blogging on their news organizations’ web sites: e.g., the Rocky Mountain News twittering live from a funeral, the Denver Post blogging live from the Ward Churchill trial. Several of the bloggers, for example, on the Huffington Post are journalists or columnists; some even have their own blogs.
No, I don’t think the definition of a “blogger” excludes a journalist. But let’s put it this way: while a “blog” often isn’t dyed-in-the-wool objective journalism, that doesn’t mean that, by definition, it can’t be.
What blogs have done is led to the democratization of speedy news transmission, as well as op-ed broadcasts by the masses. That’s neither good nor bad. A “blogger” is someone who uses the tool of a “blog.” A Washington Post reporter can be a blogger, but so can Joe the Roto-Rooter Man.
No one is saying journalists can’t or don’t blog. The issues discussed above are twofold:
If professional journalists/news organizations can’t make a profit on blogs, can unpaid (thus amateur) bloggers fill the gap?
And since it seems bloggers are more than willing to try, how can amateurs augment the news gathering/reporting process in a way that provides trustworthy information?
Everyone has an opinion, and with the Internet, certainly have few impediments to sharing it with the universe. That’s the problem we face — how to sift through the useless noise to find factual information with value — and not just that which reinforces pre-existing prejudices.
As David has said on numerous posts, the MSM are simply trying to move their current methods and content from paper to the web. Unfortunately, they forgot how to get paid in the transition. Maybe they can reintroduce the subscription model, or perhaps they can wangle a licensing/royalty fee out of the ISPs as in the cable model, and continue delivering content the old fashioned way in the new medium.
Highly motivated amateurs like David are coming from the opposite direction — practicing “journalism lite” (interviews), but it is unlikely that he or others will take up the tedious and difficult task of hard news reporting.
Blogs (and bloggers) are terrific in their ability to provide immediate feedback about any subject, and their egalitarian granting of anyone with a computer a soapbox and the presumption of credibility. But the question remains, are they a viable resource for producing reliable hard news?
Thus my suggestion that, if the amateurs outnumber the pros, then perhaps an adaptation of the wikipedia model enhanced with the blog’s open discussion capability, could provide hard news content on narrow topics researched and vetted by a small group of independent subject matter experts would provide a better forum for the newest evolution in journalism.
Do you mean make a profit or report news? I think all indications are that some bloggers do provide valuable news — to the best of their abilities.
That’s true. But no one else had acknowledged in this thread that they actually do. It was implied that a blogger is different from a journalist by definition, and I’m saying that’s not necessarily the case in all instances.
Well, they can mimic what they read or see professional journalists doing, as best as they can. I’m not saying they have to adopt the same tone, just adopt the elements of presenting facts, presenting evidence. The style of delivery. Some people can get up at karaoke and mimic Elvis Presley pretty damn good – even though that doesn’t make them The King. It’s a matter of practicing. Of maintaining a vigilant eye. Plus, as ever, it’s partly in the purity of the intention.
Why not — at least partially, if not exclusively. That doesn’t mean that everybody ought to believe what they read on a blog. But usually if it’s a big enough story, a more major news organization, which has the ability to do further verification, is going to check out the info.
Boy, do I hate to compare journalism to science, but there it is: someone says this does this; then other people seek to verify whether or not it’s true. Even big hard news stories can be generated by the little-ol’-me blogger, especially locally, but nationally, as well.
Perhaps Obama needs to appoint a Blog Czar. We have a czar for everything else, it sometimes seems. But I joke.
Hey, it’s a two-way street: major news organizations – and other bloggers (hell, sometimes Wikipedia itself) – can vet info on blogs that seems suspect, if the story is big enough. Conversely, who keeps tabs on the bullshit reported by the major media – whether Fox News or the New York Times? Bloggers.
For expediency in all the posts above, the term blogger was implicitly defined as a non-professional journalist. I didn’t think our meaning needed elaboration. Sorry.
Amateurs, by definition, don’t seek a profit.
If a professional news organization or journalist can’t make a living producing hard news, the implication is that they won’t continue to do it, thus opening a gap for amateur bloggers to fill.
Most of what professional news organizations do doesn’t wind up on the printed page. Research, editing, developing sources, etc. doesn’t lend itself to easy mimicry, particularly if you neither have the time nor experience with performing those tasks, or expertise in the subject area to begin with.
To date, bloggers (you and me) have proven adept at snark, opinions, and Monday-morning quarterbacking. Not so much the drudgery of actually reporting newsworthy events.
I await your next scoop with baited breath…
or do you smell some bait somewhere?
I dashed that last post off a little too quickly, it seems. My editor missed that homophone 😉
For fun, I looked up the origins at this site: Bated Breath
The authors seem to be a cross between Click and Clack and Miss Manners.
[titled: “Really, all fine points or clarifications…”]
A bit misplaced on the page…but my intention was pure, at least.
The mountain on the McInnis website. Granted it was a little gotcha story but I believe it was both broken here and the identification of the mountain occured here.
I think my interview with Bennet was the first time he was quoted as saying he would vote for single payer health insurance.
Club Twitty I think was the first to report (here) about the pretend rancher who was an O&G shill at a recent public hearing.
Newspapers still break more news. But some happens here.
I love reading about stories here (sourced from newspaper websites), with all the interesting commentary from the Polsters, and then check if the same news item made it into the next day’s Post.
But climbing Long’s Peak doesn’t make me a mountain climber.
The examples you cite are correct, but I should add that unlike a reporter would do, you didn’t actually quote the Senator, you paraphrased what you heard — thus (if the Senator desired) easily disclaimed.
I looked up other articles (including the Coloradoan’s coverage of Markey, Udall and Bennet on Healthcare on 6/15). There, Bennet was more circumspect, just toeing Obama’s line. But as it happened, I had sent a letter to his office that same week, and got his reply soon after, where to my surprise, he referenced Rep. Conyer’s single-payer bill, but didn’t come out directly in support of it.
We all agree news gathering and publishing is in for a major upheaval. The day-to-day heavy lifting will continue to be done by paid professionals. The only question (for me) is at what price will we get the presumed objectivity and depth expected from the profession?
The rest is just electronic page formatting…
I do have his statement recorded. And he has subsequently stated the same thing to others.
We’re all learning how to do this (it takes 10,000 hours to become excellent at something) but we are getting it sometimes.
“it takes 10,000 hours to become excellent at something”
When you read Thucydides and Xenophon, there are “10,000” warriors everywhere you turn….
Your a classic, Dave.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell does a good job of summarizing it. Read the research – it’s compelling.
Given variation in such factors as the difficulty of subject matters and other learned disciplines, human attention spans, and relative mental accuity, to name just a few, the notion that there is some fixed number of hours at which people generically become experts in any field of endeavor appears, on the face of it, to be one of those overly convenient reductions of a complex reality. But, if I get the chance, I’ll take a look at the research: I’d be very interested to see how someone made a case for this.
If you’re 5’6″ you’re never going to be in the NBA. If you have an IQ below 120 you’re never going to win a Nobel Prize. But with all that said, there’s the flip side of it – even Mozart didn’t write great music until after 10,000 hours of focused training.
And it seems to hold across skill after skill from music to sports to academics. And it appears to be that not only is it a necessary condition, but that putting in this effort, if you meet the basic qualifications for the skill, does put you at the top.
The number may represent an approximate average (the real average wouldn’t be such a nice, round number), and it might be a tighter average (more sharply peaked, fewer outliers) than intuition would suggest, it might even be a much tighter average than intuition would suggest, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that the “exceptions” and “qualifications” consume the rule. There are simply too many variables in play.
The way in which it might approach what you’re suggesting (and lead to the counterintuitive “tightness” mentioned above) is as “a strange attractor,” in which the time consumed in the acquisition of expertise “tends” toward that number. Again, I would be interested in seeing the research: It will either be fascinatingly insightful or painfully contrived.
especially the part about what doesn’t make it onto the printed page.
I don’t think larger news organizations are all going to disappear, though. Smaller news organizations will continue to develop, as well.
Point well taken. I’m not looking forward to my next scoop, when or if I ever have one. Then again, I’m not in the market for scoops, either, making it less likely for scoops to necessarily come my way, to be passed along to me.
http://www.salon.com/books/exc…