Brookings Live Blogging, Impact of the New Media. Part I. Washington Post columnist and Brookings fellow E.J. Dionne is introducing the panel: Jodi Allen, senior editor at the Pew Research Center, Ellen Ratner, White House correspondent for Talk Radio News service, Wonkette, Slate's Jack Shafer, and coming shortly, Andrew Sullivan. (Warning, my space key is on the blink)....

Ana Marie Cox discussing, do bloggers get things wrong....'I am a proud parasite, a media vampire.' ...

Jack Shafer ... without a doubt, blogs have attacked the dominant media from below and created a process with their frequent email readers and if they're wise they're hitting Technorati to see what the blogs are saying about them. There's a professor, Jay Rosen, who calls blogging 'distributed journalism,' taking page out of the computer world. Allows thousands of people to analyze data, analyze weaknesses, communicate it, in a short amount of time. Blog world does cast this wider net of fact checking and source verification.

EJ Dionne: Webcaster comment -- they like my tie, and if there are no true liberal bloggers on this panel, then it is also true that there are no true conservative bloggers on this panel. So strike one for balance.

Jodi Allen: Foot in both camps, print journalism and web journalism. I joined Slate before Jack did, am a web addict. All media will converge...This is going to happen pretty soon. The problem is, who's going to pay for it? This is not going to pay for having a (news) bureau in Beijing. And print media is already seeing their advertising base split apart....Important to remember that big newspaper like the WaPost loses money on each edition its delivers to the doorstep, it does that so that it can charge money for the advertising. Nobody has figured this out. The question is, who's going to pay?

Tom Rosenstiel has just put out a very thoughtful paper on this subject -- journalism based on reporting - and reporting is expensive - is being replaced by the journalism of assertion. 'I read this and here's what I think.' Opinions are a lot cheaper than facts. They are a lot easier to come by. That is where I fear journalism is headed.

Blogs, the web certainly have a role. But reporting is expensive. Who is going to pay for it?

Thirty percent of the public use the Internet. Nine percent of Dean activists have visited Wonkette.

(10:30am...Andrew Sullivan has arrived).

E.J. to Ellen Ratner: how polarized is the new media?

Ellen Ratner: the blogosphere has been more the territory of liberals...

EJ: On this question of politics, I looked at Andrew Sullivan today... People tend to denounce more those who they do not see as ideologically consistent. (ain't that the truth).

Andrew Sullivan: I just write what I think... At the National Review or the Nation, you are not going to find any more dissidents. In blogs, the joy of it, is, I can write what I want...

When I was very pro-war, at my fundraiser (for AndrewSullivan.com), I raised $80,000. The following year, when I was critical of the administration, I only raised $20,000. The following fundraiser, $12,000. Readers want you to be ideologically consistent. But I just write what I want.

Wonkette: One reason the bloggers have been such effective critics of the mainstream media, is because they don't socialize with the MSM. But now it is getting to be clique-ier, more hierarchical. Blogging is a lot like punk rock. Once your band gets signed to Geffen...

E.J. Dionne: Bloggers for hire? for political campaigns?

Jack Shafer: Andrew Sullivan took heat a few years ago. He has been critical of the pharmaceutical industry. Then, the pharm industry took out an ad on his site. He ultimately kicked them out. I don't think he should have....

Jodi Allen: It just seems to me, paid sponsorship should be openly declared.

...By and large, people who access the Internet start at the big news organizations, and then follow their self-created news threads...

Andrew Sullivan: I never actually ran the ad...I wrote about the offer. The NYT picked this up. I raised it, huge amounts of protests, and I just didn't think it was worth it. I never actually got the money... I was a coward.

This was four years ago. I wanted to see if blogs could be financially self-sustaining. Now, thanks to BlogAds, it is starting to pay for itself.

Ann Pincus, Center for Public Integrity: I love blogs, but I think a lot of them are inaccurate, libelous... Should there be any standards?

Ana Marie Cox: Hard to get away with baseless accusations, because swarms of people will write back to you. If you keep writing stuff that is inaccurate, people will stop reading you. Do you have a specific example?

Jack Shafer: The NYT publishes about 4,000 corrections every year. Fairly responsible. Can't reduce all blogs to slanderous piles of lies. One person's slander is somebody else's truth.

EJ Dionne: I think that last sentence is not true...

Posted by Laura at March 22, 2005 10:17 AM