Can bloggers fill in the gaps of the dieing newspaper?
Ken Doctor, on his blog Content Bridges, makes a a very insightful post lamenting the decline of newspapers. He believes that investigative journalism will take a back seat when newspaper publisher Knight Ridder is sold.
Done well in five parts, “Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice,” began Sunday and unfolds through today. Fredric Tulsky, the project’s lead reporter, lays out a three-year Mercury News investigation into the fabric of the Santa Clara County criminal justice system…. Guess where that $400,000 is in the how-to-cut-costs presentations to bidders by Knight Ridder and its banker representatives. Guess where that $400,000 is on the spreadsheets of most of the private equity bidders.
While this may be true for newspapers, I believe bloggers will fill in the gaps. Yet there is one problem — bloggers don’t yet have the same credibility that newspapers have. Or do they?
Andrew: Thanks for kind words. Next week, the Knight Ridder board is formally accepting bids. Since I wrote the above item, I’ve had numerous conversations about the reporting/blogger world.
In essence, here’s an issue we all deal with, I believe: In-depth reporting requires much time, and thus, funding. That’s particularly true of investigative reporting, but also of much local reporting, covering government beats, often boring work, but work that often reminds us all of the watchdog function of the press in our struggling democracy.
So, brand is an interesting issue — and consumer sorting of brand (by blog aggregator, by government agencies???) — will be an issue.
The deeper one though is funding, paying people to go out every day to find out information, only some of which is worth writing about.
The blog overlap is journalism is easiest to see in opinion, whether traditional metro column-like or in the arts or in sports. And that’s a great deal of what’s in a newspaper.
But I’m worried about who is going to pay for the basic reporting that’s an essential building block of what we know, what facts from which we start our dialogues.
Ken
Comment by Ken Doctor — March 4, 2006 @ 11:56 pm