Tuesday, March 2, 2004

A Newspaper Editor Blogs The editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer is entering his third month as an almost-daily  weblogger, and says he's coming to appreciate "that other world." In an interview at  Poynter.org, Doug Clifton says his blog has clear differences from his regular newspaper column: "The blog encourages spontaneity. It's more conversations. And readers respond more quickly." Besides Clifton, the paper has blogs by a technology writer,  a metro columnist and a reporter on assignment in Iraq. The paper's rules are that the blogs still must be edited, and must not "diminish their work for the ink-on-paper Plain Dealer." Gatekeepers No More Blogging journalists and journalistic bloggers Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen were participants in the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In in San Diego last month, and now the rest of us can read a detailed transcript or listen to an online audio version. Rosen, for example, sees the rise of weblogs and related interaction as a return to "the original promise of the public, which is a collection of people who are not only readers, but also speakers, people who have opinions that not only count, but they can themselves voice.  People who have not only ideas to share, but a role in politics." The "gatekeepers" in decline include not only journalists, but political pollsters and consultants accustomed to filtering information for a passive audience.  A Jarvis comment: "The first obligation is to go read those blogs and see what the people are saying and what they care about, which may be very different from what we say they care about on our front pages or in our stump speeches, and so the first and most important thing is to listen to the people." A Gillmor comment: "I do not disdain the mass media, which compensates me nicely, and lets me do these things and talk about these things, and I believe in mass media, in its role in particular in doing big investigations that are going to be hard to do if that disappears, and I am afraid of that world where there is no mass media. I want there to be all of this, not just some of it." The same conference included David Weinberger, senior Internet adviser to the Howard Dean campaign and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.  12:30:32 AM

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