Bloggers v. The New York Times
Huh, so long ago (in 2002) David Winer made a bet with the New York Times that 5 years hence blogs would rank higher the the times on google searches for the 5 top news stories of 2007. Well it’s 2007 and someone looked into that.
It turns out that Winer was right (blogs won 3 out of the 5) but they were all buried not on the first page and in fact it turns out (surprising no one) that Wikipedia beat them both. Here’s the thing though - the purpose of Winer’s bet was that he predicted a news environment “changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.” But this bet doesn’t prove any of that and on top of it all is insulting in that oh so annoying way that bloggers’ self-love always is with the implication that anyone who continues to rely on the Times as a news source is an uninformed person. Argh.
The bet positions every blog in the world against the NYTimes (which had a pay wall up until very recently, discouraging, to a certain extent, the amount of linking and thus success in the search engines). Does he expect that informed people will seek out tons of amateurs for any given news topic that might pique their interest and figure out which ones they trust? The NYTimes is the department store of trustworthy writing for many people - they can simply find whatever they want to find on the site and know that it meets some level of quality. That simply isn’t the case with the billions of bloggers around the world - sure there are some areas where they excel but is this environment even close to what Winer predicted? No.
Beyond that, let’s look at the first relevant search result for those top 5 search terms.
For chinese exports the first one is a BusinessWeek piece. Print magazine.
For oil prices it was an AP piece hosted on msnbc. May as well be print journalism.
For iraq war it was wikipedia and then cnn.com (and then thenation.com). Well, wikipedia wins.
For mortgage crisis it’s wikipedia again and then the nytimes (and then usatoday). Wikipedia wins, but again print is right behind.
For virginia tech killings wikipedia takes it home, but cnn’s right there.
I know I link to wikipedia all the time because it’s a more or less unbiased ad free source of information. When I link to them I feel like I’m passing my link juice on to a worthy non-profit - plus it has everything and isn’t editorialized content for the most part. I just want somewhere that explains whatever it is I’ve mentioned. It doesn’t mean that when news breaks that’s the first place I think to look.
Blogs haven’t won. In fact in my opinion there isn’t even a contest and I don’t mean that in a “Felix is the best blogger ever, there’s no contest between #comments and your crappy blog.” (I know, I hear that all the time! On the streets, in the subway, it’s a little embarassing). I mean, blogs and journalism coexist peacefully - there’s space for blogging which does not replace professional journalism.
There are definitely things that are better served by blogging than they were served in the pre-blog days, but now we’ve got that specialization we can settle in to a lovely time where bloggers and journalists each do what they do best. It’s a spectrum with professional journalism on one side and bloggers on the other and the blurry middle is ever growing.
So let’s just put aside our hubris and simply get along. Y’know?
