January 02, 2004
Routers News Service (tm)
Remember two of the original concepts surrounding the early Internet (attributable to Al Gore I believe)? The first is that information wants to be free, and the second is that the Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it.
The first concept of course has been misrepresented by many to mean that anything found on the Internet is free of cost to the finder. Wrong. It means that information seeks the seeker and will find a breach to escape those trying to restrict it.
The second concept, related to the first, speaks to the designers' goals for the early Internet (the cold war U.S. military!): that battlefield and wartime communications were so crucial that only a redundant, dumb, self-healing network could serve the military's future communications purposes. Simply put, could military command and control function after a nuclear confrontation? Thank God we have not been through the nuclear field test, but I venture to say that the Internet has exceeded the design goals.
Fast forward to the present and what do we have:
News views Big Media (aka The Irreleventsia) as damage and routes around it. We are witnessing the birth of the Routers News Service (tm).
Information channels are spontaneously rerouting around Big Media! I've already commented about this Instapundit post for other reasons; I want to revisit it because it is such a great snapshot of what is happening in the world of news.
I now get virtually no news from TV anymore. Just when I'm watching CNN Headline News at the health club. And I dare to think that I am as informed, if not not much better informed, than any news junkie who gets his news from traditional media. I never knew news to be this exciting! I have to admit that I know virtually nothing about Michael Jackson's case, or Kobe's, or Scott Peterson's, but then, it still mystifies me that the Irreleventsia believe crap like that is newsworthy.
I'm not certain there is even a prescriptive in the long run for the Irreleventsia to stop at least some audience hemhorraging. A necessary short term step however is to "de-agendize" their reporting, if that is possible. Fox News has been an admirable exception, but they still report too much celebrity crap.
The reason I believe the long term outlook for Big Media is grim is simply that the cost of entry for a blogger is almost nothing. Are there a bunch of absolutely unremarkable blogs out there? Yes! Are there a bunch of loony toons out there writing weirdosquad screeds? Yes, Yes!! But there are many honest bloggers doing an admirable job of reporting the news on world events that the Irreleventsia refuses to even acknowledge as news. Take the anti-terror demonstration in Iraq mentioned in Glenn's post. Virtually unnoticed by the Irreleventsia, yet the turnout exceeded by an order of magnitude or two any pro-regime or anti-American demonstrations that have happened recently there. Furthermore, the strong sense I get is that the anti-terror demonstration was very genuine and not some Baath party-staged event filled with paid participants.
The Irreleventsia has some fundamental redefining and soul-searching to do. The cost of reporting news is plummeting which means that the traditional barrier of market entry cost is eroding. One win may be for the Irreleventsia to coopt bloggers as paid contractors and rid themselves of the brick and mortar foreign bureaus. The danger again is that if they spin their for-hire bloggers, news readers will again go elsewhere.