ZDNet’s Marc Cooper thought he’d lambasted problems with journalistic integrity on the web, but ended up unintentionally providing a prime example of it himself in his recent story, Web news: the new frontier?.
Cooper simply recycles the old tired complaints against web journalism, especially the amateur kind. “…let me suggest,” he writes, “that throwing a mass of unfiltered, unchecked data and opinion onto the Internet doesn’t make for the best “user experience.” As example #1 of that problem he talks about an unnamed story by an unnamed “self-described Web journalist” who wrote an account of Microsoft’s recent announcement of that company’s .NET Internet strategy. According to Cooper, the unnamed author gets it all wrong and engages in “flights of fancy, creative writing or plain sloppiness.”
Cooper can’t bring himself to name the web journalist, but it is in fact Userland’s David Winer and the account of the .NET announcement appeared on Scripting.Com, which acts as sort of a sounding board for Winer’s opinions and ideas about the Internet. Cooper’s column and Winer’s web log offer interesting contrasts — namely Winer’s opinionated, occasionally annoying web log has far more integrity than Cooper’s biting comments. Why?
I find I rarely agree with Winer and both his presentation and style evokes very negative reactions from some people (I’ve offhandedly mentioned his name or his company in e-mails only to have my correspondent savage him — Winer definitely provokes strong feelings either way). But Winer doesn’t bill Scripting.Com as the last word on the Internet. In fact while he’s disparaging something or someone he doesn’t like, he always includes references and links to what he was talking about. You won’t see Winer post, “ZDNet posted a lousy article about .NET” and leave it at that. He’ll post links to the articles he disagrees with and usually to a lot of other background information on the topic. This is how the web is supposed to work — instant peer review. If I read something Winer writes I can visit the article or press release or product announcement he’s point to, and if I think he’s crazy I can mention that on the discussion area of Scripting.Com.
Not so with Cooper. If Winer hadn’t posted a message about the ZDNet article on Scripting.Com I never would have known who Cooper was referring, much less be able to examine the article that upset Cooper to see if it was indeed as factualy incorrect as Cooper claimed. This is the worst sort of traditional media paradigm; the journalist as high priest and gate keeper always abstracting and hiding all of the messy primary materials from readers and instead only feeding them stories that have already been appropriately processed and massaged. News as Cheeze Whiz.
It would come as a complete shock to someone like Cooper, for example, that some of us actually glean a lot more information by comparing three or four rough first hand accounts of events by non-journalists than we do by reading the official journalistic version of an event. This is especially true in the computer industry where often times computer reporters seem to be absolutely clueless about end users. One of the reasons, for example, that Winer’s Scripting.Com is popular because whether or not you agree with him, Winer has a handle on what people want from the Internet as well as the Internet’s still unrealized potential for connecting people. Winer’s vision of the Internet is creating tools to enable and enhance conversations between people, whereas Cooper’s entire view of journalism is based on the view that such conversations are pretty much worthless tripe lacking integrity, and requiring journalistic gatekeepers at every corner (in fact, ZDNet’s discussion system seems engineered precisely to discourage significant user feedback and discussion).
Different people will have different ideas about the value of these conflict visions, but for me I’d rather be creating content and reading content by other individuals flung throughout the world, rathe rather be simply a daily consumer of whatever ZDNet or CNet or the other big gatekeepers tell me is important.