Web News Vs. Print/TV/Radio Media

Pre-Web Media has spent the last several years critiquing Web media - especially blogs. This is much like the criticism the buggy whip manufacturers must have made against the automobile industry back in the early 20th century. Pointless. They're doomed, regardless.

Web news is just beginning to find its capabilities. There is so much more to come. Just think of the advatages that Web news immediately has over print:

• Minimal incremental cost to add readers/viewers vs. printing and distribution costs
• Instant update and correction
• Ability to include video
• Color photos are free to add - and look really good
• Links to other news, including archived news
• Searchable
• Ability to be linked to by other media
• Automatic global distribution
• No real format limitations - i.e. the page - articles can be as short or long as desired
• No trees killed

These are really huge advantages. As dramatic as the difference between telling sagas around the campfire vs. paperback books. As cars vs feet. As jet planes vs. wagons.

Journalists (don't you think it's interesting that the name is all about journals - sort of "log"-ish, as in "Web log") have barely begun to exploit the possibilities of the Web, though. Since the Web can be programmed to do fairly fancy things, the news could "do" things: keep track of things for you, calculate stuff. The news could make news automatically with polls or data gathering. It already automatically updates data for things like the stock market and elections and the weather. There will be more of this to come. And other things I can't imagine yet.

And what about the big criticism that the traditional journalists have made about the reliability of the information in the blogs? In my experience, the Web is more reliable than print. In the last year, the Web has clearly demonstrated that it is more efficient at uncovering incorrect quotes, data, or plagarism than print media. The wikipedia model has become the norm. Good Web information is self-correcting. Readers of the information can report errors and cause them to be corrected quickly. Blogs have been correcting print media this year. This criticism is working against them now.

Another big difference is competition. The Web is brutally Darwinian - or blessedly open - depending on your point of view. Anyone can be a reporter on the Web. If you are good enough. If you write well and investigate effectively on a topic of interest to a sufficient number of people, you can be a Web journalist. You can just start your own blog for free on Blogger. If you are a left-wing political commentator, you can just write a Diary at Daily Kos. Daily Kos has a blog model that is unsurpassed for functionality. It's so ingenious that it deserves several posts of its own - later.