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Thanks to Ian Betteridge for leading me to this.

So Dave Winer has proclaimed his answer to the "problems" of journalism and newspapers. I agree with Ian that he raises some points, and that he doesn't get it for the most part. Now understand that like everyone, from me to you, to Winer to everyone has an agenda. Winer is the creator of RSS, (and if he technically isn't, he's close enough.), and one of the major pushers of the "river" concept as it applies to RSS. (He's not the creator of the river concept, I think LiveJournal's friends pages, among others beat him to that. But you'll never hear him talk about LJ, nor most other "A-List" bloggers. LJ is put into the same arena as MySpace, which is a shame, since there's a lot of neat stuff on LJ. But yeah, LJ beat him to the river.)

So it is well worth Winer's time to make RSS the sole, or main way you get information on the Internets.

Having an agenda is not a bad thing. It's not a good thing. It just is. Understanding that agenda however, provides context to someone's views.

One of his ideas is this:

In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers. The reporters have been acting as middlemen, connecting sources with readers, who in many cases are sources themselves. As with all middlemen, something is lost in translation, an inefficiency is added. So what we're doing now, in journalism, as with all other intermediated professions, is decentralizing. So it pays to make an investment now and teach the educated people of the future the basic principles of journalism.

Dave, as a journalist, you're a great programmer. He's got no idea of the amount of work involved in journalism. Mind-numbingly tedious work. Fact-checking. Verifying sources. Chasing down sources to begin with. On and on. It's astoundingly hard work to do well, and it's why you rarely see it done well. Punditry is easier and more fun, hence the ten Coulters and Frankens for every Woodward and Bernstein. Dave is ignoring that work. Dave is ignoring the dangers involved in journalism. See, when you're doing stories about parts of the world that don't have the levels of internet participation we do, you have to do this thing called "traveling". To fun places. Iraq. The Sudan. Israel. Zimbabwe.

You know. Garden spots of peace and human rights, where journalists are treated like veritable GODS.

Okay, I was a LITTLE sarcastic on that last bit.

But the truth is, real journalism is real work, and Dave is ignoring that real bad.

Second, embrace the best bloggers. How? Easy -- every time someone is quoted in your publication, offer them a blog hosted on your domain. This has a couple of advantages: 1. It gives the reporters the ultimate say on who gets to share some of your authority, who gets a chance to be the next amateur star. 2. It gives the reporters an incentive to only use sources that are qualified, it would improve the quality of your reporting. It also has a third benefit, as you expand the number of people writing under your banner, you also expand the reach of your publication, into school boards, local government, sports teams and businesses. It's also important because it's how you decentralize, aligning your interests with the "grain" of the web, as opposed to the current positioning, against it.

For another, he's painting the "best bloggers" with a better rep for research than they have earned. Face it, the "blogosphere" is not about making sure you've done the research before posting. It's about posting first. Le Scoble, who is the A-List's A-Lister has said numerous times that fact-checking is of far less importance than getting his post up first. He relies on his readership to do it for him. He's not the only one. Which leads us to another problem.

When you're talking about the legwork of "real" journalism, bloggers are lazy. Real lazy. So are the news media, but they tend to be somewhat better than the "blogosphere".

His idea that the sources are the best source of information is a nice one, but it would require far more integrity than humans, as a rule, have. Face it, if we take his idea to the limit, then there's no reason to "report" on what the President or Congress say. Just read the public records on it, right? Somehow, I don't see Dave, bless his liberal heart, (No, that's not an insult, but a statement of reality), being willing to let Bush be the authoritative voice on the Iraq war. By the same token, I don't see the Coulters and Malkins of the world content to allow Hilary Clinton to be the sole authoritative voice on anything.

People lie. Constantly. That's one thing that journalism is there to do...catch them. Face it, the press tripped up Clinton and his dissembling about workplace fellatio as much, if not more than Ken Starr ever did, and for a damned site cheaper too.

So no Dave, that's not a great idea, especially when "misquoting" tends to be used to mean "disagreeing with me".

Dave goes on:

Now your reporters just have to read the blogs to find the new trends, the quotes for their articles. They will learn a lot and perhaps even start having fun, instead of (as Markoff puts it in the O'Reilly piece) feeling like they're at a wake. That's depression, and you can feel it in the articles they write, and you can't possibly dig out of a hole when you're depressed. You need to find a way to tap into the excitement of the Internet, to bring it into your publication. In the tech business they call this "embrace and extend."

Secondly, what if the blogs that are now the magic sources for all reporters are full of shit? Made up of deliberate lies? Now you are just promulgating crap. No fact - checking, no nothing, just parrot what another blog said. That's not just a bad idea, it's incredibly stupid as stated. I have to go with the assumption that Dave just had a moment of "I know what I meant, I just didn't type it well" there. Because while he can be incredibly annoying and overbearing, Dave's not stupid. At least not like that. It's funny how he's advocating an echo chamber as the cure for what he views journalism as, which is...well...an echo chamber. But I guess Dave's echo chamber is somehow better than everyone else's.

Ian comes back with a neat rejoinder comparing journalists to carpenters. I don't totally agree, but I mostly agree. Let's put it this way, Ian is closer to what I think is the truth. The problem with newspapers isn't with the journalists, reporters, and editors, it's with the owners and the publishers. Most people I know actually writing news have a solid grip on the realities of the modern media. It's the people writing the checks that don't, and contrary to what everyone thinks, money is still a requirement, even in this brave new world.

Of course, never one to not have the last word, Winer replies to Ian:

Ian Betteridge thinks my view of journalism is "frankly, nonsense," comparing journalism to carpentry. "This is as silly as saying that carpenters are middlemen for wood merchants," he says.

Interesting point, but in carpentry the raw materials are dead things -- wood, nails, screws. In journalism the raw material are sources, living people, who can, if they want go direct, if they get tired of being misquoted, or if no reporter ever asks what they think, or if when asked, they don't understand. That's the sense in which reporters are intermediaries.

I suggest a visit inside the sausage factory. Ask a reporter what dumbing down means, and how they feel about the headlines that have appeared over their writing.

But the Winerian view of journalism as some complicated echo chamber? Nah, that's a far better description of the "blogosphere".

Technorati Tags: Dave Winer, Ian Betteridge, Journalism, Robert Scoble

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