Blogosphere the Emerging Media Ecosystem - How Weblogs and Journalists Work Together to Report, Filter and Break the News

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Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Blogosphere: the emerging Media EcosystemHow Weblogs and Journalists work together to Report, Filter and Break the News

by John Hiler

Trying to understand the complex relationship between bloggers and journalists has become my own personal Waterloo.

I've taken a few stabs at it already, and learned a lot along the way. Lesson One: Blogs can do a tremendous job breaking news, and journalists are

wise to start their own to tap that power. Lesson Two: Some rare bloggers become amateur journalists, a status which brings with it its own unique

ethical challenges. Lesson Three: Most bloggers are more like Columnists than capitalJ Journalists.

Still no matter what I did, the weblog/journalism relationship seemed to defy reduction. No metaphor seemed complex enough to capture the

subtleties of their interactions. I greatly enjoyed one set of metaphors from fellow metablogger Doctor Weevil:

blogger : journalist :: tick : sheep

bloggers : journalists :: dung beetles : elephants

But surely bloggers are more than just ticks and dung beetles feeding off of their journalist hosts! True, the majority of links in weblogs are to articles

written by journalists... but I've seen too many articles by journalists pulled straight from weblogs, Blogdex, and Metafilter to buy fully into the

Bloggers/Parasite metaphor.

SEARCHING FOR A METAPHOR

Were Bloggers parasites feasting off their Journalist hosts? Or were Bloggers creating a new form of grassroots journalism, one that threatened the

extinction of Journalism as we know it?

Then one day it hit me: parasites & hosts, grassroots & extinction... they were all biological metaphors.

All of a sudden, it all made sense! The truth is, Bloggers and Journalists are both parasitic organisms. In biology, we have a term for relationship

that seems mutually parasitic: symbiosis, when both organisms benefit from working together. In many ways, bloggers and journalists are in a

mutually symbiotic relationship, working together to report, filter and break the news.

INTRODUCING THE BLOGOSPHERE

Bloggers and Journalists form a blogging biosphere that has become an ecosystem in its own right, an ecosystem that one savvy blogger has dubbed

the Blogosphere. The word was meant as a clever pun combining "Blog" with "logos", a Greek word meaning logic and reason. And while bloggers do

often use logic in dissecting arguments, I love the word Blogosphere because it happens to capture another truth: the Blogosphere is a biosphere of its

own, a Media Ecosystem that lives and breathes just like any other biological system.

Like any ecosystem, the Blogosphere demonstrates all the classic ecological patterns: predators and prey, evolution and emergence, natural selection

and adaptation. I've often thought that anthropologists were best equipped to deconstruct the emerging blogging subculture, but now I'm convinced I

got it wrong: the greater mysteries of the Blogosphere will be unlocked instead by evolutionary biologists.

BIRTH OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

Something about the Blogosphere gives it the feel of a living breathing ecosystem.

Like any ecosystem, the Blogosphere has a life of its own, one that's more than the sum of its weblogs. You can't understand a jungle by studying a

single jaguar, and in the same way you can't understand the Blogosphere by studying a single weblog. Surfing the Blogosphere you can see

evolutionary forces play out in real time, as weblogs vie for niche status, establish communities of likeminded sites, and jostle for links to their site.

But in order to understand the new Media Ecosystem, first we have to make sense of the Old Media Ecosystem. Let's start by following a typical news

story across its natural life cycle.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF A NEWS STORY

I witnessed firsthand the life cycle of a news story a few months ago, when the Google/Scientology story broke this past March. The Church of

Scientology filed a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint against Google, forcing the search engine to pull the content of a website

criticizing the Church. There was an instant uproar on the web, as critics charged Google with censorship (a situation that Google handled brilliantly

a few weeks later).

I found out about the DMCA complaint late one night, around two in the morning. I puzzled over whether or not to write about the story. I usually

don't cover breaking news I write Features about things I find interesting (usually involving weblogs, naturally). Unlike breaking news, my Features

don't have to be timely. An article like this one doesn't have to be published right away, a fact which I often use to procrastinate publishing until

"next week".

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But this story was breaking news, so I couldn't just sleep on it. I decided to stay up all night to write an article about the Google story, doing the sort

of analysis that I enjoy doing for my Feature articles. I made sure to include a detailed history of the Scientologist's aggressive use of

copyright/trademark law when suing critics. I also talked with half a dozen sources, ranging from legal experts to former Scientologists. When I

finally published the fourthousand word article, it was sometime around three or four in the afternoon.

Meanwhile, Declan McCullagh over at Wired News scooped everyone with the story, hammering out a great 544 word story by 11:55 am that

morning.

BREAKING NEWS VERSUS ANALYSIS

Declan knew something that a rookie reporter like me didn't get: there's a big difference between Breaking News and Analysis. Most news stories

start off as Breaking News: a story that no one else knows about. Ever since Woodward and Bernstein broke Watergate in the early 70s, every

reporter has dreamed of breaking a Big Story (there were big stories before Woodward and Bernstein, but how many of them were made into a

movie?).

After the Breaking News comes out, then it's time for the Analysis: Why did this happen? How could it have happened? What does it all mean?

Sometimes the line between Breaking News and Analysis can get a little blurry. Once a story breaks, articles tend to combine a healthy mix of the

two: an article will Analyze the story, also making sure to include a snippet or two of Breaking News with the latest developments in the story.

Once the developments in the story dry up, the story starts to "die". At this point, the story has about another week or two of life on the "Op/Ed"

pages (the OpEd Columns, Editorials, and Letters to the Editor). Then, no more beating a dead horse the news story is too old even for the Op/Ed

pages.

BACK TO THE FOOD CHAIN

Once I had a handle on the life cycle of a News Story (Breaking News > Analysis > OpEd), the Media Food Chain started to make more sense. You

can "follow the news" as it makes it way through the Media Food Chain.

I'll focus on print journalism because that's what I'm most familiar with. Print Journalists break lots of news stories. That journalist might be a Wall

Street Journal reporter, digging into Enron's balance sheet and ferreting out corporate corruptions. Or it might be one of the 3700 employees of the

Associated Press, a wire service that writes over 20 million words a day for any of the 8500 subscribing newspapers, magazines, and radio shows.

Or maybe the journalist works for the local paper, reporting on high school sports.

Whoever breaks the story, once the news is out there the Media Food Chain swings into action. If the story is exciting, other print media outlets will

pick it up and run with it. You can almost always spot when this happens, because the story will often credit the source ("as first reported by the

Sacramento Bee").

TV reporters are usually the carnivores in this media Food Chain, subsisting on a healthy diet of newspaper stories. Some TV Reporters do original

reporting (60 Minutes and CNN come to mind), but I'm told that most local TV reporters start every day by reading the headlines in the paper and

seeing which stories are hot enough to run in the Evening News. A print journalist I spoke with told me that reporters will sometimes interview her off

camera to get the facts of a story... and then "report" those facts on the air.

That's not so surprising. The media ecosystem can only support so many newspapers and TV stations, and judging from the salaries of my journalist

friends it's not the most lucrative profession. As a result, there are a limited number of participants in the Traditional Media Food Chain, with only so

many people available to do the original reporting and fact checking the whole systems needs to work.

Because of these limited resources, many have charged Traditional Media with a consistent bias that fails to reflect the diversity of opinions and

ideas. About half the email I get on this subject claims that bias is a Liberal one, while the other half claims it's a decidedly Conservative one. Either

way, there is a strong sense from some readers that Media organizations have a mixed record when it comes to accurately and fairly reporting the

News.

WEBLOGS AS GRASSROOTS REPORTING

Many people are looking to weblogs to help address this media bias.

By adding to the diversity of original content, weblogs have added a whole new layer to the Media Food chain. That puts weblogs at the base of the

food chain, generating the sort of grassroots journalism that the new Media Ecosystem has grown increasingly dependent upon.

Because bloggers are closer to a story, they'll often pick up the sort of things that traditional Journalists miss. This is expecially true for Eyewitness

blogs: blogs written by someone involved in a story. And few stories in recent history have involved more people than the September 11th attacks on

the World Trade Center.

Eyewitness Blogs

911 was really the watershed event for this sort of grassroots reporting. I've met a good number of New York bloggers, and many of them have told

me the same thing: "I had to start blogging after 911, just so my friends and family knew I was ok. Also, for the first time I felt like I had

something to say something worth blogging."

There are so many post 911 weblogs that they've gotten their own name: Warblogs. Eight months after September 11th, Warblogs mostly dissect

and analyze the news from the War on Terrorism. But immediately after 911, Warblogs provided a powerful form of personal journalism that

captivated thousands of readers.

One such warblog was BuzzMachine.com by Jeff Jarvis. I found Jeff's personal story about 911 far more engaging than watching the planes crash



into the towers on CNN over and over. Check out this excerpt from his story and you'll see what I mean:

There was no light. I could see nothing, only black. I slammed into a building, and a tree, and another building.

I heard people and asked where we were. No one answered. I kept going and finally saw light at Chase Plaza II, where the building managers

opened the doors, letting us refugees and much smoke inside.

People retched up the black soot of the tower. They splashed water from any sink they could find to try to clean off the inchthick layer of

destruction. They took showers in bottled Poland Spring water, even Snapple from a lobby deli that volunteered to be looted by us.

I found personal stories like Jeff's more powerful than a lot of the Pulitzer prizewinning New York Times and WSJ coverage. Jeff was an eyewitness,

someone who was literally on the scene covered in soot and rubble. He conveyed on a gut level the sort of fear and panic that a lot of the traditional

media coverage seemed to miss.

This sort of eyewitness reporting comes in large part from people's desire to share their stories and publish the truth. These are key features in blog

based Grassroots Reporting, and a big reason that weblogs have exploded in popularity since September 11th.

Since then, grassroots reporting has continued to be a key strength of blogs. An Eyewitness blog can give readers an insiders account, like Bryan

Mason's popular (and personal) coverage of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics where he worked as an logistics coordinator.

Eyewitness blogs can also provide firsthand coverage of politics, as evidenced by Adam Curry's account of the Dutch response to politician Pim

Fortuyn's assassination. According to Adam's account, mass media got the story all wrong:

As the world's media started to report on the tragedy came more disbelief: Pim Fortuyn was being described by the world press as a "Hard

Right winger", "The Dutch LePen", "antimuslim", "Racist". ...

Without fail all three major networks (ABC,NBC,CBS) labeled Pim Fortuyn as ultra right and/or racist. With phrases such as "running on an

anti muslim platform" or "the Dutch Le Pen" .

Adam described a completely different man than the one I had read about:

It was stunning to read the New York Fucking Times report "Fortuyn's rise mirrored a rightwing resurgence in several European countries,

lately highlighted by the antiimmigrant Jean Marie Le Pen's surprise showing in the first round of French presidential elections."

Was the Times talking about the same Pim that the dutch endeared as he would appear on every talk show, always dressed to the nice with

his sharp wit at hand. Was this the same Pim the country had enjoyed for 10 years as a writer of many political books and weekly columns

always aimed squarely at exposing the underbelly of dutch politics, which is mostly played out behind closed doors in the Hague. All dutch

know it, but Pim wasn't afraid to say it.

Pim Fortuyn never called for a "Ban on immigration" or "Removal of Muslims". ... What Pim did do, was start the public debate about

immigration and standard of living in the Netherlands, which is the second most densely populated country in the world.

Reading stories like this really shakes my faith in traditional media. Who do I trust: the New York Times, or Adam Curry?

That's a tough question. As personal and powerful as eyewitness blogs can be, they often lack the credibility of a traditional news outlet. I trust

Adam from having read his blog for so long now, especially when it comes to those subjects I know he's an expert on: music, radio, and technology.

But even I'm not sure how much to trust his account of the Pim Fortuyn assasination.

Then again, maybe that's the point of grassroots reporting: at least now I have access to another perspective. That perspective has opened me up to

the idea that perhaps the traditional mass media coverage got the facts of the story completely wrong. In a world where over half the media

outlets are controlled by six corporations, that sort of diversity of perspective is becoming increasingly important.

Thematic Blogs

That diversity of perspective is also reflected in a growing number of Thematic Blogs.

Thematic Blogs usually involve one person blogging about their area of expertise or passion. These bloggers often have widely accepted credentials,

like an advanced degree from a top university, or a top jobs at a respected company. But most important, they write wonderfully focused thoughts

regularly often daily about a topic that they are obsessed with.

These days, it's not hard to find a lot of great thematic blogs . One good example is Alan Reiter's Wireless Data weblog, providing original

content and links on wireless data (there's even a section on wireless blogging!) Alan is different than your usual ink stained journalist. For

starters, he's the CEO of his own wireless consulting firm.

If Alan were a traditional journalist, he'd be fired for having a conflict of interest. Fortunately he's a blogger, so we can all benefit from his industry

experience by reading his blog.

Thematic blogs are another form of grassroots reporting, albeit one that fits more comfortably into the traditional definition of journalism. It's easy to

think of thematic bloggers as miniature versions of journalists, except with less pay and more of an agenda. As a result, thematic blogs are generally



accepted and respected by both readers and journalists alike. As they grow in number, they'll increasingly provide a valuable middle ground between

professional and amateur journalism.

One blogger acting alone is easy to dismiss what's so revolutionary about that? But it's much harder to dismiss a whole gaggle of bloggers working

together to commit an act of journalism.

COLLABORATIVE MEDIA

That sort of group journalism is exactly what Rusty Foster enables with his blogbased website, Kuro5hin.org. Rusty's even coined a name for this

phenomena: Collaborative Media.

At first, Collaborative Media seems like another twist on Thematic Blogs. In both cases, we have one person writing an article about their area of

expertise. But Kuro5hin takes it a step further: the site is powered by a software system called Scoop which lets other people contribute to the story.

Scoop has three powerful features which let people collaborate on a story on Kuro5hin:

Anyone can submit an article

"[Anyone can] submit stories about interesting things that you hear about, things you think of, or other things which strike your fancy.

This site has an open submission queue."

Anyone can vote on whether or not that article passes muster

"Any user can see and vote on all submitted stories. If you want to see something posted, you can make it happen by participating in the

moderation of the stories in the submission queue.."

"Garbage will not be tolerated. Others can and will rate your posts into oblivion."

Anyone can post comments about a story, providing feedback and building on the story

"[Anyone can] post comments about the stories that you see here. ... Commenting is a very good thing, and really helps articles develop

into the discussions we like to see here."

This voting system tends to be better at Analysis than Breaking News. "The voting model doesn't pick up on up to the minute Breaking News," Rusty

told me in a phone interview. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "What tends to happen is that after a lag of a day or two, you get a more

thoughtful story."

Rusty highlighted a few examples last year in an essay:

[S]ince the 9/11 attacks, we've had some of the best articles I've seen on the site, ever, and in a couple cases, much better articles on

immediately relevant news stories than I saw in any other publication. Take the Florida Anthrax scare: Bacillus Anthracis, aka Anthrax, by

an NYU medical student, describes the facts of the recent anthrax scare, discusses the biological and medical realities of anthrax, and delves

into the history of weaponized anthrax, concluding with an assessment of how likely anthrax is to be used as a weapon, and what kind of

effectiveness it would have. This was posted on October 9th, and I have yet to see any traditional news source cover the topic with that kind

of coherence, accuracy, or balance.

How about the big airline safety scare? Two articles by a US airline captain discuss the proposed measures to secure airliners, describing in

detail what might work and what definitely won't. The "Don't Crash" Button and The Solid Steel Cockpit Door have more solid knowledge,

experience, and facts per paragraph than any major media treatment of the "we must secure our planes" hysteria.

There are other blogstyle sites out there that enable Collaborative Media, but Kuro5hin is unique in its emphasis on original content. As a result,

Kuro5hin readers don't have to wait for Journalists to publish a story they can link to... and so Kuro5hin's grassroots reporting can end up scooping the

mainstream press.

Rusty cited a story on BMW's new iDrive car interface, a new digital interface that replaces a lot of the switches and buttons in the new BMW

Series 7 automobiles. "Our story came out over five weeks ago, well before newspapers started to run the story," Rusty told me.

As much as I enjoy Kuro5hin's strong analysis, my heart lies with its fascinating Feature articles. Matt Nobes, a Kuro5hin contributor, has written a

two part series on Particle Physics that's highly instructive. Another contributor wrote a profane guide to the world of tobacco chew where I

learned all about the culture and taxonomy of chew. And Trent Seigfriend took the time to write about his conversion to the Uberman Sleep

Schedule of six "thirty minute naps spread throughout the day".

In each case, a well written article was followed up by thoughtful comments from people with direct experience in the field. Kuro5hin has proven that

with the right software, the Collaborative Media model can be a powerful tool for journalism.

WEBLOGS WORKING TOGETHER: COLLABORATIVE MEDIA

Most Weblogs don't have nearly the amount of technology that's baked into Kuro5hin's software. As a result, individual bloggers don't have the

seamless experience of Kuro5hin contributors. "There's a lot more friction with Weblogs than Kuro5hin," Rusty explained. "Sometimes they link to

each other's coverage of the same story, and sometimes they don't. That can make it harder to follow the conversation."

But weblogs are closing the gap. Raw numbers don't hurt: by most estimates, there are millions of weblogs and journals, with tens of thousands of

active blogs available to participate in Collaborative Media. Even with the friction of a decentralized system, weblogs have increasing amounts of raw



brainpower to hash out the issues behind a news story.

In addition, weblog indicies like Blogdex and Daypop have sprung up that let you know who else is linking to a given news story. That Adam Curry

coverage of the Dutch response to Pim Fortunyn's assassination I mentioned earlier? Blogdex shows that 66 separate sites linked to the article,

many of them providing commentary and making additional points about the event. Blog Indicies and crosslinking between sites are creating the

same sort of community and collaboration that made Kuro5hin so effective.

Sites like Kuro5hin have proven that a centralized community website can do the sort of Grassroots Reporting that is at the heart of Collaborative

Media. Now decentralized individual weblogs are also taking part in that same Collaborative Media experience, providing a decentralized solution to

Grassroots reporting.

JOURNALISTS AS PREDATOR: USING WEBLOGS FOR STORY IDEAS

All this Collaborative Media means that weblogs are breaking more and more stories and features.

Food always attracts predators, and these juicy stories are no different. The predators in this piece of the New Media Food chain are Journalists, who

are increasingly using weblogs as sources for story ideas:

The New Media Food Chain

Using Blogs for Story Ideas

BLOGGING JOURNALISTS

Sometimes the journalists are even bloggers themselves. One such hybrid blogger/journo is Glenn Reynolds, better known to many as Instapundit.

Glenn recently wrote a column about recent verbal attacks at a "Peace in the Middle East" rally at San Francisco State University. According to

one eyewitness account, Palestinian "counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews [in the rally] to 'Get out or we will kill you'

and 'Hitler did not finish the job.'"

How did Glenn know about this story? It broke on a weblog of well known blogger Meryl Yourish. Meryl received an email describing the rally

from Laurie Zoloth, the director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University. After confirming with Laurie that the email was

authentic, Meryl published the email to her blog. Other bloggers picked up on the story, linking to each other as new developments in the story

broke (Mac Frazier has a good roundup of the blog coverage). Some bloggers even did independent reporting. Meryl confirmed many facts before

she posted them on her blog, and Scott ArmelFunkhouser tracked down some of the "blood libel" posters which were being posted on the SFSU

campus.

As one of the most active members of the Blogosphere, it's only natural that Glenn reads Meryl's site. Even if he didn't he probably would have

heard about this story in one of the roughly 300 emails he gets a day. This puts Glenn at the center of the sort of Collaborative Media ecosystem that

breaks stories like this one.

Glenn is one of an increasing number of bloggers with a soapbox in the mainstream press. In fact, Glenn has two columns: a weekly column in

Tech Central Station, and a biweekly column at Fox News. Like many of the more prominent members of the Blogosphere, Glenn came into

blogging with a healthy background in punditry. Before he blogged his first post, he'd already been published in the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and

Washington Post... not to mention having been on the MacNeilLehrer NewsHour, Larry King Live, and the O'Reilly Factor.

But it's Glenn's dual status as a blogger/journalist that gives him the power to bring stories from the Blogosphere into the Mainstream Press. His Fox

News story wasn't the only coverage of the SFSU controversy. As Meryl and others broke the story, other mainstream outlets followed the story

across the Breaking News > Analysis > OpEd continuum:

May 14th

San Francisco Chronicle condemns the incident in an editorial

Adrienne Sanders of The San Francisco Examiner writes an article about what happened.

John Podhoretz of the New York Post writes a scathing column on antiSemitism highlighting the SFSU incident

May 15th

Alisa Solomon of The Village Voice writes a column condemning the events



May 16th

Melissa Radler of The Jerusalem Post reports on a new development: "The university president is so fedup with the hatefilled

atmosphere on the Bay Area campus that he has asked the local district attorney's office to help bring proPalestinian hate

mongers to justice."

The Washington Times publishes an editorial condemning the incident

May 17th

Aleza Goldsmith of the SFbased Jewish Bulletin writes a comprehensive article covering the story from the incident to the

President's response

As Glenn explained, "Sometimes a story will streak across the Blogosphere like a praerie fire. Weblogs can be the dry grass, helping to spread the

story." But interestingly, some stories don't make the leap from weblogs to mass media articles precisely because they've been so widely blogged.

As he put it, "Journalists will sometimes drop a story idea because they've already been so well covered in weblogs."

NONBLOGGING JOURNALISTS

Not all journalists that plug into the Blogosphere have their own blogs.

Farhad Manjoo of Wired News doesn't have a blog, but he follows them very closely. As he explained in a phone interview, "If bloggers are talking

about it, it almost always makes for an interesting story idea."

Once such idea that Farhad picked up was from a recent post by Rob McNairHuff for MacNet Journal:

Apple pulls a Microsoft by bundling iChat

Since the introduction of OS X, Apple has been pulling a Microsoft bundling all kinds of programs with the operating system. iChat is the

latest announced incursion into another software category, following closely on the heels of Mail, iTunes, and iPhoto.

Rob had come up with an interesting angle on a new Apple product launch, comparing Steve Jobs to Bill Gates. You may have seen Farhad's

subsequent Wired article on the same subject: Apple 'Bundle' Creates a Rumble. As Farhad admitted when we spoke, this was no

coincidence: "Rob's blog post combined with the comments building on his point was the inspiration for the article."

Farhad did more than just poach Rob's story idea. He built on Rob's ideas with solid reporting, interviewing an Apple spokesperson, getting quotes

from independent developers, and emailing Rob for clarification on a few points. Also importantly, Farhad wouldn't have written the story at all if he

hadn't covered the Apple developers conference for Wired a few days before.

This is Journalism and Weblogs working together at its best. Bloggers break the news and hash it out... and a Journalist adds a layer of reporting on

it, bringing that news beyond the Blogosphere.

Weblogs are an important source of news for Farhad and Wired. In fact, Farhad shares a sentiment that resonates with my own experiences:

"It's much harder to break news with weblogs around." Interestingly, that's nothing new for the Wired staff. "Slashdot breaks news before Wired all

the time," he admitted. "When that happens, we only run a story if we can find another angle or do additional reporting, like interviewing the original

source. Or if the story is relevant to a nontechnical audience beyond Slashdot, we may pick up the story anyway."

More and more, journalists like Farhad are turning to weblogs to find out what's hot or not on the web.

SLASHDOT AND BLOGDEX: THE CLIFF NOTES OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

Some journalists aren't taking the time to read the original blogs: they just skim Slashdot and Blogdex, looking for the most popular links so they can

write a quick article about the latest hot web trend. These sites are emerging as the Cliff Notes of the Blogosphere:

Blog Indices = Blogdex and Daypop

Community Blogs = Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Metafilter, F'dCompany.com, Plastic

These sites are frighteningly efficient at breaking news. As a friend put it to me, "I didn't realize how much the New York Times was yesterday's

news until I started reading weblogs."

WEBLOGS AS PREDATOR: FEASTING ON JOURNALISTS' ARTICLES

We've seen how Journalists can act as Predators in the Blogosphere, preying on the story ideas generated by Weblogs' Grassroots Reporting.

It's only fitting that Weblogs return the favor. Blogs feast daily upon Articles writen by Journalists, linking to each article and adding their own

comment and perspective. In doing so, weblogs provide yet another valuable function to the Blogosphere: Filtering and Fact Checking articles by

Journalists.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST: WEBLOGS AS A FILTER



Darwin once boiled down natural selection to ten words: ""Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die." That's exactly how the

Blogosphere works.

Every night, journalists on deadline submit their stories to their editors, posting their stories to a website and turning them into hyperlinks. With

thousands of journalists the world over writing about every subject under the sun, the stories Multiply and Vary just like Darwin describes.

Then the next morning, bloggers wake up and obsessively log onto the web. As they blog the news, they decide which stories to read and link to.

That's when the strongest stories live and the weakest die. For example, if Google comes out with a new product, you can bet it'll be one of the

strongest links (last Thursday, Google products accounted for 20% of the top 25 stories). If the story isn't not about Google, Apple, or weblogs,

there's a good chance no one will link to it and the link will die.

Either way, you can see the results every morning on Blogdex and Daypop: the top stories from the day before. In many ways, Blogdex and Daypop

are an evolutionary scorecard, serving to filter the news on a daily (and even hourly) basis.

Journalists are quickly learning what sort of stories attract attention from the Blogosphere. For Farhad of Wired News, "there are two things I write

about that are 'dangerous': Apple Computer and Weblogs." That provides Farhad even more incentive to get the story right. "I have a few hours to

write my stories. Weblogs have a few days to tell me what I got wrong."

Which brings us to the second big power that Weblogs bring to Journalist Articles: Fact Checking.

FACT CHECKING

As Ken Layne put it memorably, now weblogs can "fact check your ass".

A personal example: I wrote an article asking Are Blogger's Journalists?, detailing my personal struggles with amateur journalism. Over sixty

separate weblogs linked to my article, many of them indeed fact checking my ass. Or rather, many of them were calling me an ass.

In short, journalists loved the piece, but bloggers hated it. It's an interesting experience being shredded by your fellow bloggers. It's kind of like

being a bleeding fish in a school of piranha. But there's life after death: a real discussion came out of the piece, and I got hundreds of emails with

followup thoughts on the subject of amateur journalism. I blogged some of the feedback on my site, and was struck by the truth a James Lilek

quote that Glenn likes to highlight: "The newspaper is a lecture. The web is a conversation."

JOURNALISTS AS PREY

It's in that conversation that we as a Blogosphere learn. But before we can start the conversation, first we need something to talk about. And this is

where Journalists deliver: a clear majority of the top fifty links every day are written by Journalists and published in Big Media newspapers and

magazines.

To test that theory, I analyzed the top 50 links on Blogdex on a random day, Sunday March 3 of this year. I placed each link into categories to see

what types of links were most popular:

Type of Link Number of links

article 27

weblog 4

quiz 4

web page 4

zine article 3

blog project 2

flash animations 2

software 2

press release 1

Over half of the links are to Journalists' articles, a pattern which holds true on most any day you check out Blogdex.

This pattern of linking demonstrates the symbiosis between bloggers and journalists a fact that journalists often miss when covering the blogging

sector (Scott Rosenberg of Salon wrote one of the few journalistic pieces that really captured this symbiosis). Perhaps it's more fun to write about

New Media and Old Media at war with each other... or perhaps it's just a subtlety that's not easy to pick up on deadline?

THE COMPLETE BLOGOSPHERE

The Blogosphere is pioneering a new form of iterative journalism.

Grassroots Reporting

First, stories are increasingly being broken by weblogs doing grassroots reporting.

Blog Filtering

The best of these stories are filtered through a combination of Blogdex, community blogs, thematic blogs, and blog indices



Traditional Reporting

Savvy journalists both blogging and nonblogging alike use take the best of these bloginspired story ideas and write articles

Blog Filtering and Fact Checking

Bloggers link to the most interesting articles by Journalists, fact checking and filtering the stories

As new developments break in the story, they're picked up by bloggers and journalists alike... and the next iteration of the Media ecosystem begins

anew:

The complete Blogosphere in Action

LIES LIES AND MORE LIES

This iterative journalism isn't always a good thing. As Olivier Travers pointed out in an email, "I'm not sure the information cycle between

blogosphere and media can't sometime reinforce lies or biases."

A good example of this is a story by Ananova that circulated widely in the blogosphere:

EU may get new 'barcode' logo

Over 60 blogs linked to the story about the new EU flag, most of them bemoaning the "hideous" and "truly

ugly new flag". But what most people don't know is that the flag was just a concept design not officially

commissioned by the EU.

As Ananova reported in a followup (EU Rejects Plan to Change Flag):

There are no plans to change the European Union flag, Commission officials in Brussels have insisted, despite a new design proffered by a

Dutch architect.

Only five blogs have linked to the followup story... and new sites continue to link to the "new barcode logo" flag story as recently as last

week.

The iterative journalism of the Blogosphere has its dangers. Still, the traditional media food chain has propagated similar misinformation for years...

and in fact, provided the original misinformation which launched this EU story! There's little question, though, that the rate at which information

spreads is growing since the advent of weblogs and the Blogosphere.

That can be both a blessing and a curse. But it's important to note that for the first time, everyday people have a way to correct misinformation and

circulate the correct information back into the Media Ecosystem. And once that information enters the Blogosphere, it has a chance to spread just as

quickly as the original information. Compare that the difficult in getting a Correction printed in the newspaper... and then, the chances of anyone

seeing that Correction buried deep inside the next day's paper.

The Blogosphere isn't perfect, but it's the most robust and diverse Media Ecosystem we have. As the mechanisms tying it together grow more and

more automated, its collective power and influence will start to approach that of any single newspaper or magazine.

WARBLOGGERS TURBOCHARGE BLOGOSPHERE

The power and size of the Blogosphere got a huge boost recently with the post9/11 phenomena of warblogging. Pundits like Glenn Reynolds and

Andrew Sullivan provide daily coverage and analysis of the latest developments in the War on Terrorism, inspiring hundreds of others to blog as

well.

Most importantly, warblogging has greatly increased the relevance of the Blogosphere for most people. Before warblogging, many of the links that



circulated in the Blogosphere focused on technology and web design. Now there's a healthy daily debate about political and cultural issues that's

relevant to the millions of news junkies out there. That's drawing more bloggers and blogreaders into the Blogosphere, making the new Media

Ecosystem more robust with each passing day.

A quick comparison reveals the breakout appeal of warblogs: Dave Winer has been writing one of the leading technology blogs for over six years,

attracting about 10,000 readers a day. Glenn Reynolds started blogging last year, and as of last Wednesday he had 42,805 readers, of which

almost 25,000 were unique visitors with each visitor on average visiting 1.7 times a day.

Will the Blogosphere survive the end of warblogging? "I don't think the Blogosphere will dissipate with the end of the war," predicts Glenn Reynolds of

Instapundit. I think Glenn is right. Warblogging helped broaden the Blogosphere beyond the tech sector. But now that it's here, the Blogosphere has

the audience and the infrastructure in place to Report, Filter and Break the News no matter what the subject.

WHY THE BLOGOSPHERE MATTERS

Thinking about the Blogosphere as a biological ecosystem helped me gain a deeper understanding of how it works. But why is this so important?

When I tried to answer that question, the biological ecosytem metaphor didn't seem to help. Just as I was looking for the metaphor to answer that

question, I had the chance to interview Glenn Reynolds for this article.

Glenn is a published author and a law school professor, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that his take focuses on the intellectual impact of weblogs.

As he explained, "What I see in the Blogosphere is very much like the network of European coffeeshops in the 18th century."

The more I thought about it, the more I liked that. In many ways, the Blogosphere has become the default forum for intellectual discourse, a sort of

intercontinental coffeehouse buzzing with discussion and debate.

It'a a powerful metaphor. These European coffeeshops were the celebrated "Third Place" (besides work and home) where intellectuals could read the

free newspapers and debate the important issues of the day. According to Glenn, these coffeeshops were the birthplace of a whole new set of ideas

that fueled the next generation of thinkers, artists, and business people.

Hmm... sound familiar?

THE BLOGOSPHERE: THE NEW GLOBAL COFFEEHOUSE

When you compare the Blogosphere to European Coffeeshops, we have a couple of big advantages.

For starters, you don't have to be European to participate. The Blogosphere is increasingly global, and as more and more countries come online it will

become even more so. Even language barriers are starting to come down, due to tools like Google's Translator.

Also, bloggers don't have to travel to find the nearest coffeeshop. Just log onto the web and you're in the Blogosphere. Geography has become

irrelevant.

Finally, the Blogosphere is free both for bloggers and for readers. For less than a price of a cup of coffee, you can take part in the global

conversation with some of the smartest and most informed people on the planet.

What are you waiting for?

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Blogosphere the Emerging Media Ecosystem - How Weblogs and Journalists Work Together to Report, Filter and Break the News