Recently former long time Daily Hampshire Gazette editor Ed Shanahan published an article regarding his views on blogging. You can read "Time to say goodbye to the Daily Newspaper? Not if we want hard news" at Downstreet.net. Ed writes well and has offered some insightful commentary. I thank him for providing the source material that spurred this entry on Northampton Redoubt and encourage you to read his entry before reading mine. Offer your comments below if you’d like.
The reason the Valley Advocate invited me to blog is because I frequently use source material, either research or notes from meetings I attended, and I write about legitimate items of interest the mainstream media is not writing or talking about very much. For instance, there was little media coverage of the Interstate 91 Interchange approval I addressed on this blog March 6 thanks to Mary Serreze. (See link to the right)
Blogging from my view allows for an alternate point of view to be expressed by someone other than a hired professional. While it’s true traditional reporters do a brunt of the research for many stories, they are also compensated fairly well for doing so, generally at least enough to pay the bills, raise a family, maybe purchase a home, receive health and pension benefits, and take an occasional vacation. People often attend college to become journalists so it is fair to say many consider working for an established news outlet a career pursuit. I have yet to notice degree programs offered for would-be bloggers or Schools of Bloggersim for that matter, but that will likely change as time goes by. In any event, all of my work blogging with the Paradise City Forum, Masslive’s Your Stories, and now this blog has been performed compensation-free, and in fact I’ve underwritten or paid for the privilege of undertaking much of this activity. That’s a lot of hours my wife wishes I’d spent gainfully employed somewhere rather than typing away at the keyboard at three in the morning or organizing a public meeting.
As I’m sure many of you are aware, with all the news that’s out there, I’m frequently disappointed in what gets covered and how. Reporters from local newspapers and radio stations often seem to ask city officials what they think and then regurgitate the responses. So we have representatives from one set of corporations, the mainstream newspapers and radio stations, repeating statements from representatives of other corporations known as cities, plus officials from towns, colleges, and businesses are added in as well. Is it any wonder why incumbents repeatedly get re-elected? To me some (but certainly not all) of these particular stories are not much more than op-ed pieces manufactured by reporters on behalf of public officials, under the guise of news, but it’s a living I suppose. Whatever happened to striving for balance in daily news reporting and seeking alternate views for readers or listeners to consider? Regretfully, it’s basically gone the way of the horse and buggy and blogging is changing that, for the better in my estimation. Simply put, just because a reporter does some paid research and injects that research into the public domain, colored by his or her own personal biases or perhaps those of an editor or researcher, doesn’t mean they deserve exclusive rights to comment publicly sans rebuttal. After all researchers sometimes get it wrong so who is left to report on what the reporters are reporting and how well they are reporting it if not us bloggers?
Could that be why blogging has proliferated, as the internet has presented us a new communication device and opened up the potential for the rest of us to impact our public policies in a way not dissimilar to what the mainstream media has enjoyed these past many centuries? The first American newspaper was printed April 24, 1704 and was called the Boston News-Letter and before that the creation of "movable type in the 1450s" changed how information has been disseminated to the masses. It’s no coincidence that one of America’s premier statesmen, Ben Franklin, had carved into his gravestone the word "Printer" to exemplify what he was most proud of regarding his life’s efforts. That’s telling. Thus politics, printing, and other forms of media have evolved together as partners of a sort, so I ask where will politics and blogging be in five hundred years? When radio and television were introduced they didn’t eliminate the need for newspapers, and neither will bloggerism, but bloggers will now play a role in shaping the world’s public policies, and the long term consequences of that remain to be seen.
As we participate in the dawn of a new revolution, we are ushering in the world’s first computer literate generation and should probably add touch-typing to our elementary schools’ curriculum. Seriously. The commentary of regular people, for better or worse, is now available for all, including supporters and patrons of traditional news outlets. Bloggers are providing an entire industry with new competition, and that is great NEWS for consumers and voters alike. Perhaps bloggers are succeeding because many of the people that tuned out because they recognized there is too much information that is unheard of, unspoken of, and unwritten about by the mainstream media, are tuning back in now that they have a refreshing new resource for unedited discourse that stems from a phenomenon created by and for humans known as cyberspace.
So remember Ed: many bloggers take their endeavor seriously while being compensated modestly if at all. Blogs allow for a far more democratic discourse, and while some bloggers may be uninformed and rely on mainstream reporters to provide them their source material as you have indicated, others provide a valuable service to their community that falls more or less under the banner of volunteer-ism. Check out the Valley Advocate’s Urban Compass by Heather Brandon and I’m confident you’ll agree that her blog is worth reading.
