Reality Check

A tale of two newspapers' perspectives. First, the Star Tribune, with their supposed glittering star of insight, the wealthy and privileged Nick Coleman, on what the blogosphere means:

Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.

Bloggers don't know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square -- without editors, correction policies or community standards. And so their tripe is often as vicious as it is vacuous.

Now Craig Westover, new editorial writer for the rapidly ascending in my opinion Pioneer Press:

Mainstream media don't concede what bloggers do is "journalism" - evidence former CBS executive Jonathan Klein's "pajama" comment. Typical is columnist David Broder's lament that "the Internet has opened the door to scores of 'journalists' who [have] no allegiance at all to the skeptical and self-disciplined ethic of professional news gathering."

While the journalism side of mainstream media licks its wounds and snarls rationalizations at the undisciplined rabble storming the Bastille of its self-proclaimed credibility, one wonders what the business side is thinking.

...

In a classic example of marketing myopia, Levitt describes how railroads, operating with a product focus, dismissed the airplane as an innovation to be embraced. They disastrously perceived themselves in the narrow "railroad" business, not the broader "transportation" business and consumers didn't necessarily need railroads - they needed transportation.

Already faced with a significantly functioning blogosphere, are there network executives, newspaper publishers and station managers asking themselves, "What business are we in?" Are they coming up with answers other than "television news," "newspaper publication" and "radio programming?" Have they considered the "information" business and what that recognition might mean for their relationship to bloggers, the Internet and their customers?

The winds of "Hurricane Dan" are already blowing themselves out to the relief of all stressed out "real" journalists. But for media executives (and not just at CBS), now comes the tough construction task, not just rebuilding lost credibility, but creating new models of information businesses.

A rare breed indeed, this Westover. A mainstream media person who gets it. Probably because he's not a traditional journalist, not by Nick Coleman's standards. Instead he's a marketing guy, with a life long interest in the news and current events, and a talent for logic and writing. He started as a chronic Pioneer Press letter-to-the-editor writer. (The letters-to-the-editor page, version 1.0 of the blogosphere.). In their wisdom, the Pioneer Press made him one of their temporary community columnists last year and have now elevated him further to semi-regular contributor status.

Because of that eye for talent, they now have a guy with an open mind, with nothing invested in the maintenance of the journalistic establishment status quo, opining on what the blogosphere might mean to the business of information distribution.

And the Star Tribune has Nick Coleman, desperately fighting to salvage his own privileged position and his profession's entitlement to a monopoly on current events commentary.

News consumers, information seekers, which paper would you rather subscribe to?