Seeker Blog

Jeff Jarvis is live-blogging at the Harvard conference Blogging, Journalism & Credibility. I’m finding this exchange quite interesting. Together you have some of the blog-lords [Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Dave Winer, John Hinderaker, Dan Gillmor, to mention only a few], together with MSM senior folk [Jill Abramson, editor NY Times, Jim Kennedy, AP], and too many academic & law luminaries to list:

I’ll be blogging the confab as long as my sanity holds out.
: Alex Jones says that one (unfortunate) lesson that mainstream journalism can teach blogging is that credibility is fragile and mainstream journalism has lost too much of it in recent years.
: Jay Rosen is presenting his paper. He said the “war should be over between bloggers and journalists, the cartoon dialogue… Even though it makes for good feature stories and great blog posts, bloggers vs. journalists doesn’t help us much.” He said the tension between them will go on and its necessary and inevitable. But the tsunami story makes it “obvious that blogs have a role in journalism.”
Dave Winer said this morning that I was Jay’s Frankenstein. Jay said it’s the opposite. Jay’s right. He has made me think about media (read: my life) in new ways.
After summarizing his paper, he quotes Rebecca Blood saying that part of the reason for conflict is that blogging and journalism are in a “shared media space.” That is the reason the war is over because no one is leaving that space.
Jay is making a point he made on Brian Lehrer’s show a few weeks ago: that this not about the “media” but about the “press” and the press is now owned by the people. That is the real shift of power. “They have to share the press with the public.”
Isn’t that precisely the problem with CBS? Dan et al could not bear to share the press with the public. But the public demanded it. The public won that battle.
Jay says that journalists have been slow to recognize the debt they owe blogging and that is because this new medium — this new press — was not developed by them. The people who understand this new press — the ethic of the link, the art of conversation — are bloggers.
Jay recalls his first Bloggercon when Len Apcar, editor of NY Times digital, said that in 2002 a majority of NY Times readers are online yet even today a majority of the journalists at The Times think they work for the print product. “Actually, they’re working for an online newspaper that has a print edition.” Great line.