Lessons from history

In the days when radio journalism was in it's infancy, the wire services refused to allow broadcasters to use their content. Radio was unwanted competition for newspapers and radio journalists were considered second class pseudo-professionals. That all changed as CBS, Mutual and NBC built their news departments, and in time, broadcasting became the primary source for news for the majority of Americans. Are there parallels in the blogosphere? Trained journalists belittle them. Their predictions don't always come true. But like them or not, Bloggers are impacting the way we disseminate and evaluate the news. Online Journalism Review's Staci Kramer is freshly returned from bloggercon and she ponders "the nature of journalists and bloggers -- and the myth that they are mutually exclusive." Scott Rosenberg, a journalist at Salon.com who is also a blogger put together some notes for the bloggercon journalism session. He quotes The Electronic frontier Foundation's Cory Doctorow, who told a Microsoft gathering, "New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at." Think back to the battle between radio news and the print giants. Is history repeating itself? While some professionals heap vitriol on bloggers, others celebrate them. Perhaps Doc Searls puts it best: "What we need isn't competition between blogs and mainstream news outlets, but a working symbiosis between the two.."