I hear a lot of hype about "citizen journalism" and the impending media takeover and so forth. Sorry, but I just don't buy it. From what I've seen, most "citizen journalism" tends to consist of a lot of awful opinion blogs and endless whining about the mainstream media.
But an article on the New York Times today may have eroded my mountainous dislike of bloggers just a bit.
The article is about The Smoking Gun, a website that posts things like the forged documents that the LA Times used for their story on Tupac's murder. Unlike most online news ventures, The Smoking Gun actually DOES investigate and fact-check their content, so I'm inclined to avoid lumping them in with bloggers. But while reading the article, I realized that they can do things the mainstream media can't.
By posting documents like the Tupac ones, they performed a function that may have taken other media groups weeks or months. Because the Smoking Gun performs a specialized function (finding intriguing documents) they're able to perform that function better than a multi-faceted organization.
Blogs can also (sigh) function as a useful critic of the media, a function that didn't previously exist.
I'm not falling in love with blogs here - I still think they're mostly pretty stupid. And the traditional, business-oriented news media wont go away, because there simply is no legitimate replacement for it (despite what a bunch of Linux geeks might think). But I can see how blogs can play small, significant roles that augment the larger practice of journalism.
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