Microcontent News has an interesting article by John Hiller on Borg Journalism, in which blogs take on the role of the Borg (or ants), assimilating, collectively, the function of journalism.
Here was my angle: traditional journalists have often been quick to dismiss weblogs by citing a single poorly written online diary as “proof” of the failure of the weblog format. But it’s not the individual weblog that fascinates me. It’s when you tap the collective power of thousands of weblogs that you start to see all sort of interesting behavior emerge. It’s a property of what scientists call complex adaptive systems and it’s enabling weblogs as a collective to become more than the sum of its parts.
As part of the process, the writer notes how bloggers have “scooped” the follow-ups he’d intended to his original article. In coming to grips with this, the writer quotes Dan Gillmor, a journalist:
– My readers know more than I do;
– That is not a threat, but rather an opportunity;
– We can use this together to create something between a seminar and a conversation, educating all of us;
– Interactivity and communications technology — in the form of e-mail, weblogs, discussion boards, websites and more — make it happen.
But looking at how the blogging community has reacted to various news stories over the past several weeks, Hiler’s come to the conclusion that the blogs are good at conspiracy journalism (debunking conspiracies) and speculative journalism (exploring the implications of a new idea or technology). Blogs are weaker than traditional journallism, though, in terms of primary research and in synthesizing complex stories. “To put it another way, Weblogs would never have broken Watergate. But you can bet they would have blogged the heck out of the story, hashing out its implications on metafilter and kuro5hin.”
Interesting stuff.
(For some more reasoned thought on Blogs and Journalism, read the Bleat today. If you want to read some stupid commentary about it, read this. If you want to see how stupid it is, check this out.)