Glenn asks if blogging is going to lose its freshness as more (though still not many) bloggers start to make a living at it. He's not worried, though:

...why are so many people doing it? Because it's fun! And fun is good.

That's a good reason to do all sorts of things. Press accounts tend to focus on making money (perhaps because many journalists dream of walking away from their day jobs, and editors?) but money is only one reason we do things, and usually not the most important. As people get richer, and technology gets more capable, I think we'll see a lot more people doing for fun things that previously were done only for money. And I think that's a good thing.

Speaking of journalists, it's easy to see why they're both fascinated by, and frightened of blogs and bloggers. I suspect that it's because journalism is something that doesn't seem to take much skill to do well (at least as well as its largely done), or if it is, most journalists don't seem to be up to the job. It's kind of like Hollywood (or has been, up to now)--it's not so much what you know, or how much talent you have, but who you know, and how lucky you are. But the days in which a clueless journalism major could (by whatever means) get a job in the industry, and not have to worry about competition are coming, or have come, to an end.

The problem is that journalists, as a class, are rarely experts in any particular field. We always used to say in the tech proposal business that it was easier to take an engineer and teach her to write, than to take an English major and teach him engineering (there are exceptions, of course, particularly when the English major took some science classes on the side). Same applies to journalism, and any sort of expertise. The best journalists, particularly those who specialize in certain areas, such as science, or finance, are generally people who came from those fields to journalism, as opposed to being journalism majors.

It's been noted that the blogosphere is chock full of people who know things (not to mention lawyers and law professors who know how to make logical arguments, against which many journalists are utterly helpless, at least to go by the Cory Peins, not to mention Mary Mapes of the world), and this was dramatically demonstrated to journalism's detriment in the Ra^thergate affair. And now that bloggers have pulled the curtain from the journalism wizard, many journalists' dreams (to whatever degree they exist) of "walking away" and just making money blogging will probably go unfulfilled, because it's not at all clear what they will bring to the table.

For these reasons, if there is a flow of talent between blogging and professional journalism, I expect it to be largely in one direction--from the former to the latter--because that's the direction that the osmotic pressure of the talent and knowledge will dictate.

I see blogging continuing to grow. If we include p-dcasting of audio and video, we can expect production quality to rise, and micropayments to proliferate. It's Glenn's Army of Davids (I need to get on his pre-print mailing list). So far it is limited to people who are pretty good editors of their own stuff though.

The problem, IMHO, with current journalists, is that all they know is what little they have to learn to be a journalist.

Spelling. Grammar. Noun / verb agreement.

I hear mistakes having to do with historical events, time lines of histoical events, geography and the sciences in general so often that it makes me wonder how these talking heads ever got out of college. If they clearly don't know the differences in the placement of, history surrounding the story or seasonal differences in Austria and Australia, it's not clear how anything they say can be believeable.

Often with both local and national feeds I see a story happening on video, and the newscasters narration isn't factual for the story that is being shown.

(video shows a car and pickup truck burned out on the freeway, NEAR the bypass, traffic is low, but moving past the accident. a fire engine and ambulance are on the scene.)

"...and a two car accident on the bypass has traffic snarled. Rescue crews have been called and should arrive to give assistance momentarily."

Now if the story I am seeing doesn't agree with what they are saying, what else do they have wrong?

I'm a generalist with an orientation to science and technology. Some people tell me I'm pretty good at the latter.

One interesting counterweight to the idea that specialists will increasingly become more important because of blogging is the difficulty all too many specialists have when they go even a bit beyond their specialties.

The medical field started going into specialties before there was even a computer field. The field has made some pretty good strides by doing so. They've also apparently made some howling errors. Recently we've seen some backtracking on the low fat diet. Sleep some decades ago was seen as relatively unimportant. Lots of doctors even held that the sleep patterns common a century ago wre wasteful and unnecessary. Growing research over the past few decades tends to give the lie to that idea.

I'm not so sure today it's easier to teach an engineer to write than an English major engineering, perhaps because I am good at written and verbal expression. I'm frankly horrified at how bad so many techies are at either written or verbal expression. It is a little hard to quantify, though.

It strikes me that Heinlein was on to something quite important when he claimed specialization was for insects.

OTOH, I don't see blogging suffering the same penalties for getting caught hiding conflicts of interest. I think this is a huge problem with the really popular blogs.

Steve,

It could be we are asking more than is reasonable from the press. Let me use myself as an example. I'm fairly well educated -- actually done grad work in physics and in social psychology. Two of my grandparents are from England. Over my adult lifetime I've developed more than a passing interest in history. My cousin Harry over in England actually taught history for a career. You would think I'd be more familiar with English history than the average American, wouldn't you? Well, in some ways I am. In other ways? One year ago if you had asked me about 1066, I could recited "1066. William the Conqueror. Battle of Hastings." Last summer I saw the book "1066" by David Howarth. To put it mildly, I was surprised about the differences in English society pre and post conquest. Those differences have impacts up to the present day.

With regard to your TV news story about the accident, I'm not as surprised by the phrasing. Lots of us use "car" to mean vehicle of personal transportation. The differentiation today into car, SUV, pickup truck, etc. is a bit artificial. All those vehicles are being used for the same thing (workman's vehicles excepted). I doubt we would even have SUVs and minivans without the notorious CAFE requirements. OK, we might have a few, but they would be specialty items, not general purpose transport for humans.

For what it's worth, I get my news by reading it. It's more complete and faster than TV or radio. I also expect less than lots of people do -- pretty much always have.

Try sitting in the bar for an hour or two at the National Press Club in DC. Or get someone to take you to dinner there. Listen to the conversations around you. Every time I was there -- quite frequently when I lived in DC -- the usual conversation revolved around how important the press are, how UTTERLY important the speaking person was to the press in particular and the world in general, and how unimportant and terribly uninteresting anything else was. Granted, there were exceptions. Usually the conversations I was having, which mostly revolved around technology in some form. I did hear reporters claim they knew nothing about [place name of science or technology subject here] and that's the way they liked it; and no one could dispute them because they were THE PRESS, and they knew what was good for everyone (didn't we see this in "Citizen Kane?"). Besides, they had a Rolodex of experts they could call, never mind most of those technical "experts" are like John Pike and do not know one end of voltmeter from the other.
The atmosphere of arrogance and disdain was overwhelming and depressing.
Web logs are wonderful antacids to the traditional Press's sour view of life, the Universe and everything.

Chuck what you say is true about interchangeable nouns for motorized vehicles. I probably should have said 18 wheeler instad of pickup. But the "telling" would have been the same by the bubble headed bleached blond that comes on at 5.

(I just realized my last post was not complete)

I meant to add:

I can't understand just what IS being taught besides writin' in journalism school.

When I went to college, after scraping my way up from high school drop out, I was required to take classes not in my discipline. That seems to be woefully lacking amongst the majority of young talking heads, and some of the older ones.

If you report the news for a living how can you not know what happened last week, month or year?
It's either just not caring about what you report or open deviousness.

Steve,

TV news has been taken apart by people better than me. You could read Edward Tufte, for example.

Aleta,

What you describe is depressingly true. Unfortunately, you can find it in all sorts of venues here in the DC area.

Best,

Chuck

Perhaps what you say about engineers and English majors is correct, but I know it's certainly easier to teach engineering to a art historian then it is to teach art history to an engineer.