BBC’s Newsnig8t: A balance sheet of the blog

The BBC is having a discussion about what it should do about blogs. This takes place in the wider context of the breakup of the broadcasting model. People are reporting stories for themselves using blogs and mobile phones (with the 7/7 bomb, not the G8, being seen as a tipping point). The Guardian’s foray into blogs has been impressive but seems to me the wrong track: trying to weld a corporate identity onto the content and capture it within a corporate system on their own platforms. A blog is the free and individual writing of a single person, or group of people, untrammelled by rules or a given “mission statement”; the blogosphere is a series of communities of blogs, where what is of value comes to prominence because of self-selection and word of mouth rather than promotion: in other words, because enough people believe it helps them get to the truth. Blogs are acting like the ibis on the shoulder of the buffalo to mainstream journalism right now. I do not predict the demise of the broadcasting model but I can’t see a linear progression for it either. How it interacts with blogging, and mobile content, is not the interaction between two technologies but between two kinds of content. The challenge for broadcasters is not to produce faux blogs; ditto the challenge for journalists. It is to respond to the content need, indeed the content gap, demonstrated by the existence of blogs. The problem is: maybe it can’t respond fully. The added hitch is: it is going to be more difficult for public service broadcasters to engage in this because we are hidebound by extra rules on impartiality as well as fairness and accuracy. It seems to me that the world right now, for good or ill, is craving partiality…or at least honesty about one’s stance. The popularity of Fox News is testimony to that: Fox and blogging are part of the same phenomenon and it is not totally welcome to traditional journalists in the UK. But that is not a reason to stop experimenting with blogging.