That Internet thing
If there's a challenger to the Star Tribune's Big Question for political blog that has set the tone for political debate in Minnesota, it's hard to come by; at least when Eric Black was writing it. Exposed now for being a l... l... liberal (even though he admitted it while at the Strib), when he went to Minnesota Monitor, Black made some interesting points about the role of blogs in mainstream media during an appearance on MPR's Midday broadcast today.
Host Gary Eichten noted that with newspapers, people usually stumble across something that they didn't know . And as they decline, and the Internet gains audience, that is being lost.
"The Internet makes it easy for people on the right to read only news that they will agree with and people on the left to only read news that they will agree with, I do think for the sake of our society and our system of government, it is important to find some way for people to be exposed to the inconvenient facts that don't confirm what they already believe. I do worry that the blogosphere makes it too easy for people to not see the other side of an argument," Black said.
To the original question, however, Black said the abundance of information trumps whatever advantage newspapers had. "The advantages of people being able to get large amounts of information from sources that people can trust on the topics they're interested in, overwhelms the somewhat sentimental idea that there are people who will learn something that they didn't mean to learn because of the old system when the newspaper pretty much controlled what there was to read," he said.
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He prefaced the answer with a very insightful qualifier. "Once you get past the blogs...." he said.
And he's right. Blogs and the Internet have often been thought of and referred to -- at least by mainstream media -- as synonyms. But so far in this election cyle, they're clearly not. While blogs have been relatively stagnant in terms of effect and audience, the "rest" of the Internet is making great strides in political coverage. And in many ways, blogs and the lower end of the Internet are to the "upper end" of the Internet what newspapers are/were to the Internet in the context that Black described.
For example, YouTube is dedicating sections to each of the presidential candidates. And the CNN/YouTube debates is giving people the opportunity to ask the questions for a change.
And the candidates themselves have migrated more of their campaigns to the Internet and have --and here's the appropriate word -- "resourced" their online efforts to provide video or audio of their candidate's speeches faster than just about any other source available. While there's certainly an argument to be made about the "spinning" that takes place on those sites, it nonetheless is usurping much of the role that mainstream media, and bloggers too, have staked out for themselves.
In other words: the digital world is spinning far too fast for any niche to be maintained for more than a year or so, which makes those of us in the business wonder what's the next online niche?