It is particularly interesting to note that blogger Felix Salmon got credited for bringing attention to this. My guess is that we are going to see more cases of bloggers breaking stories like this since they are often more free of conflicts of interest.
Before, you mostly had to worry about political bias in newspapers, but here we are seeing selectivity being employed when reporting plain old business news.
I don't have many memories of this happening in the recent past, a poignant example would be when CBS refused to air a story on 60 Minutes about how Tobacco executives perjured themselves about their awareness of nicotine’s addictiveness. CBS killed the story because it could have jeopardized their acquisition by Laurence Tisch (who at the time owned Lorillard). Michael Mann's wonderful film, The Insider, centers around that debacle:
I don't think it's that bloggers are more free of conflicts of interest, but that there are more bloggers so there is a higher percentage whose conflicts of interest are not relevant to a given story.
Breaking a story that someone else is sitting on is interesting - but it still requires (in the Lewinsky scenario) reporters doing actual investigations. Newsweek had the story. Drudge broke that they were sitting on the story. Drudge also isn't a blogger. He's a news aggregator that very occasionally does original reporting (which usually consists of leaks of book galleys, and stuff about to be published...often leaked to him on purpose by reporters to drum up interest and drive clicks to the story a few hours later, and in many cases political operatives pushing narratives, especially during campaigns)
Felix Salmon also fudges the notion of reporter vs. blogger. He is employed by Reuters, and he blogs for them. How do you draw the distinction between blogger and reporter?
I'm not trying to take away from the important transformation that is occurring, but I think that to put it in a binary divide of bloggers vs. old media/MSM reporters is too broad.
In 1998, there wasn't really the concept of a blog or a blogger. My point is that mass-consumption journalism is falling short of the ethics that it is supposedly built on, but the explicit bias and naked greed of mass-production journalism actually balances out to something more usable, if you're information literate. No one has to pretend to be impartial anymore. But they can and do argue with each other, allowing the audience to watch and make their own judgments.
If you're not information literate, maybe you need a perfectly impartial press with no conflicts of interest. Tough shit--human nature rarely allows us such a luxury. The history of news has more Hearsts, Pulitzers, Murdochs, Drudges, Huffingtons, and Arringtons than any kind of ideal journalists.
I would tend to think they are. Bloggers have to worry about much smaller scale of income/loss than a newspaper as big as new york times. Higher percentage also helps.
Felix is one of my favorite bloggers, but he's not your typical pajama clad amateur. He's paid by Reuters, and his career path looks much closer to a traditional journalist/analyst, who happens to write for the web. He works in an office, and actually picks up the phone to investigate stories. If he is the model for the future, it's one where reporters still rule the roost, once they get over themselves and figure out the internet.
Well, Felix Salmon is a Reuters employee. Just because he's a blogger doesn't mean he's independent of big media companies and their conflicts. (I'm not pointing to any wrongdoing or turpitude on Salmon's part, just observing that an inflated claim is being made for his independence.)
If bloggers play a useful role in this kind of situation (and I think they do) it's not because "they are often more free of conflicts of interest" but because they're building a personal brand rather than contributing to an institutional brand, and that gives them a higher risk tolerance: they get more payoff from a big scoop, and they don't answer to editors whose incentives tend toward minimizing embarrassment.
I yield to no one in my partisan criticism of the NYT, but the failure here is likely not "we can't offend our corporate overlords" so much as it is "we don't have a single reporter on staff qualified to understand what was happening here." There are three options for getting stories: running them down yourself, following up on other reporters' work, and being leaked the story by someone wanting to do damage to someone else. For huge swathes of the human experience, the NYT just lacks the expertise to accomplish door #1.
This is the same reason why the NYT didn't break ScamVille, despite having published press releases about it. They simply don't have anyone on staff who understands affiliate marketing, Internet advertising more complicated than their own brand ads, social media ("sure sounds sexy though!"), etc.
The incentive structure in traditional journalism is a) have a big enough megaphone to get leakers to come to you and b) get good at owning the stories that other papers break while defending your own stories. Note that "get really good at breaking stuff" is much, much harder. This is why you'll see more and more bloggers with deep, deep talents in narrow fields break things in the coming years.
(One example: CBS got into a flap about the authenticity of some papers purporting to demonstrate something negative about George Bush a few years ago, and stuck to their guns about them. Then a cycling blogger who -- random hobby time -- also happened to be an expert in computer fontsetting realized it was impossible to produce the papers on the typewriters available at the time and, in a visual which should have won him a Pulitzer, created an animated GIF switching between frames scanned from the purportedly typewritten document and the same text typed into the default settings of MS Word, showing they were pixel-wise identical except for scanning artifacts.)
This is a shame. There was once a time when the NYTimes was seen as a paragon of journalistic excellence. The same could be said for the Wall St. Journal. Heck, there was once a time when the Tuesday Science section was something to look forward to.
Is there a petition to End the NY Times? You know, to put it out of its misery.
I think the only subscribers left are ones that just see it as a duty to keep their subscription as a "donation" of sorts, for fear of it vanishing. It looks to just represent a mental crutch.
If business is war, could it not follow that under reporting of the battles business undertake in court also be a casualty. Noam Chomsky noticed this with East Timor, an Australian neighbor. The country was at war with Indonesia but barely reported. [0]
Before, you mostly had to worry about political bias in newspapers, but here we are seeing selectivity being employed when reporting plain old business news.
I don't have many memories of this happening in the recent past, a poignant example would be when CBS refused to air a story on 60 Minutes about how Tobacco executives perjured themselves about their awareness of nicotine’s addictiveness. CBS killed the story because it could have jeopardized their acquisition by Laurence Tisch (who at the time owned Lorillard). Michael Mann's wonderful film, The Insider, centers around that debacle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Insider_(film)