The Blog Estate

As media consolidate and the public stops trusting them, bloggers are playing the important role of watchdogging the watchdogs.

Is Salam Pax a sellout? The mysterious Baghdad scribe, who gained worldwide notoriety for blogging from his besieged city during the war in Iraq, recently scored a biweekly column in London's Guardian newspaper. Now that he's been anointed by traditional publication, Pax goes from "amateur diarist" to "professional journalist." In his first Guardian column, he jokingly asserted that he'd "sold his soul to the devil"—because in the blogging community established media is often seen as the enemy. But, in truth, Pax's mainstream acceptance may actually mark the true acceptance of the blogging—and suggest an important role blogs will play in an increasingly monopolized and distrusted media landscape.

We know by now what blogs are: web logs filled with regularly updated musings and commentary, typically written with a personal voice and emanating from both unknowns and celebrities. More than 3 million blogs haunt the web, according to Wired magazine, and their influence is being examined by everyone from ranting letters-to-the-editor types to the officious Charles Krauthammer, who snipped on Fox News that "they serve their purpose but will never replace The New York Times."

That's probably true. But two recent trends make easily published independent media—in many ways, after all, a blog is no more than a high-tech interpretation of an old-school, photocopied 'zine—more important than ever before. First, the FCC's recent decision to relax media-ownership restrictions promises even more consolidation among the mass media, which makes voices that aren't Viacom's or the News Corporation's even more important. Second, the public's increasing mistrust of those same, recently scandalized, corporate media—a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found only 36 percent of Americans believe news organizations get the facts straight—underscores the need for, essentially, a shadow press corps that keeps big media honest the same way the press theoretically works to keep the government honest.

Of course, this is really nothing too new: Blogs were already giving voice to the proletariat back when Jayson Blair was still a happily employed fiction-writer.

"Blogging harnesses the web's real genius—its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off," says political writer and pundit—and "Daily Dish" blogger—Andrew Sullivan on his site. "In that sense, it's the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web."

A recent Pew study found that approximately 20 percent of Americans got their war news from the Internet, and several independent journalists got around Pentagon control of war information by filing daily blogs from the Iraqi front. Much of this product routinely fact-checked mainstream media reporters and kept an eye out for bias, whether from the left or the right.

Remember the furor over Maureen Dowd's May 11 New York Times column, the one in which she allegedly misquoted President Bush? The comparison of the real quote to Dowd's truncated version was first made by a blogger, Robert Cox, and was brought into the mainstream by Sullivan on his blog. Even more recently, a similar controversy arose when The Guardian may have misquoted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, whom the paper wrote had said Iraqis live on "a sea of oil." He did use that phrase, but it was part of a much larger statement, and, under pressure from bloggers, The Guardian was ultimately forced to print an unabridged version, to provide context.

The accountability issue may be two-sided. Independent bloggers can keep reporters honest, but they also often hold themselves to different standards than traditional journalists, and they sometimes rely on unsubstantiated rumors. But, bloggers would argue, the blogosphere, as it's called, is self-correcting. With millions of individual and independent publishers, an inaccurate blogger will quickly hear from others, doubting his veracity. Before blogs "it took longer ... to debunk myths," says Jesse Walker, a media historian and associate editor at Reason magazine. "Nowadays, someone can upload a piece of information instantly that either supports or refutes a rumor.... It's this interpenetration of media sources that forces accountability."

That interplay has always existed, Walker says. "As long as there have been professional media, there have been amateur media, the newsletters, underground newspapers, and such," he explains. "They alternately complemented and competed with each other. But the dynamics of that relationship had been submerged—until now"

Increasingly, though, there may be pressure for blogs to seem less like amateur media. David Winer is a fellow at Harvard Law School and founder of Userland.com, a software company that manufactures web-writing and content-management tools. He thinks the blog's lack of professional polish is the key to its appeal. "You can hear the individual voice in a blog," he says. "That is what's attractive about it. If it were given any polish, the magic would be lost." But while bloggers have ably knocked down barriers to entry in the media market, their success has created a demand for bigger and better blogs. Salam Pax isn't the only blogger to find celebrity status. CNN's Kevin Sites ran an independent blog from Iraq. Mickey Kaus blogs for Slate, Microsoft's online political magazine.

They may well not be the only techno-opinion writers whose nascent entrepreneurial spirit surrenders to the monopolies blogs are purported to be subverting. Reason's Jesse Walker sees similarities between the blogging movement and the early-1990s independent film movement. The indie movement gave a voice to filmmakers without studio backing or major financing. It "came from those on the fringes of the industry," Walker says, just as blogs can give a voice to those outside of the traditional media. But by the end of the '90s, the major studios had largely co-opted most indie film.

Or, maybe, blogs can turn that model on its head. Rather than blogs being overtaken by mainstream media, mainstream media will be overtaken blogs. Harvard and Userland's Winer has a longterm bet with Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital, in which he suggests that by 2007, the year's major news events will be more covered by blogs than by the Times.

But Nisenholtz isn't buying. Does he think blogs will take over? "The question is a red herring," he says. "I don't view blogs as competition for journalistic organizations such as the Times. I see them as fundamentally different. Blogs allow people to publish their views on the Internet. This is highly useful, but it in no way precludes the use of a professionally edited form of journalism."

Angelina Sciolla last wrote for mediabistro.com about trying to find a literary agent.