Lee Gomes wrote about Memeorandum, Blogniscient and TechCrunch in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s an interesting column discussing the rise of blogs as “journalists” and the usefullness of blog aggregators in filtering out the most important writing.
The reality is that while there are now as many tech blogs as stars in the sky, only a tiny fraction of them matter. And those that do aren’t part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world’s new elite. Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it’s not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.
While I agree with the trend that Lee Gomes is highlighting, I also think there is something even bigger going on. I agree with Dave Winer when he says:
There’s more going on here than the reporters being replaced by bloggers. It’s disintermediation, the thing that the Internet does to every business, art and profession that aggregates and repackages. Carl Sagan said that human beings are the cosmos gaining consciousness and studying itself. The tech bloggers are the tech community, the programmers, lawyers, investors, business managers, users, taking responsibility for their own cosmos. The reporters were necessary when you needed a million dollars to start a news “paper,” then a billion dollars to start a media empire. Now you need a laptop computer and an account on Blogger or MSN Spaces.
Bloggers take friction out of the news reporting process. No editors are around to slow down the process. There are also no fact checkers, which can cause problems. However, the blogosphere tends to correct for this, and, as an ecosystem, I’d wager the blogosphere gets more things right than journalists.
Anyway, it is an interesting article. Lee Gomes is one of the guys who gets it, obviously. And I just bought every print copy of the ‘Journal at the local newsstand. 
Congrats Mr. Gatsby! I did say you would be a rock star this week…
To the point though, did you see the SFWeekly cover story on Craig Newmark last week and how newspapers were having to fire staff etc… Basically said that the decline of jounralism quality is Craig’s fault.
Funny how newspaper publishers think of the news in terms of a product when it comes to promoting sensationalist, yellow journalism influenced headlines, but fail to see the whole thing as a product in the face of competition. They, like the music industry and others, knew this was coming and most did little about it (even less in the years since the dotbomb crash which were ripe with opportunity for them).
To Dave Winer’s point, I wrote a little more on the cost of communications and the role of marketing over here on my blog a few months back.
Newspapers need to rethink themselves in their entirety. Their only chance to survive is to innovate and adapt to the changing needs of their audience.
This whole business of A-list bloggers taking the seats of poor journalists makes me want to puke. Mainstream people, like the writer of this WSJ story, don’t get that it’s not some conspiracy by a tiny group of people vying for the front row.
The real blogosphere is, as Dave Winer so aptly expresses, about communities informing each other. I don’t doubt that there are some bloggers who want the reach/frequency fame, but the reality is the vast majority don’t. Why that never ends up in reports like this is beyond me.
On, congrats on the props.
Congratulations Mike! You are doing a terrific job in introducing interesting new technologies to the world. Keep it up.
What scares me is that the celebrity culture of the blogosphere will eventually drive the disappearance of the “long tail.” When/if the 80/20 rule eventually apply, we would know that old media has subsummed “new media 2.0″ In such an environment, the star blogs will invariably be information “hubs” and the p2p nature of the blogosphere will disappear as well.