Here’s an uncomfortable tidbit for seekers of truth in in the online world: The bulk of news content online is drawn from the output of print journalists. Put plainly, it’s traditional print journalists (well, okay, in the *best* of circumstances print journalists instead of mass distributed wire services) who are doing the legwork, checking the sources, writing the articles, and putting themselves ‘on-the-line’ when it comes to ferreting out the facts comprising the day-to-day operations of government, military, and corporate operations.

Many of us who work in the Online world want to believe citizen reporters in the form of bloggers are replacing traditional print journalists, but, despite outliers, it’s people trained how to ask questions, where to go to look for data, how to check sources, where to go for reliable confirmation that really find out what is going on.

Let me put this in a different context. I’m a User Experience Designer. I have training in how to elicit accurate user feedback about an interface that isn’t just about what they like, but what supports their behaviours in such a way to enhance the way they perform tasks. (That’s the ‘journalism’ part.) I deal regularly, however, with people who think they know what user’s want because they used to be users of the systems in question and who also believe that when they hear a user says they want something, that thing must delivered without investigation, despite what is being asked. (That’s the Online ‘my-narrow-perspective-focused-on-one-aspect-of-an-issue-is-REALLY-insightful-and-relevant’ part.)

I’m the one who has to step in and point out what people say they want isn’t always what they mean they need and what people feel isn’t the same as how they behave. To make the analogy more apt: I’ve spent years learning how to elicit what people need before hearing what they want, like journalists spend years learning how to discern what people are, and aren’t, saying, as opposed to what they what everyone to hear.

I have no doubt individuals pressing organizations and institutions for change via the Internet have an impact. They raise critical evidence and ideas, sometimes well ahead of traditional media workers. Traditional news media workers, furthermore, often need to refine, advance, and press their skills and efforts in the pursuit of their craft. I am sure, however, single-issue-focused individuals who can direct all their non-working (and some of their working) hours to a specific topic, without reference to other issues and integration with a broader community, cannot replace, but can compliment, trained, professional investigators and writers governed by a transparent system of fact-checking and confirmation (which I admit has been somewhat lacking in some sectors — I’m looking at _you_ CNN (I mention CNN here only because I expect they are to be held to a higher standard, unlike MSNBC or Fox News who have no standards of accuracy or truthfullness)!!

Some people say “History repeats itself”. I tend more towards the Mark Twain perspective: “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.” In practical terms, when radio came, for example, the death of print based news was said, by many, to be imminent. Far from it. When television came, radio AND print were said to be dead. Not quite. With the advent of the Internet…. Well, you get my point. The move from one media to another isn’t about one paradigm wiping away another. Human beings and human societies don’t work that way. Information media technologies build on one another, resulting in a kind of totem pole, whereby the figures at the bottom aren’t eliminated, erased, or minimalized, but, rather, they become part of the structure of the whole, becoming the solid, reliable supports for whatever new additions appear later on.

New media do not replace old. New media stand on the shoulders of media that came before. At this point, people are still working out how to integrate everything. Some only look at sources that reaffirm pre-existing values and perspectives. Others have withdrawn, having realized so much media is concentrated in the hands of just a few corporate interests that a multiplicity of voices across media is facilitated only by elements cast as “fringe” by mere fact of their non-inclusion. Instead of a band new day, facilitated by a brand new media, we have a mess — a bloody, tangled, latent mess — just like generations before us felt they were facing.

Put another way, digital media and the transmission of relevant “news” in the Online world is far from perfect and in that way, it rhymes.

Recalls to mind a recent experience I had with a mainstream media publication. I’m a music producer and sound engineer and was approached by this rather large publication to do a review of a new audio product. I put the product through a rigorous set of tests in my studio and wrote the review. Being less then impressed with the product, my review was less than favorable.

When the editor told me they were not going to publish my review, I asked if the product-in-questions manufacturer was one of their advertisers. Yes it was. I wasn’t surprised!

Its also not surprising that Noam Chomsky, the worlds most quoted author, said to be “the most important intellectual of our time,” and outspoken critic of Western affairs is virtually ignored by Western media.

Journalism as we know it in North America is hardwired with conflicting interests, and is indeed killing itself!

Not seeing much of that in blogs.

Know which one I prefer reading.

Yet I find bloggers extremely interesting, I understand I’m reading their opinion which isn’t always based on fact.