Tree of Knowledge

This week marks the first anniversary of round two of the poll wars between The Australian and the Australian online psephological blogosphere.

There’s little benefit in raking over what was said on both sides at the time, but I don’t think anyone would disagree that by this time last year, the work of bloggers like Peter Brent, William Bowe, Bryan Palmer and Possum had become widely known amongst the commentariat.

So other than sparking off a snark war of epic proportions, what have these guys achieved?

Consider the results of Lexis-Nexis searches of major Australian newspapers for “poll AND margin of error” for the following date ranges:

• 4 August 2005 – 4 August 2006:         43 hits
• 4 August 2006 – 4 August 2007:        66 hits
• 4 August 2007 – 4 August 2008:        116 hits

I would argue that tripling the profile of one of their key issues in the national press should be grounds for some satisfaction in the online Pseph community.

To my mind, this is the most important outcome of the poll wars. Like it or not, today both camps live in the same media ecology. It should never have been about one camp ‘against’ the other, but should have been about what each medium could learn from the other. The results above suggest that the national press in Australia has developed a substantially greater appreciation for the relevance of sampling error when interpreting polls in the wake of the poll wars. Similarly, anecdotally it seems to me that the pseph community has toned down some of its ad hominem tendencies.

My friend, Charlie Beckett, the director of the LSE’s Polis Journalism and Society think tank argues in his recent book “Super Media” that the potential impact of the blogosphere is greatest in the form of ‘Networked Journalism of this kind:

New-media technology is only having a serious effect because of its impact on established journalism. The way that the vast bulk of public and commercial media is changing is more important than the emergence of citizen journalism or the independent blogosphere. Together they offer the opportunity to transform the news media into a more open, trustworthy and useful forum for information and debate. Saving journalism will not in itself save the world. That is down to people and politicians. But a healthier local and global news media is a necessary precondition for international development and security…..

As it becomes non-linear and open-sourced, journalism changes. This is about more than posting a comment on a blog or sending in a photo to a website. The claims that traditional media is made for authority, objectivity and quality will be challenged. I think that the business, moral and political case for journalism is best made when it embraces these changes. To retain value journalism must engage with the public. It must shift power from the newsroom to the connected online and digital world. It must become “networked”….

Networked journalism is a process not a product. The journalist still reports, edits, packages the news. But the process is continually shared. The networked journalist changes from being a gatekeeper who delivers to a facilitator who connects.

I tend to agree. You can’t expect a journalist working in a commoditized news structure to specialise to the same extent as a blogger with an unhealthy obsession in a niche area. Similarly, you can’t expect a news organisation to commit the same volume of man hours to discussion of a niche issue as that which occurs in the comments threads of these topic specific blogs. What you can expect however, is for a modern journalist to bring their journalistic training to bear in tapping into the expertise contained in these online communities. Clearly not everything that is written about in these communities is either newsworthy or reliable. However, when combined with the professional judgement of a ‘networked journalist’ these communities could contribute to a greatly enriched journalistic product.

Psepholology, The Blogosphere, The MSM | RSS 2.0 | Comment it , or trackback this post.