ANTI-BLOG BACKLASH?

Glenn Reynolds' new TCS column is a bit chatty and cluttered, but a couple of his conclusions make good jumping-off points.

And when "making" media is cheap, and an unlimited supply of people are "making it," what happens to journalism? Something that journalists may not like: Journalism, right now, is in the process of reverting to its earlier status as an activity, rather than a profession.

So journalism won't be a profession anymore? It's an interesting thought. Can the middlemen be eliminated in the news-media economy?

Blogs don't do their own reporting, it is said. But is this true?

Take the Iraqi bloggers. They deliver impressions from the Baghdad street straight to American computer screens.

Or take the letters page of Andrew Sullivan, a phenomenon seemingly easy to duplicate. Readers from all over the country write in, usually providing either expertise or on-the-ground experience.

Also, it may become more in the interest of organizations to do their own reporting. Politicians, corporations, government agencies and NGOs will have an interest in doing their own reporting about themselves. Of course, they may have biases, but bloggers will punish them if their self-spin is implausible.

If the blogs can match Big Media on the reporting front (not yet by a long shot), they already have an edge on other fronts (logical thinking, creativity, personality, brains), so they should dominate Big Media. But don't underestimate technological inertia. Millions of people will go on receiving the newspaper on their doorstep, day in, day out.

I don't think the middlemen in the news economy will be eliminated. The NYT and the WaPo will remain. But it's worth thinking through how an economy of public discourse minus the MSM would operate.

Glenn adds that:

[quoting himself] "[I]f Big Media let their position go without a fight to keep it by fair means or foul, they'll be the first example of a privileged group that did so. So beware." I think we're already beginning to see signs of that backlash... and the press establishment's general lack of enthusiasm for free speech for others (as evidenced by its support for campaign finance "reform") suggests that it'll be happy to see alternative media muzzled. You want to keep this media revolution going? Be ready to fight for it.

Hmm. The Communists in Eastern Europe in 1989 are one privileged group that pretty much gave up their position without a fight. Still, point taken. But it's hard to imagine the press establishment urging that blogs be forbidden.

However, I wonder if Andrew Sullivan's strange surrender is an indicator of the type of the "fight" that this "media revolution" will face. Having lost a bit of his mojo in the blogosphere (yeah, he still gets tons of readers, but I don't think he convinces them anymore), he seems suddenly eager to embrace the establishment. (But to continue the revolution metaphor and call Sullivan a fifth-columnist would be going too far.)