At PowerLine Scott has a lengthy excerpt from an article written by Phil Boas, a managing editor in MSM. Phil gets it:
To many of you, bloggers are a presumptuous rabble – amateurs elbowing their way into the publishing world. You may not know them, but they know you – your face, your manners, your prejudices, your conceits.
They’re your readers. And, God help us, they’ve become the one thing we’ve always begged them to become…Engaged.
And he believes, as do many of us, that this is a positive thing. As he mentions, we don’t have the resources to hit the streets and come up with news items on a daily basis. I know from trying to run my own local news site that I cannot hold down my own job, run this blog, and attempt to keep up with everything happening in my city. I tend to focus on our local Congressman and education. That takes plenty of time.
What we can do is dig deeper. We have access to expertise through a post or email. We provide a forum for all to comment. Ours is the editorial page, with op-ed pieces and letters to the editor via comments. On occasion, we collectively do the investigative work MSM are ill-equipped for or uninterested in doing. Phil also talks about this:
They’ll be our competitors and our colleagues and they’ll force us to dig deeper into issues, think harder about them. They’ll show us how to coalesce expertise on a breaking story and drill deeper for the more complete truth. They’re already teaching us today how to own up to our mistakes.
Mistakes. We all make them. The problem MSM have is that they have been viewed for so long as the Keepers of the Truth that they began believing it. Now they have been shamed by that conceit. Some recognize the symptoms, and some don’t.
Phil Boas is warning his contemporaries that they risk becoming irrelevant if they don’t.
We’re taking power!
Comment by Karlo — April 20, 2005 @ 5:41 pm