Belmont Club on Blogoshere news

Wretchard at Belmont Club has a brief post on how the blogosphere is starting to effect both news commentary and more recently news gathering:

The blogosphere is a specific manifestation -- and by no means the only one -- of the networks made possible by the Internet which can be imperfectly compared to the emerging nervous system of a growing organism. Once the software and infrastructure to self-publish was in place, it was natural that analytical cells, or groups of cells would take inputs from other parts of the system and process them. The result was 'instant punditry', which was nothing more than the public exchange of analysis on any subject -- politics, culture and war just happened to be the three most popular. It enabled lawyers to offer opinions on law; military men on things military; scientists on things scientific. And suddenly the journalistic opinion editors found themselves at an increasing disadvantage. While individual bloggers might not have the journalistic experience of the newspaper professionals, they had the inestimable edge of being experts, sometimes the absolute authorities in their respective fields. This is exactly what happened in Memogate. People who had designed Adobe fonts and written desktop publishing programs knew the memos were computer generated and were not going to be overawed by Dan Rather's experts asserting the contrary. They were the real experts and to make an impact they did not have to be correct across a large range of issues. They only had to be right in the one thing they knew best and from that vantage could hammer a mainstream pundit into the dust. Rather's defeat at the hands of Buckhead was not accidental. It was inevitable.

...The advent of cheap consumer digital cameras capable of recording sound coupled to the proliferation of internet connections meant that ... the Internet was developing a sensory apparatus to match. To the 'instant pundit' was added the 'instant reporter' -- the man already on the spot, often possessed of local knowledge and language skills. These came suddenly of age with the December 2004 tsunami story. Survivors...'filed stories' which were ...launched into the global information pool. In retrospect, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine forshadowed the events of the tsunami coverage. Individuals with mobile computing and communications devices provided a substantial shadow coverage of the unfolding events there. Like the tsunami instant reporters, the insta-journalists in the Ukraine had the additional advantage of being largely unknown to each other. This meant that unlike the wire services, which are often single-sourced, the insta-reports could be cross-checked.

Click here: Belmont Club

The effects can be as wide spread or narrow as the issue. I am on a list serve for a group many members of which are readying for a conference on what is a now very storm tossed Kaua'i, Hawaii. At 4:23 PM today a member at UCLA sent out a copy of a Hawaii newspaper story about damage to a major Kaua'i hotel and surrounding areas, and at 8:06 another at U of Hawaii had responded that the hotel ppl were meeting at was on the other side of the island; she had spoken to the manager, and all was well there. Not a blog, but local knowledge and the Internet. Story, fact checking, and reporting. It won't replace the mainstream media, but it will be interesting to see how the MSM and the blogoshere continue to interact.