“Unless bloggers begin covering school board and city council meetings, major and not so major crimes, serious and not so serious accidents and fires, weather, issues of importance to the few and to the many and issues of little interest to themselves—all this on a daily basis—they will not provide the services now covered by the mainstream press”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Damn straight. And it is pure agony to get a horse shod, too.

The headline is quoted from a luddite’s lament in The Age — in Melbourne, Australia. Technology threatens the jobs of the farriers of our age, newspaper reporters, and there is nothing for it but to weep incessantly from — literally — halfway around the globe.

Suck it in, suck it up and move it on down the road. Such horses as there are needing shoes are shod, and — to the exact extent that anyone at all is interested — school board meetings are being overseen and documented. How much education do you have to have in order to fail persistently to understand that broadcasting was a low-tech economic compromise? In the world of narrowcasting, everyone gets exactly what he wants, nothing that he doesn’t, and no one is obliged to pay for school board notes in order to see the horse-racing results.

Reporters have always been demagogues in debate, masters at deploying the logical fallacies they never learned in school. Even now, when they want to scare their vanishing audiences with the bogeymen of the internet, they pick the weakest of straw men to pick on. In the case of the article I’m citing, the designated victim is Wikipedia, which, because it lacks editors, could at any moment deceive you into believing that Wednesday is a vegetable.

Do you want to see the future of professional journalism? My pet example is John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His “Venture Blog” is a beat blog: He covers venture-capital-funded start-ups as his beat and as the exclusive focus of his weblog. His work is also printed in the newspaper, but that’s anticlimactic — hours or even days late. Cook is a blogger who happens to work for a newspaper.

It seem unlikely to me that anyone is going to pay for weblogged coverage of school board meetings, but weblogging is the future of school board reporting. Content producers who want to get paid for their efforts will have to expend those efforts on content people are willing to pay for. Just about a century ago, a great many farriers learned how to pump gas and change tires. Blessedly, they didn’t have dying newspapers — with thriving on-line editions — in which to whine about their fate.

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