An article I wrote for OJR about why some people trust bloggers more than mainstream journalists has just gone live:
Transparency Begets Trust in the Ever-Expanding Blogosphere
The openness of Weblogs could help explain why many readers find them more credible than traditional media. Can mainstream journalists learn from their cutting-edge cousins?
And don’t miss this fascinating accompanying chart, with data supplied by Technorati, that hasn’t appeared anywhere else on the Web: Who has the ear of the blogosphere?
(Wired magazine two weeks ago published a similar chart, with a different slant, but it’s not online.)
Jeff Jarvis and David Sifry and Mary Hodder of Technorati are the main parties who preach the virtues of transparency, why it works in the blogosphere, and how mainstream news sites could benefit from the practice.
Excerpt:
“The Web is not chiefly about a library or a news stand,” Sifry says. “You have to start thinking about the Web as this humongous event stream. The Web is a set of ongoing conversations that weave together into this new kind of omnipresent social fabric.” …
Jarvis agrees. “We are witnessing the growth of a culture of transparency,” he says. “Bloggers are more trusted, I think, because they are human and too often news organizations are not. Bloggers tell you who they are (usually) and what their backgrounds and biases are and their readers can judge them and engage with them on a personal level. News organizations are big and often monolithic and are reluctant to admit let alone share perspective or agendas.”
The craft of journalism itself is undergoing a shift as we move toward a more pliable online model. “Bloggers see news as a conversation,” he says. “It’s not over when it’s in print; it’s not fishwrap. News improves and the facts and the truth come closer when the discussion begins …”
Well articulated.
Later: I was wondering whether to post the full text of the email Jeff Jarvis sent me, but Jeff saved me the trouble.
Also, see BlueHereNow’s pointer to Richard Edelman’s Trust Barometer (a Word doc), which shows people are more likely to believe friends and family than the mainstream media.
Tim Porter weighs in smartly:
The most important lesson mainstream journalists can learn from bloggers is that to gain trust from their readers they must put trust in their readers. Open up the journalistic process. Share the sources. Give the public more space in the paper (or, as the Bakersfield Californiann is doing with the Northwest Voice, let them write part of the paper themselves.)
Journalists saying, “Trust me, I’m a pro,” doesn’t work any longer. Saying, “I’m a pro so I’m going to trust you,” just might.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Jeff Jarvis says: “Bloggers are more trusted, I think, because they are human and too often news organizations are not.”
There is a larger point here to be made, which is that people (eg bloggers) are more trusted than companies (eg news organisations) because a company is just a legal construct. If people trust, say, the Body Shop, often it is because they think that Anita Roddick is a decent person who shares their values and has imbued her company with them. (And it works both ways: When people distrust, say, Microsoft, often it is because they think that Bill Gates is the devil’s spawn whose values are against everything decent people hold dear, and who has infected his company with those values.)
I’m so sick of hearing from companies that “Our greatest asset is our people!” This is lip service with a capital L. The fact is that the individuals who make up a company hold real value, and sharing that value with the world at large through blogs will engender trust and build an affinity in customers for a business’s entire operation. Has a branding guide ever achieved anything like that?
I think one of the appeals of bloggers over journalists is that in general they are not edited by other people. Although blogs are certainly self edited, and many, my own included, certainly could benefit from some technical editing (spelling, grammar, etc.) in general by not being edited you are getting the true (although oftentimes raw and biased as well) opinions of an individual.
When I read an article in the New York times I know that what I’m reading has been filtered through an editorial staff. In general I think that people trust individuals more than they trust companies of which an editorial staff (by extension) represents. I think people feel that in this way bloggers are less censored than journalists and although each person much judge the validity of a post for themselves at least they are getting that opportunity vs. having an editorial staff make that decision for them. Filtered or unfiltered is the question. For many the preference remains unflitered.
The contention that blogs offer a transparency and thus a superior level of trusted information to the populace is emblematic of a media failure more important than the concentration of its ownership. The profession has failed to make sure that citizens actually know what the job of a newsroom really is and why the process is far different than producing anything else.
Journalism has neglected to reinforce its own story in the context of public life, citizenship and community collaboration, and bloggers are driving at full throttle through that huge trust gap. But it is important to distinguish between how the craft of journalism is executed now and the foundational elements on which the craft – and its role in society – rests.
The blogosphere presents tremendous power in many ways, but it is a mistake, in my view, to compare a blogger’s assertions, however well informed or puckishly presented, to editorial disciplines and a constitutional framework that have been defined and refined over many centuries. Protection of
sources, fact checking, editorial oversight, continuity, community memory — to say nothing of grammar — and many factors are part of the dramatically imperfect process of presenting “the news.”
When bloggers delve successfully into something as untidy and as hostile to democracy as, say, organized crime, then we will know that they’ve created a place for the format in journalism.