{"id":572,"date":"2004-02-23T23:10:52","date_gmt":"2004-02-23T23:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/?p=572"},"modified":"2004-02-23T23:10:52","modified_gmt":"2004-02-23T23:10:52","slug":"a-lightbulb-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/2004\/02\/a-lightbulb-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"A lightbulb moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I stopped by Tim Porter<\/a>‘s site tonight and noted his excerpts of a seminar given by Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen, who spoke at a techie teach-in down in San Diego.
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They were saying all the usual “news is a conversation” stuff I’ve read a zillion times. I’m nodding along because, of course, they are the leading lights of news blogging and then, out the blue, a flash hit me:
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Nobody’s listening to this stuff except other people like me, and like them. It’s the echosphere of the blogosphere.
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The echo is constant: the people who edit the news we consume are dullards who cannot see the wonder of blogs. They are blind to the magic of participatory journalism, the nirvana of two-way communication between newsies and their audience.
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These dullards<\/i> constitute 90 percent of the newsroom I work in — that is, the nine-tenths of my co-workers who (I presume) have never clicked on this blog. My flash of insight was this: these people are not idiots. They smart, ambitious, hardworking people of good will and earnest intent. I like being around them.<\/p>\n

So it’s hard for me to picture these people who put the paper out every day — the reporters I hear working the phones, the editors I see going over stories with those reporters line by line — as clueless. I think they have other priorities.
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In our preoccupation with the “out there” audience we’ve forgotten the “in here” one. You know, the people we keep telling, “wake up and listen to us, we get it.” How come they haven’t glommed onto the fact that blogs represent a logical online-news distribution model?
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I think it’s because instead of talking to them, we’ve been talking to ourselves. We’ve been big on telling them to listen up, but have we been listening to them?<\/p>\n

There is a deep, abiding resistance to blogging in most newsrooms, and it’s something beyond the aversion to change. Something about this stuff we get such a kick out of troubles them to the core. It could be they’re too busy putting out today’s news to worry about how they’ll put out tomorrow’s.
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In any case, if we want blogging to gain traction in newsrooms, we have to go deeper than the “they don’t get it” bit that’s sustained us thus far. The “out there” audience knows what’s wrong but is powerless to fix it. The “in here” audience has suspicions of its own.
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They’re not the only ones who have to listen up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I stopped by Tim Porter‘s site tonight and noted his excerpts of a seminar given by Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen, who spoke at a techie teach-in down in San Diego. They were saying all the usual…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}