To Their Surprise, Bloggers Are Force for Change in Big Media

From Online Journalism Review

A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic's query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers' scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism.

Mark Glaser
Posted: 2004-05-26

Blogger Robert Cox tried everything he could do to get The New York Times to change its ways. After he read an incorrectly abridged quote in a Maureen Dowd column last year, he tried in vain to get a correction in the paper. He vented, he raged, he rallied the blogosphere and even some other newspapers. But in the end, his parody of the Times' correction page -- and the overreaction from the Times' legal department -- got the newspaper to change its policy.

And Cox isn't the only blogger who's made waves recently. Australian blogger Tim Blair unearthed a fabricated quote by Chicago Tribune correspondent Uli Schmetzer, whose career at the paper ended shortly thereafter. And blogger Patrick Frey, aka Patterico, helped counter a series in the Los Angeles Times about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's conflicts of interest with a front-page L.A. Times story on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's own conflict.

[...]

And one role bloggers have been playing is as ideological watchdogs on Big Media, as most of the bloggers mentioned in this article are more conservative folks who see a liberal bias in the newspapers they read with a fine-tooth comb each day.

[...]

Though these are cases of Big Media bowing to the influence of bloggers, few people believe bloggers have reached widespread public credibility. Rosen says that Weblogs are slowly gaining some influence and some respectability. "What's clear from these cases is that news organizations will have to interact with bloggers who have hold of something newsy," he said. "And there's no doubt bloggers can break stories and will do more of that in the future ... The larger effects may be on bloggers' credibility among journalists."

Frey himself was realistic about each blogger's individual influence, though the echo effect can help spread the word of a media misdeed in a nanosecond.

"There is no single blog that has power comparable to that of a major daily paper like the L.A. Times," he said. "There's just no comparison between the circulation of any individual blogger -- even Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit -- and that of a newspaper like the L.A. Times. However, when you look at blogs in the aggregate, I do think that blogs are potentially revolutionary. All you need is a computer, a viewpoint and the ability to express it. If your opinion is original, well-written and contributes to the discussion, there's a good chance that it will be noticed."

I and most bloggers are nowhere near the caliber of these guys but like the last line says you can get noticed and make a difference. Here is a copy of an email from the BBC retracting a story after I blogged and complained about it.

Dear Mr Landers,
Many thanks for your e-mail regarding Jo Wilder's [Wilding's] piece on the 'Iraq: Your experiences' page. All e-mails on our pages are vetted before publication, however her background had not been made clear to us and, therefore, we have now removed it from the piece.

Many thanks for drawing our attention to this oversight and we apologise if we have misled you on the issue. I hope this does not prevent you from reading our site in the future.

Kind regards,

Sarah Brown
Broadcast Journalist
BBC News Online
www.bbcnews.com
sarah.brown.01@bbc.co.uk