Bloggers v Journalists Part 1,743,945.

I rather liked Ian Betteridge's take on the perennial "are bloggers as good as real journalists" (Scoble Edition): Sez Scoble:

Journalists who fight this system (and readers who don’t check out the comments) are missing the point. This is a participatory media, not a one-way one, and, while it has a different editing system (the editing is done post publishing, not pre publishing) it’s pretty clear to me that this system arrives at the truth a lot faster than anything on paper does.

But, you gotta read and participate in those comments! Lots of old-schoolers don’t like that dirty work.

All very true, but as Ian notes:

But the problem is that "a story" has a life far, far beyond the original post. For a popular blogger like Scoble, the original words are likely to be picked up and reposted hundreds of times.

Watching the development and correction of stories, there's something interesting that I've always observed. When someone posts something controversial (and wrong) few of the sites which post about that original post also post a correction.

And thus begins a classic network effect. Suppose Robert writes something erroneous, which 1,000 blogs pick up on and post about without correcting. If each of those has 100 readers, that's 100,000 people who believe the original story - and unless Scoble's readership is so huge that it encompasses all that 100,000 AND they correct their own posts, that's a lot of misinformation out there on the web.

This situation is really compounded if the original post comes from someone without a vast readership, but which gets picked up by a well-read blogger. In this case, if the well-read blogger doesn't pick up on the correct, it's likely that the word will never have a chance of getting out - and the original, false information will be far more widely spread.

I don't know what the solution is by the way.....both are right here. In practical terms it probably means blogging will be less trusted than more formal reporting overall (though heaven knows journalism has enough inbuilt biasses), or at the very least readers will learn to know to cross correlate.