Over the past few months the blogosphere has increasingly gotten a lot of attention from everyone but especially the media and politicians. We probably never would have even heard the name Jeff Gannon if it were not for the blogosphere and we probably wouldn't have learned about the forged TANG documents were it not for the blogosphere to illustrate events from both sides of the political spectrum.

Just today over at DailyKos is saw two things that really have me excited about the future of the blogosphere. Yesterday someone wrote an open letter to Senate Minority Leader Reid and an impromtu fax campaign was organized. Today we see that he took the time to actually respond directly to the community. Also today, there is a front page entry written by Senator Feingold about campaign finance laws as they apply to bloggers. A debate I started here. As a general rule, if you write your senator or representative you are going to get some generic form letter back thanking you for writing and possibly marginally addressing your issue with a canned response. What we are seeing here is direct responses to a block of voters.

Mike and I were discussing this over IM this morning and his contention was that blogs were not news and the signal to noise ratio is very high (meaning there is a large percentage of garbage out there). He had a few other arguments but I'll let him expand on them himself

My contention was that they absolutely were news because there have been many stories (as illustrated above) that broke there first and probably never would have made it into the mainstream media were the stories not handed to them on a platter. Secondly, the blogosphere is increasingly getting exclusive interviews/comments from important news makers (see examples above). Furthermore, blogs and even things like America's Debate are filled with insightful commentary and analysis. If I read a blog entry or particularly a topic here at America's Debate I'm going to see all the relevant evidence from both sides, analysis and commentary, things proved and disproved and I get to make up my mind based on that. If I read the Washington Post some journalist has already made up his mind for me. I'll choose the former every time.

I'll expand on my positions further in this debate, and without further ado here are the questions for debate:
1. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are a source of legitimate news?

2. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are sometimes a more valuable source than traditional news outlets?

2. Do you believe that blogs and interactive forums like America's Debate which draw participation from the newsmakers themselves are the future?

1. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are a source of legitimate news? The only source of legitimate news is events themselves. Nitpicking aside though, yes, blogs are a legitimate source of information about events, aka "news." They're also just like any other source, subject to human error and folly.

2. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are sometimes a more valuable source than traditional news outlets? With a qualifier like "sometimes", how can anybody disagree? Yes, without a doubt.

3. Do you believe that blogs and interactive forums like America's Debate which draw participation from the newsmakers themselves are the future? THE future, no. A very important part of the "news" matrix in the future, undoubtedly.

1. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are a source of legitimate news?
I must admit I've never read any, but from what others have said about them here and elsewhere they are as much a source of legitimate news as any other person.

To my mind they are equivalent to "sources close to" or "a close friend of" - necessarily anecdotal and somewhat anonymous; even a blog supposedly written by someone famous may be ghost-written by someone else. That may not be a bad thing, in that newspaper editorial columns are not all automatically written by the editor.

But by the same token, such a person may well have access to facts, or just an insight or perspective, that nobody else has, so they might be a genuine source of "news".

2. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are sometimes a more valuable source than traditional news outlets?
Like my motorcycling relative said, the "sometimes" means the answer pretty much has to be "yes". Especially if they have the aforementioned unique perspective.

3. Do you believe that blogs and interactive forums like America's Debate which draw participation from the newsmakers themselves are the future?
I'm less certain about blogs from newsmakers, but how cool would it be if major political figures were personally posting here on AD?

Mind you, given the necessary anonymity of the internet, they could already be here. Since I'd say most of the better debaters are the less anonymous posters, that either means politicians are better actors than most actors, or it doesn't augur well for the state of politics

Which, I think, ultimately is the greatest weakness of the current internet for the newsworth of bloggers (and even the sainted AD!). A key factor of the credibility of other news media is their reputation and credibility, which ultimately (I think) is to do with their accessibility.

If I go to the Canada Tower at Canary Wharf in London I can, if I sit in reception for long enough, meet the editors of the London Daily Telegraph and The Mirror who work there. If I go to Shepherd's Bush in West London, I can sit outside BBC TV Centre until their Political Editor (Andrew Marr) or any other London-based BBC TV broadcaster comes past.

Then, if I disagree with something they've said on air, I can talk to them in person. Under UK law and press industry self-regulation, I even have rights of reply to correct inaccuracies or just complain, and if they have damaged my reputation in any serious way, I can sue them for libel.

But if some blogger says something unpleasant about me personally, or puts up some patent falsehood as news, he or she doesn't usually publish a physical address where I can find them. If I threaten to sue, it's really easy for them to ditch their ISP and disappear, only to reappear in another guise somewhere else (I understand Mike keeps quite busy at times blocking banned ex-members who broke the AD Rules last time they were here from coming back under another name from another IP address).

Ultimately I think we are at the beginning of blogging and internet news - a somewhat similar situation to the 18th and 19th centuries for newspapers, or the 1930s and 40s for TV broadcasters. At the moment, we either find people to pay attention to because we already trust them in another area (hence the success of the news websites of TV or radio companies, for example the BBC) or because we've been recommended them by someone else we trust - the route most of us took to find AD (even if the recommender was Google).

Someone here could be writing the best blog in the world, but unless someone else stumbles across it and starts telling other people about it, they will be talking to themselves.

1. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are a source of legitimate news?

Disagree. Many blogs don't have the kind of fact-checking news sources have, so it's fairly likely that some will make a mistake. Rathergate was an incident of blogs being more reliable, but most blogs have any number of Rathergates, being independent.

2. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are sometimes a more valuable source than traditional news outlets?

Agree. Because when the source can be verified, blogs will tell you things that traditional news sources sometmes gloss over, and sometimes go into more detail on specific subjects than traditional news sources can. For example, look at the gruesome pictures of Iraq in the Boston Globe vs. the optimistic pictures in the average blog.

3. Do you believe that blogs and interactive forums like America's Debate which draw participation from the newsmakers themselves are the future?

Yes. In all honesty, sometimes I wonder why we don't have registered users "Conan the Republican" and "Going to Washington." It would be a good PR move, as well as a valuable way to see what people think of you.

Yes. I think that some are legitimate sources of news; liberal news or conservative news, and in the case of some [shameless plug->] like mine [seen at the bottom of the screen], libertarian news/commentary. Not many blogs just report, we're an editorial page online. And a good amount of them [shameless plug --->] like mine, are pretty good, to excellent.

Agree, I hear about things on blogs that I would never see on the mainstream media.

In a few years, who knows, maybe we'll be hearing about the ConservPat Balanced Budget Bill being proposed in Congress.

Funny you say that, because I'm actually [rips of mask] Ted Kennedy.

CP

I have never thought that blogs should be taken as reliable or serious sources for news updates or events. History has told us that the winner of a war changes history to suit them. I view that the same as almost any media outlet. Because their opinion is the only one advertised it is easy for them to put their own spin on things. Blogs have become places where fear of reprimand, or fear of correction have lost any real meaning. We take into account our own common sense when reading or listening to news but blogs would find ways around our own judgement. I put blogs on the same sort of platform as old World War Two propaganda films. Blogs are a way to get information, but is it the right information? No.

I disagree. Blogs do not check or double-check their sources so it could be easy to say that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were structure designs in the towers themselves as opposed to the truth. Like I said, all blogs are is a way to disperse information that has no real substance and almost always no truth. When we cannot see the person writing or reporting the information I tend to worry because we never know who is on the other end of the screen trying to pass off ill-legitimate information as fact. If their are lies, damn lies and statistics, and the way to measure blogs were on this scale I would have to put them as damn lies.

The fact that countries still do not have television and scarcely have radio means that is it highly unlikely for news to move to the internet. That would be fine for nations like the United States, England, and Japan but I am not so sure as to how effective it would be. So no, I do not think that interactive forums are the future.

1. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are a source of legitimate news?

That depends a bit on one's definition. Many blogs are just opinion forums and are no more to be trusted than newspaper editorials or Fox News - though they can provide valuable links to online articles around the globe. Some are just gateways to other sources and have little original content at all - though, again, they can be a valuable resource. Others are the logs of actual investigative journalists who assiduously research and source just about everything they publish. Still others, like Daily Kos, are logging communities, with members around the country (and the world) pursuing stories and adding data as it emerges. And most blogs are not related to news at all - they're about knitting or cars or pets or beer.

The more journalistic blogs and some of the better communities are absolutely legitimate sources of news. And they tend to do more fact-checking than your average national daily, weekly newsmagazine, or television broadcast news. They also cover a far broader range of events in vastly more detail and cover those stories that the national media won't touch.

2. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are sometimes a more valuable source than traditional news outlets?

Disagree. The genuine news and political blogs (on both sides) are always a more valuable - and reliable - source than traditional news outlets. Granted, most of them rely (so far) on news gathered by the "professional" media, but the average media news report will rely on a single reporter or crew. Bloggers can base their stories on news gathered by ABC, CNN, Fox News, every local paper in the country, the Times of India, Al Jazeera, China Daily, Smoking Gun, Panapress, Australian Jewish News, the Norwegian Forest Cat Fanciers' Association, their sister-in-law who works for Citibank - and news culled by other bloggers. And with most blogs, you can check their sources - not so with broadcast or print news.

3. Do you believe that blogs and interactive forums like America's Debate which draw participation from the newsmakers themselves are the future?

Nope. They are the present. Not only are they already a more comprehensive and accurate source of news, they are also one of the few remaining breeding grounds for activism - whether they are the MeetUp type events which got Howard Dean so much support last year or letter-writing, petition, and boycott campaigns online. When a coalition can be formed between members of communities as diverse as Daily Kos and Free Republic to oppose the bankruptcy bill, it's time for politicians to start taking notice. And the rest of us should be ahead of them - as we usually are.

1. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are a source of legitimate news?

Just to expand on my thoughts in the initial post, I very much believe they are. Now as Wertz just pointed out, not all blogs are good sources of news. In fact as he stated there are plenty of blogs out there about knitting, personal events, and there are even blogs written for pets these days.

Perhaps I should have qualified the question to say "political" blogs instead because that is really what I meant. And in regards to Mike's signal to noise ratio comments in my opinion there are only certain political blogs which are relevant. If you take the universe of political blogs you are going to have everything from quality sites like DailyKos, Mother Jones, Wonkette, etc all the way down to people who just copy and paste articles from the news and offer a little commentary or even those that make things up.

But I think that it is undeniable that some of the stories in recent memory have been broken exclusively through political blogs and average people researching the information that is out there. The two examples I gave were this whole Gannon/Guckert affair and also the TANG memos during the election. Blogs have also been virtually the only source of news for things like the blackbox voting crusade led by Bev Harris and they have helped to discredit groups like USA Next before they even have a chance to get big. If people had paid more attention initially to SBVfT when they started, perhaps their impact could have been greatly minimized and they could have been discredited.

2. Do you agree or disagree that blogs are sometimes a more valuable source than traditional news outlets?

I suppose I sort of got into this above by the mere fact that blogs do break stories first, especially recently. There are a few other reasons I think they are often more valuable than traditional news sources.

1) Blogs and especially forums like AD present all of the original research right along with commentary for you to evaluate and form your own conclusions. If I'm a completely disconnected third party and I'm reading a thread in AD on Social Security Reform or a diary over at DailyKos then I get all the information out there to interpret for myself (and in the case of AD from both sides). If you read an article in the paper then you are only getting what the journalist thinks is important and you really have no way of knowing whether they are selectively reporting something based on individual bias.

2) Blogs and forums present lots of analysis and commentary. When I read something that is "news" like an event that just happened, I'm far less interested in the actual event then I am in the lines of thought on both sides of the aisle and what people are saying.

3) For most blogs they are clearly written with a certain political bias. In my opinion that is handy because it is sort of like customizing your news to what you are likely to care about. It would be like setting up a profile on CNN.com stating you were liberal/democratic and getting stories likely to be important to you first.

For all those reasons and more I always stop by my favorite blogs written for various political persuasions and AD before I ever hit any traditional news site. In fact I generally just use these traditional sites to confirm stories.

3. Do you believe that blogs and interactive forums like America's Debate which draw participation from the newsmakers themselves are the future?

I think that they are (obviously ). Politicians have used the internet in previous elections but it wasn't really until this past election that the internet became a highly important communication medium. There were more than a few instances where information was communicated there first before it hit any traditional outlets.

I have also increasingly seen the newsmakers themselves actively putting out information on the web through blogs as a first priority. I gave several examples above, but there are many more and quite a few people running for the house of representatives had blogs over at DailyKos during the last election.

I think that eventually we are going to see the national debate being carried out in places like AD. You'll have ordinary citizens discussing issues of policy with staff members from politicians (or politicians themselves, who knows).

The notion that traditional/mainstream media is superior at fact checking than blogs is a myth. Counter-intuitive perhaps, but a myth. The New York Times has superior fact checking resources than any single blogger. (Whether or not the Times employs those resource is another question, for another thread) However, the sheer number, breadth and volume of the blogosphere dwarfs the MSM. Much of it is as relevant to political reporting as the NYT Book Section (oops, bad example. ), but the blogosphere as a whole has just as much or more political reporting going on than the MSM.

Another aspect, or more accurately, illusion being perpetrated here is that there's no fact checking going on with blogs. That's pretty much the stupidest thing to pass through this thread. While its true that Blogger X may not spend a whole lot of time checking his facts, if he wants to be a "heavy hitter" in the Blogosphere, he'll start doing so for a simple reason.

Other bloggers will be checking! Everything David Frum at National Review, or David Horowitz at FrontPage, says is going to be scrutinized by the squeaking moonbats at DailyKos. Nothing passes through Free Republic or the Democratic Underground without intense examination by the hardcore elements on both sides.

Fisking is a pretty aggressive, and effective form of fact checking. Of course, if you only partake of the moonbat juice over at DailyKos, or the rabid foaming of the Anti-Idiotarian Rotweillers, then you're responsible for not being fully informed.

An interesting comment on this subject from Markos over at DailyKos. Just as a bit of background Chris Daly is one of San Francisco's supervisors and has a running feud with the SF Chronicle. I hadn't actually thought about it this way but it is an interesting concept and furthers the idea of blogs as news, especially when written by newsmakers.