Mike Arrington made journalists mad.
I once told someone there was no such thing as a bad experience if you were a writer. As long as you got a good story to tell, you won out in the end.
Mike Arrington felt he had a bad experience when he went to the Online News Association conference last weekend. His own telling shows that he certainly didn't hold back his punches.
Mike should realize that Mainstream media is generally defensive. Blogs are trying to take away their immediacy. Politicians play them with one hand and slap them with the other. Liberals think the media is too conservative. Conservatives think it's too liberal. Advertisers want to pull out if they think a story will have a negative reaction.
Mainstream media also stings from criticism that that they don't know what they are talking about. Which Mike plainly said. Which is easy for Mike to say as he has an industry blog. You won't see stories in Techcrunch about paper mill workers on strike or the value of a school lunch.
Mainstream media hates that criticism - that they don't know what they are talking about. But they hate it because they know it is unfortunately often (not always or even most of the time) true. Mainstream media has taken press releases I've sent them, put a by-line by a staff writer on them and printed them verbatim. Why? Because I write a good press release.
Mike chastised them for making new that was "old". He said they print things a day later that he sees in blogs immediately. Well great. But that's a crappy argument. On News.google or CNN, I get breaking news. So that doesn't wash. It's a red herring. I would like to see bloggers write about something that happened more than five minutes ago because it would mean they actually remember what happened more than five minutes ago.
But Mike is right on the conversation issue and why is that important? Because conversation refines information. Mainstream media is about information dissemination - not refinement. Blogging is about refinement. Without mainstream media, blogging has nothing to refine. Both Mike and the ONA should recognize that blogging and mainstream media is symbiotic.
They both have big big weaknesses. But that's because they are run by people. Sweaty, error prone, people. God love 'em.
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