Traditional Media and the Blogosphere in Iowa, Part 1

Because of what I do, I get asked a lot about how the “MSM” — I’ll call it the “traditional media” — approaches blogs in Iowa. Because I think that over the past few months I’ve developed an interesting answer to the question, and because at cocktail parties I am not always as articulate as I’d like to be, I figured I’d sketch an answer here in hopes of starting a broader discussion that involves — at least, on some level — both bloggers and the members of the traditional media.

In my mind, there are really two operative questions involved in this subject:

1. How does the traditional media read blogs?
2. How does the traditional media write blogs?

The duality here is intentional, because the spirit of the blogosphere is communal and reciprocal. The buzzwords are Web 2.0, interactivity, social networking, etc. Publishing a web log means writing good content, but it also means making sure you pay attention to what others are writing and attempt to further the broader discussion.

Here, I address the first of the two questions above. The second will be the subject of a forthcoming post.

So how does the traditional media read blogs? The short answer: frequently but inadequately. (The long, more interesting answer is below the fold.)

I know that members of the traditional media read many, many blogs every day. I am confident that almost every political reporter in the state is familiar with Iowa Independent by now, and that some check it multiple times daily (I single Iowa Independent out merely because I have access to its traffic and pay close attention to how its content is received). I also know that at least a few are reading this post here, which is encouraging.

But stories on blogs — even semiprofessional, nonpartisan ones like Iowa Independent — have failed to infiltrate traditional media coverage in the state in any significant way. I read (and enjoy reading) several of Iowa’s traditional media blogs daily. When I see a piece of analysis that I consider particularly important or interesting, I quote it with attribution and a link back to its author. So do all of the bloggers I know outside the traditional media, and I suspect that the amount of traffic that our links drive to blogs at the Des Moines Register, Radio Iowa, and the regional newspaper sites is significant.

On the other side of the equation, I cannot recall a single time that the traditional media blogs have linked to us. I will not presume the necessary level of omnipresence to claim with certainty that no such linkage has ever occurred, but suffice it to say that it is incredibly rare. Even when, for instance, Iowa Independent provided more comprehensive liveblogging of the Ames Straw Poll than almost any other blog in the country over the weekend (and got linked by national news outlets repeatedly in the lead-up to the event), not a single member of Iowa’s traditional media cited us for any of the stories we broke. Not even a link commending us after the fact.

That said, I’m not whining. Traditional media bloggers link to certain nonprofessional blogs at their peril. Many blogs have been ruthlessly unkind to them, and few may be ready for the kind of scrutiny that traditional media receives every day. I cannot blame someone like Kay Henderson or David Yepsen for their reluctance to even appear to be influenced by content on a blog that, for all they know, may have called for the assassination of cabinet members or something else that’s that kooky a long time ago. It’s a liability, and when you are concerned with syndication, letters to the editor, pressure from management or editors, etc., it might not be worth it to expose yourself to criticism that you are paying attention to the left-wing online mafia.

But that isn’t how the blogosphere works, and no informed internet users think that it is anymore. Links do not imply endorsements. I have often linked to bloggers with whom I almost never agree: anti-science, anti-choice, anti-gay, racist, Republican, and libertarian bloggers are often worth discussing, and so I talk about them and I link to them. The internet democratizes media and communication only because it is a two-way street, and it serves the community best when divergent ideas come into conflict in a public forum.

But beyond the idealism of a Millian “marketplace of ideas,” there remains another reason for the traditional media to participate in — and react to — the rest of the blogosphere, and it is not merely academic: it is in the traditional media’s interests to throw us a bone every once in a while because we are good for a scoop now and again.

Maybe it is a difficult notion for professional journalists to swallow, but bloggers can sometimes do more than traditional journalists can. We do not have restrictive editors or persnickety subscribers, and many of us are able to put a lot of our time into a smaller number of stories than members of the traditional media are. Our reporting is not always perfect, and some of us in the blogosphere do not do any original reporting at all, but when we do come up with something interesting, the traditional media should consider picking up the ball and running with it.

I think we bloggers flatter ourselves with the delusion that the traditional media considers us to be competition, and that that’s why they do not pick up our stories and duplicate our coverage. If they considered us competition they would be picking up all of our stories rather than ignoring us (in print, at least).

The truth is that they don’t consider what we do to be on the same level as what they do. In their mind, it seems, blogging and journalism can only coexist when practiced by someone who is a journalist first and a blogger second. This is a mentality that pervades not merely Iowa’s media establishment but the traditional media landscape nationwide.

In Washington and New York, however, journalists and editors are coming around. My work has been linked by blogs at the New York Times, MSNBC, ABC News, the Atlantic, the Politico, the National Journal, the Hill, Reuters, and on local and regional news sites outside Iowa. Despite that attention, I have never gotten a single link from the traditional media in Iowa.

What is to be done about this?