The whole truth about television or why blogs and social media win the battle

New wave

People often talk about blogs and social media as about new journalism, which will replace the old “professional” one. The Internet has become a field where everyone can become a journalist, where User-generated-content, based on self-organization and self-filtration, clears off the chaff and fills the widest information field, when the Internet community is a self-contained mechanism for creating and distributing any information when in disputes Truth is born, and the forces of good no longer prevail over the powers of the mind.

Vague doubts

However, in all this magnificence can be questioned, based on many prerequisites. Still, it is clear that a million monkeys in a million years will not write "War and Peace." It is clear that journalism is a profession that is taught in prestigious universities, in which people work for many years, accumulating experience and connections, using expensive equipment and wide opportunities offered by the crust of the First Channel journalist. After all, any large media is a large organization in which there is more than one level of verification of a released candidate. Previously, I also doubted that blogs and social communities (the same Habr) will be able to replace a full-fledged editorial media in terms of content.

The fog clears

Doubts began to disappear 3 years ago, when “Habr” became more interesting, more informative and more visited than “Webplanet” left by Denis Kryuchkov, rotting from Lyeha's bile, a strange editorial policy. Well, it's not about that. Recently, doubts about the adequacy of professional journalism have only intensified, reinforced by just the same fabulous examples, for which no need to go far. It is enough to glance at the Humor on Habré blog and laugh, or even cry over the plots illustrated with ASCII articles through the eyes of ordinary people or Hacker attacks through the eyes of the first channel . And if you recall the history of the earthquake in Tahiti, Haiti and many similar ones, it becomes quite sad. So why are the media so often talking nonsense? Do they consciously want to deceive someone, or is it just the costs of mass production and banal slovenliness? I am sure that in most cases (we do not take into account the “jeans” and following the political course) there is no conscious desire to deceive someone. The main reason is that the same people who have a journalism education but poorly represent the sphere they are reporting on are taking pictures on a topic set by the authorities. This is logical, the journalist cannot be an expert in any field, and the topics of reports cover all possible areas of life.
')

Who is guilty?

What does a standard journalist do when he needs to make a report about a particular phenomenon? That's right, he is looking for experts in this field and interviews them. And why experts are also often not the most successful? For many reasons:

• Journalists do not understand anything in the topic on which they are preparing a report, be it IT, anime, or Petrick filters. Those. understanding them is not enough even to find and select good experts and ask them the right questions.
• Even with such an understanding, focusing on a wide audience does not allow one to delve into professional jungle. Actually, the journalist has no incentive to show everything as correctly and reliably as possible and to dig especially deeply. He does not understand anything in this topic, the authorities do not understand, the audience understands even less. I also don’t care if the symmetry of the electrofusion interactions in the Higgis field is violated, it’s enough for me to know that the Boson has not been found yet, and most of us don’t care.
• Attempting to avoid accusations of one-sided presentation of the material and the desire to make a show at the expense of the controversy often leads to the fact that the “alternative opinion” of the professing amateur is equal to the scientifically grounded opinion of a real expert / scientist.
• Often the community around the topic being described does not want publicity and dissemination of information about itself. Or they simply understand that journalists, because of their incompetence, will once again distort and vilify them, so real experts do not want to be interviewed, and their place is immediately taken by less competent individuals who want to promote themselves or their own, not always adequate, ideas.
• Lack of screen time and time to prepare a report: often the list of questions is not set in advance, an interview is taken with one duplicate, then cut off to a minute of screen time, because The whole report has 5 minutes, but you need to make an introduction, show a beautiful picture and a couple of other experts.
• The format of live communication itself (whether it is an interview or a talk show) is not very convenient for experts. Not everyone is able to express their thoughts in real time as beautifully as on paper and in front of a television camera. Read the same written in advance is also not possible.
• Weak feedback from the audience. The article on Habré receives hundreds of comments, publication in a journal with a circulation of 50 thousand copies. no more than a couple of letters from readers. Well, after watching the report on TV in general it is not clear where to turn, the journalist’s e-mail is not often indicated, and a very small percentage of the audience wants to go to the TV channel’s website and write something on the forum.

We are ours, we will build a new world

It is clear that in the specialized paper publications more and more adequately, weeks on TV. IXBT magazine will not write nonsense about computers if everything is so turned on them. But even here everything is not so good, when in the world-famous scientific journals such as Science and Nature someone jokes for the sake of publishing a pseudoscientific nonsense generated by the analogue of Yandex. Spring (I exaggerate, but there was a close case).
Online media have even more opportunities, they can correct the already published material, the most advanced can take advantage of sociality and to some extent combine the UGC with the editorial approach, for example, by co-editing wiki documents by several authors or ranking the users by users, but not all , but only having the status of an expert in this field. Actually, the complex combined multi-level structure of rights to create and edit content is what Wikipedia is headed for, and then many online media will come, starting with progressive Digg and Habr and ending 10 years later, with ribbon.ru, which has only recently introduced comments to articles.

Yes, blogs and social media are also a bunch of incompetent people talking about what they don’t know. And this article is "from the same opera", because I am not a media expert, I have never worked on television, only gave interviews a couple of times and published a couple of articles in magazines. But still, in the bulk, people write about what is interesting to them. About what they understand or sincerely want to understand. They write quite deliberately, because A blog is a media of one person who would be ashamed of the bullshit. At the same time, social content filtering mechanisms, such as blog ratings, karma (voting for what is appropriate), the possibility of commenting, etc., work quite effectively, continuously evaluating both content authors and their individual materials.

Summary

Perhaps that is why in the Gordon Quixote program dozens of invited experts speak about banality or something controversial about the dollar, while alexsword though distorts facts and statistics, but at least operates with them, and not with incomprehensible sentences. Public understanding also serves as a good service for blogs that you can write anything on a blog and information should be checked with at least banal Google. Just as on the contrary, the poor service of television is served by its venerableness and the faith of the people that, even if censorship is possible there, they speak only the truth out of politics. About possible banal incompetence, few people think.