Weblogs and journalism

Jeff Jarvis, president and creative director of Advance.net (his Weblog), which runs Web sites for Newhouse newspapers, on the Internet and Weblogs:

"The internet is the first medium owned by the audience."

He said interactivity is vital for his chain's newspaper sites: During high-school wrestling season, a forum on nj.com could get 250,000 page-views a day. The papers are now looking at how to use Weblogs - he wrote a war Weblog during the Iraq war, for example.

"Weblogs to me are the highest form of audience content."

"A forum is like Saturday night at the bar. ... Nobody's going to remember you the next morning. On a Weblog, you're crapping on your neighbor's lawn."

"There's not a lot of money to be made. ... The real reason we're doing it is because it's so darn cheap." He says Advance will try to offer Weblogs to small advertisers, such as restaurants. Nano-media, such as Gawker, I think will be a success," although success is relative - they succeed because their costs are so low.

What makes them better:

* Speed, "I know it before (Couric and Lauer) know it."
* Variety: We are not locked into one newspaper.
* Interactivity: Interactivity brings quality. I love my comments.

But, he added: "Weblogs are nothing magical. It's just a tool."

Elizabeth Spiers, editor of Gawker, which is a New York gossip site:

"A few of the publications are a little bit antsy about what the blogs are doing to their businesses."

"I have editors sending me gossip items about each other. It's just hysterical."

She ignores most press releases.

Vin Crosbie, managing partner, Digital Deliverance (his Weblog) on journalism:

A lot of media people "are really scared or dismissive about blogs right now," he said, pointing to a recent posting on the online-news mailing list comparing blogs to mood rings and pet rocks.

"It'll probably take them a couple of years for them to understand it, for it to sink in," he said.

Big mistake, he said: Thoreau, Lewis and Clark, Darwin and others who all published what were daily journals. "You can bet your ass they would be online, blogging. ... Can you imagine if Lewis and Clark photoblogged?"

Keeping a journal - and trying to publish it - is natural, he said: "'Journalism' comes from 'keeping a journal.' "

"So, yeah, this (Weblogs) is journalism. It's personal journalism, which is the way journalism originally was."

If nothing else, media companies should do blogging as a defensive measure - to protect their market share from independent Weblogs. They also provide a service - and immediacy - to users. But is there any profit? "If you're a trade journal, yeah, you really can do this," but the picture's less clear for general-interest publications.

Crosbie said the ability of people to create narrow communities of interest on the Internet is going to force changes in mass media: "We're going to have a revolution really over the next ten years. ... Blogging is just simply another manifestation of that. It's creating a major problem for media, much like how the Industrial Revolution changed society."