No blog better illustrates the power of the blog as a medium than Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog. Marshall and his readers are helping compile a timeline of the events leading up to, during and after Hurricane Katrina. The timeline is compelling reading. Regardless of your politics it would be impossible to read it and not be outraged at the events and lack thereof.
I expect Marshall is achieving more today through the timeline than the enquiries which will follow. He is doing it without spin, transparently and by interacting with his readers and it is this interaction which interests me the most. Interaction is the oxygen of blogging in the area of news. It is what has been missing in mainstream media and what so many obviously crave. Blogging is ‘hot’ because people want to report what they know, challenge what they read and influence the words of history. Blogging allows that.
While you can turn on any of the cable news channels and see stories of anger and frustration at an inadequate and late response from varying levels of government in the United States to Katrina, non which I have seen have offered the power of the list created by Marshall and his readers. Their document makes the case.
As publishers navigate their way to a more interactive relationship with readers, the newspaper supply chain (newsagents here in Australia) needs to embark on a similar journey. For 130 years we have sold news day in, day out and newspaper publishers have published news. Publishers are changing: readers and becoming colleagues – while that metamorphosis may take some time yet, it will happen. In the case of newsagents we have not even begun to collectively contemplate how we must change. Whereas our businesses were once the key consumer connect in the news ‘conversation’, now we’re an aging relative in an overcrowded photo.
What I want is for my newsagency to connect with people as directly and personally as Josh Marshall does in his blog. I want to help people have a voice on matters which concern them. I want to be relevant in this new world.