Chapter 7 – What the Crowd Knows: Collective Intelligence in Action – by Jeff Howe

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He is a Wired journalist.

I prefer stuff written by economists like Robin Hanson, Justin Wolfers, Eric Zitzewitz, Koleman Strumpf, David Pennock, etc.

What’s the point of having the mainstream media journalists writing their own stuff when we can cite the people listed above????

I believe in the “In His/Her Own Words” principle.

Enough with the journalists. I’m fed up by them.

The Internet enables us to access directly the people who know. Let’s bypass the journalists. Let’s bulldozer this unnecessary filter.

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[...] It’s true that blogs are capable of bringing down politicians, just like newspapers. But financial blogs don’t have anything like the same kind of influence that the big political blogs have, and as a result newspapers find it easy to ignore them – that’s going to change very slowly indeed. But it will happen, as increasing numbers of financially-literate professionals realize that there’s a whole world of information and analysis out there on the web, and that much of it is of objectively higher quality than the stuff they read in their daily newspaper.

As I say, writing about finance is hard – and bloggers have a huge home-team advantage over most mainstream media in that they don’t feel the need to spell everything out for the sake of readers who might have no idea what a bond is. What’s more, many of them [= the finance bloggers] are financial professionals themselves, and know exactly what they’re talking about. Journalists, by contrast, tend to be arts graduates; many of them are positively petrified every time they see a number. As a result, as any financial news outlet will tell you, it’s really hard to find good financial journalists.

But the biggest gap between professional journalists and bloggers hasn’t even begun to start narrowing. It’s this: professional journalists tend to think of their article as the end of a process of reporting, while bloggers tend to think of their entries as the beginning of a process of commenting.

Once a journalist’s story has been edited and published, he or she is on to the next thing. [*] By the end of the day, the story is lining a cat’s litter-box somewhere. It’s over, and the journalist is hitting the phones, getting the next scoop. There’s no equity in revisiting old pieces, especially given the “no sooner does the ink dry than it revolts me” syndrome – something coined by Jesse Eisinger, paraphrasing Samuel Beckett.

A blog, by contrast, is nothing without reactions – from commenters, from other blogs, even, occasionally, from the mainstream media. Professional journalists simply don’t view their own work in the light of how it’s received by others in the way that bloggers do. They therefore have little interest in using web technology to artificially extend the natural life of any given story. [...]

[*] Exactly. I know that for a fact from observing all the mainstream media journalists I have interacted with.

Most of the popular blogs, all of which started out as one-person shops, have now hired separate sales staff to handle sales. We have, Om has, etc. Hell, that’s the main reason we are working with FM Publishing, so that we don’t have to talk to advertisers directly. They turned out to be the wrong choice – throwing us under a bus as soon as the found it convenient, but it doesn’t change our position on the matter. We’re a small operation, we work 24 hours a day to break stories and write interesting content, and we’re trying to earn enough money to keep these things growing. Something Cooper would never understand. [CNET's Charles Cooper is] a paid journalist who has the luxury of sitting back and opining on others, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s what too many mainstream media journalists do – write about things they don’t know and don’t care about. And that’s why blogs are stealing their page views at an alarming rate. Based on my estimates, the average A-List blogger generates 10x the page views that the average journalist does. Why? Because we’re running our own businesses, because we support each other with linking, and because we care, deeply, about what we are writing about.

Mike Arrington says, in another paragraph, that he doesn’t care about being linked to by CNET News (a news website devoted to the business of the information technology) because it generates small traffic compared to what some IT bloggers (like Om) can deliver. Entirely true. Midas Oracle was linked to by CNET News in May 2007, and we received a fistful of visitors only, compared to thousands of people coming from the economics blog Marginal Revolution.

NEXT: Google Search, the New York Times, and the blogs