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Carb news

8 comments on Carb news

Carb news

: Steve Rubel, PR guy and blogger, is promising to read news only on blogs next week. Cute, but I say this is a completely bogus gimmick, a PR stunt without substance (sorry, Steve). The problem is that he won’t click on links to journalists’ stories.

Well, no [honest, sane] blogger would say that we present all the news that’s fit to print on blogs. We edit the news; we select it; we give it perspective; we poke and prod and question it. But we can do all that only because we link to others’ news and source material and only by clicking on those links do you get the complete story. I also assume that people who read blogs are not living in caves and are not idiots and do care about the world and do get news from TV and radio and newspapers and web sites. At this juncture, bloggers do not attempt to give you all the news and so the result of this “experiment” is a foregone conclusion: You won’t get all the news.

: Steve responds in the comments:

Jeff, I appreciate your opinions, as always, but this isn’t a stunt. It’s a true experiment to see if I can use the perspectives offered on weblogs as a window onto the core news delivered in the media. If you read my post I state strongly my belief that the media will always be important. I am simply trying to see if I can get the news I need to live by learning about it all through blogs. Normally, I would definitely click on the news links, but that defeats the purpose of the experiment.

: And I respond:

Sorry, Steve. Love your blog. Don’t agree with you here. I don’t see the “experiment.” Reading blogs and NOT clicking on the links they recommend to you is not reading blogs; it’s tonedeaf to the medium and how it works. Links are essential to blogs and by ignoring them, you’re not performing an experiment that tells you anything about blogs.

Separate from that, I think the apparent hypothesis behind the “experiment” is flawed because you’re assuming that bloggers even try — even as a whole — to give you a full news report. They don’t. When people yell as us for not writing about a given topic, that is what we yell back: We’re not trying to give you all the news. So this becomes self-fulfilling; you will not get some big stories (because they don’t interest the bloggers you happen to read — which is another deciding factor in the “experiment” and because bloggers assume you’ll get commodity news elsewhere).

I don’t object to this in defense of news media. I object to it in defense of bloggers; it misinterprets the medium.

8 responses to “Carb news”

  1. Steve Rubel Avatar
    Steve Rubel

    Jeff, I appreciate your opinions, as always, but this isn’t a stunt. It’s a true experiment to see if I can use the perspectives offered on weblogs as a window onto the core news delivered in the media. If you read my post I state strongly my belief that the media will always be important. I am simply trying to see if I can get the news I need to live by learning about it all through blogs. Normally, I would definitely click on the news links, but that defeats the purpose of the experiment.

  2. billg Avatar
    billg

    An blog-only diet might be an useful way of looking at how bloggers function as editors, if done with some logic and structure. But, I’m with Jeff on this. Trolling blogs for news is very much like our grand-dads asking the gang at the barber shop “What’s in the papers today?”
    Blogs are as much a part of “the media” as anything else, and most bloggers wouldn’t have much to say if they couldn’t bounce off the mainstream media.

  3. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Sorry, Steve. Love your blog. Don’t agree with you here. I don’t see the “experiment.” Reading blogs and NOT clicking on the links they recommend to you is not reading blogs; it’s tonedeaf to the medium and how it works. Links are essential to blogs and by ignoring them, you’re not performing an experiment that tells you anything about blogs.
    Separate from that, I think the apparent hypothesis behind the “experiment” is flawed because you’re assuming that bloggers even try — even as a whole — to give you a full news report. They don’t. When people yell as us for not writing about a given topic, that is what we yell back: We’re not trying to give you all the news. So this becomes self-fulfilling; you will not get some big stories (because they don’t interest the bloggers you happen to read — which is another deciding factor in the “experiment” and because bloggers assume you’ll get commodity news elsewhere).
    I don’t object to this in defense of news media. I object to it in defense of bloggers; it misinterprets the medium.

  4. Trevor Avatar
    Trevor

    Isn’t the point of running an experiment the idea of proving or disproving a theory? Jeff, Steve may agree with you, he’s just doing the work to verify or refute an opinion.

  5. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Trevor: If the hypothesis is flawed, the experiment is flawed.

  6. Steve Rubel Avatar
    Steve Rubel

    Let’s see how I do on the test.

  7. Dexter Westbrook Avatar
    Dexter Westbrook

    This study should confirm this core fact about blogs: They are parasites, more so than anything else.
    “We edit the news; we select it; we give it perspective; we poke and prod and question it.”
    That’s one of the more pompous statements I’ve ever read on any blog.
    More accurate:
    “We see the news on the Internet. We pick out what we think is interesting, and then chew it to death, for our own pleasure and the entertainment of a dozen or so other folks.
    “If other people, mostly the Big Media we spend so much time ridiculing, didn’t do the real work of the news in the first place, we’d have diddly squat to talk about, and NOBODY would pay attention to us.”

  8. TomK Avatar
    TomK

    Dexter:
    “If other people, mostly the Big Media we spend so much time ridiculing, didn’t do the real work of the news in the first place, we’d have diddly squat to talk about, and NOBODY would pay attention to us.”
    Well duh. If there’s no news reporting being done by big media, not only would it give (political) bloggers nothing to talk about, it would kill just about every form of pundit anywhere. And we’d still have the non-political blogs chugging along just fine, too. What, exactly, is your point?