February 8, 2008
What we cover
My fellow Fellow, Persephone Miel, wonders why bloggers are not all over a juicy story like NPR’s piece on Fort Drum advising veterans away from benefits (to oversimplify the situation). That story seems to have it all. Yet hardly any bloggers have picked it up.
She writes:
Here is where the “cream will rise to the top” theory crashes and burns. In addition to being well-reported by an award-winning reporter at a reputable news organization, this story has everything: it’s political, it’s potentially useful to vets who might have been denied benefits unfairly, it builds on the Walter Reed story, it’s ideally suited to citizen journalism (someone needs to find the other 10 hospitals visited by the deserves-to-be-infamous Col. Becky Baker and find out what she said there). But except for the Army’s public clarification with regards to Fort Drum, I’m betting it sinks without a trace into the blood-dark sea of election horse-race commentary. I hope someone proves me wrong.
This new media ecology is so complex, and such a rich field for study and research. (Not entirely by coincidence, Persephone is putting together a conference on researching participatory media.) For example, we look to mainstream media to provide coverage. Bloggers generally don’t feel the obligation to report on something just because it deserves to be reported on. The factors influencing what we blog about are shifting, personal, and multidimensional. We may surface a story that we think has gotten insufficient coverage because we think it’s so important or because we think it’s quirky and under-reported. We may provide a viewpoint that we think is interesting (and thus not obviously common) or we may express outrage if we feel we need to weigh in. But we may not blog about a story that meets some of these criteria because we’re tired of writing about outrages, because we wrote about one yesterday, because we have nothing to add to it, because it deserves more work than we’re willing to put into it, because we think it’s being adequately covered by the MSM or mainstream bloggers, or because we have to go to the parent-teachers’ conference. There are as many reasons not to blog about something as there are for not talking about them.
It’s like reading a newspaper at the breakfast table. Which stories cause you to look up and say to your spouse, “Wow, it says here…”? You’re not covering the news. You’re talking about what strikes you as worth talking about…and what’s worth talking about isn’t the same as what’s worth knowing. The “It says here” interruption assumes coverage exists.
So, I agree that the cream doesn’t rise to the top of the blogosphere, where “cream” means “most important for an informed citizenry to know.” Coverage has been a property of institutions. It’s not at all clear that it can be a property of networks, or that a coverage system will emerge from a network of bloggers doing intentional or incidental journalism.
