Ken vs. the City

Oh my goodness. I just watched the season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica. This show is truly the greatest thing on television. The storytelling chops of producer Ronald D Moore, writer Mark Verheiden, and director Michael Rymer. The elusive final five Cylons were revealed in a trippy battle preparation sequence set to Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower. The end was all cliffhanger that left you simultaneously slapping yourself on the forehead and raising your fist in a salute to the awesomeness about to fall.

My only fear is that they will find Earth next season only to find that it’s 1980.

This nerd pretty much sums up the reaction that most fans of the show had:

Today Malaysian minister Zainuddin Maidin told local newspapers that they should not quote from blogs or use them as sources because most of them have an agenda. “Do not quote them because you are disgracing yourself as you are the authority. Do not give credit to such anarchist websites.”

Is he right? Are blogs as a form of media inherently biased and “unworthy” of inclusion in the regular world of journalism?

While I agree that a lot of blogs carry a certain bias, and most blogs lack the editorial oversight employed by most traditional publications (fact checking, a nose for news, etc.), to lump them all together under one roof like that is a little short-sighted. Off the top of my head I can think of three reasons a traditional publication would explicitly want to cite a blog as a source.

1. A personal blog lends insight into a story. If a person involved in a story kept a blog, I sure as hell would want to know what was in it. To keep that from the public would be a serious breach of journalistic integrity. Including it as a source would give insight into their motivation and personality.

For examples, serial killer Joseph Edward Duncan kept a very disturbing blog called the Fifth Nail in which he described his fantasies and crimes. Disgraced Japanese businessman Takafumi Horie used his personal blog to proclaim his innocence when he was accused of securities fraud.

2. A business blog announces some new service or product. Google does this all the time and actually forgoes the traditional press release in most cases. Last week the Official Google Blog confirmed that Google was indeed entering the in-game advertising industry with the purchase of a company called AdScape.

3. A news blog is the first one to break a story. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch is a good example, reporting tech industry news before most other blogs or news outlets even know there’s a story brewing. As far as I know, he was the first one to report that photo sharing service FilmLoop had been sold out by its investors. It’s common courtesy in a traditional publication to name the media outlet or reporter that originally broke the story.

As with all sources, you have to make sure what you read on a blog is true. Blogs have to avoidlibel as much as main stream media, but most of them don’t have the resources to check the facts and make sure everything is accurate. Main stream outlets do.

Zainuddin was upset because Malaysian bloggers accused certain government officials of corruption. Those stories were later picked up by the main stream media. Today’s blogs are like the newspapers of the 19th century. Some deal exclusively in sensationalism, while others are right on the money. Malaysia is a Muslim nation that maintains a fragile compromise between secular and Sharia law. A certain amount of care is required. As a journalist you have to approach a story in a strange blog with a little bit of healthy skepticism, but to dismiss them all with the wave of the hand is simply bad journalism.

It seems like only yesterday that USAToday.com was your typical newspaper site. There were articles and you read them. I visited from time-to-time to see what original stories there might be on a given day, but it was not one of my regular destinations. The national paper’s multicolored design, created to contrast with the black-and-white papers common in the early 1980’s, carried over into USAToday.com, giving it a somewhat garish appearance that pulled the eye away from a lot of the actual journalism.

The new USAToday.com, launched last week, is much cleaner. The pictures are larger, the important stories are more noticeable. They have still made some really bizarre ad placement choices, but overall the visual improvement is impressive. I really like some of the smaller details like the placing each article’s age and other relevant data consistently near the title. They’ve also implemented category tags (strangely placing them in the middle of each article), which I have not yet found particularly useful, but it’s nice to have them.

As a property of the Gannett newspaper publishing group, USAToday has the advantage of being able to pull stories from other Gannett papers to appear alongside original stories, instead of relying too much on newswire services like Reuters and the Associated Press. Newswire services are one of the problems with online news. Not that they provide poor stories or anything, but they’re used by so many different news outlets, and any news search on a national or world topic will bring up fifty identical stories from fifty different newspapers. Sometimes the clutter is just too much.

The new USAToday.com layout gives more prominent positioning to original stories in the front page’s “Only on USA TODAY” section. The site’s “On Deadline” blog also now takes up half the screen if you click on the “News Notes” tab. Also in the right-hand column I noticed stories from the Arizona Republic and the Detroit Free Press, both Gannett papers. There were of course the obligatory newswire stories, but it’s nice to see that there are still some staff left in those cash-strapped newsrooms.

USAToday.com has also added a whole bunch of social features. Users can now leave comments, digg-ishly vote for stories so they appear in the “Most Popular” section, recommend stories to other USAToday.com readers, blog about stuff, and upload their own news photos. The voting thing is cool, and is not a rip-off of Digg. It will be interesting to see how the commenting goes. I think it’s a great idea for a newspaper as long as they’re obviously different from the companion article. Comments will need to be moderated, which means someone at USAToday.com now has an extra job.

Normally I would consider most of these social features, especially blogging and photo uploading, useless clutter. Who wants to sign up for yet another free account when there’s already services like Blogger, MySpace and Flickr? I’m still not sure what a reader of USA Today will get out of having yet another blog or yet another place to upload photos, but a site profile is a good way to keep track of a user’s comments and “Recommendations.” For the site owners, it may also be a way to get people coming back more frequently.

I’ve signed up for an account. I doubt I’ll be blogging from USAToday.com, but I bet these new features will send me back to the site more often than simply “from time-to-time.”