Another Link
Milblogger Mudville Gazette has posted up a wrap, with links, to the various sites of soldiers, army medics, military chaplains, and others who were at the secene of the Mosul suicide attack and who blogged about it.
This is the key link in the process that will turn the blog world from a bubbling sea of opinion and observation to a pipeline of information that will supplement, or bypass, the main media outlets. What MG does here is what reporters and editors do at newspapers and TV stations: get the witnesses together, arrange them and their stories, and present the result to the public. The public doesn't have to go out in search of witnesses, individually, to learn what they saw and experienced and thought about it.
In each case, someone sitting in a room thousands of miles from the event is tying together the threads of the story of what happened in that time and place.
The difference is, in the case of what MG did here, About 10 percent of it is him linking them up, and about 90 percent of it is them talking. The framework is his, but the voice is theirs.
In a newspaper article, those proportions likely would be reversed. The framework, the selection of quotes (and pruning within them) and the overarching voice of the piece would be from the anonymous editor or rewrite man in a room thousands of miles from the event.
Which do you think the public cares more about? Which do you think informs it better?
This is the key link in the process that will turn the blog world from a bubbling sea of opinion and observation to a pipeline of information that will supplement, or bypass, the main media outlets. What MG does here is what reporters and editors do at newspapers and TV stations: get the witnesses together, arrange them and their stories, and present the result to the public. The public doesn't have to go out in search of witnesses, individually, to learn what they saw and experienced and thought about it.
In each case, someone sitting in a room thousands of miles from the event is tying together the threads of the story of what happened in that time and place.
The difference is, in the case of what MG did here, About 10 percent of it is him linking them up, and about 90 percent of it is them talking. The framework is his, but the voice is theirs.
In a newspaper article, those proportions likely would be reversed. The framework, the selection of quotes (and pruning within them) and the overarching voice of the piece would be from the anonymous editor or rewrite man in a room thousands of miles from the event.
Which do you think the public cares more about? Which do you think informs it better?
