I’m a bit behind-the-fold in replying to Ethan Zuckerman’s Halloween afternoon post about media coverage of the FreeCulture@NYU DRM protest, but it relates to a sister chapter of FreeCulture.org, and our discussion of the situation at last Wednesday’s FreeCulture chapter meeting here at Harvard got me thinking a bit about the future of blogs and journalism, so I figured better late than never.

Lest I commit exactly the sin which Ethan is protesting against, I want to make it clear that I, and I suspect all of FreeCulture at Harvard and even FreeCulture at NYU, really do think what’s going on in Sudan appalling. The egregious, widespread violations of human rights are, obviously, incredibly serious, and they deserve our attention as citizens, the attentions of our press, and the attentions of our government. Having said that, I think Ethan is walking down a difficult road in comparing two uncorrelated evils, even given the evident disparity in their magnitudes. Were it the rather bizarre case that we were forced to choose between DRM on our CDs and continued genocide in Africa, I’d like to believe the decision would be rather easy; however, this is not the way of the world. Ethan’s suggestion sounds suspiciously like one that Peter Singer put forth in a 1999 New York Times Magazine article in which he observed that every time we eat a fancy dinner instead of donating money to UNICEF we are, in some sense, committing murder.

This is not, however, a question I consider myself fully equipped to discuss, nor is it the most interesting component of Ethan’s argument. That honor is reserved for his comments on what I’ll call “journalistic responsibility” - the expectation we have of reporters and commentators that they’re telling us the whole story, and about everything that ought to be important to us.

This is, I think, something which substantively distinguishes blog media from print media. The New York Times certainly knows its audience - it’s had it’s fair share of articles about what’s panning out to be a rather dull New York mayoral election - but it’s also obviously deeply cognizant of its broader role in informing the masses. The Public Editor writes fairly regular columns discussing questions of scope and balance in Times coverage (he even has a web log), though oftentimes at least of late his columns have focussed more on the methods of Times reporters than on the breadth of the paper’s articles. Perhaps the best example of the Times organization thinking quite closely about such things is this amazing note from May of 2004, in which Times editors reflected back on the paper’s shoddy reporting regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war. They also issued a critique of their coverage in the form of a collection of their stories, indicating where they felt they’d been too sparse or too lax in their investigative methods.

In one sense, the “blogosphere” (a term I absolutely abhor) has this feature built in - indeed, Ethan’s post is an example of the reflective power of the community, as is, I suppose, this post (how very… meta…). Bloggers are some of the most self-aware of any journalists (apart, perhaps, from Judith Miller): a Google blog search for the word “blog” yields dozens of blog posts written about blogging.

The effect, however, isn’t quite the same. Ethan’s blog is great but it doesn’t have a readership as large as BoingBong’s, and he talks frequently about Africa so he is in some sense preaching to the choir in lamenting the continent’s poor ‘blogosphere’ visibility (there’s that word again). His position must be a frustrating one in large part for precisely the reasons he describes: if the most popular sites heeded his pleas and started covering international politics in the way he (rightly) identifies as very important, it seems possible that their readership, by and large interested in some very specific set of topics, might migrate elsewhere.

The very features that make blogs an appealing alternative to traditional journalism - the ground-up grassroots anyone-can-say-anything infrastructure - also contribute to the inadequacies of the medium. Trackbacks, pingbacks, technorati - all these things turn an ad hoc community of voices into a powerful unified community… but a headless one. The important decisions of what blogs top what lists and what posts show up where are made soullessly by machines and algorithms, based on what are probably best described as “market factors.” The trouble is that the blog community isn’t a balanced market - it is, by and large, a market of geeks and techies with strong opinions on a great many things but strongest opinions on a select few. And so, time and time again the top blogs on technorati include the Daily Kos, but always it’s flanked by BoingBoing and Engadget and Gizmodo and CopyrightTechnoGadgetryAgainstTheDMCABlog.

I don’t mean to indict any particular blogger. There are lots of people out there doing great things - many more by orders of magnitude than there even could have been 5 or 10 years ago. But if blogging is really going to make it - if it’s going to be considered not just a “rising star” in the journalism world or a novelty premium-charge item on the home-page of a strapped-for-cash media giant, but rather a mainstream institution like evening newscasters and CNN that even my parents and technologically illiterate English-major friends read - then those of us in the blogging community (and many are way more entrenched in it than I am) are going to have to sit down and figure out how we can ensure two things. One is that we cater to the interests not just of the ‘poleis’ (to co-opt Ethan’s language) of which we are already members but also better to those of the poleis that haven’t yet adopted blogging as a source for news and commentary.

That’s not enough, though. We also need a system, likely one run by people, though perhaps a collective of people a la Wikipedia, of accountability of coverage. It needs to be the case that people are watching each other and making sure that, while people that should care about DRM protests (and maybe everyone should) see adequate coverage of DRM protests, people that should care about political unrest and human rights issues in Africa (and again, it’s likely everyone should) find out about those things as well.

It’s folly to expect all of this from BoingBoing or Gizmodo - their publishers have their areas of interest and their readers have come to expect information about those topics. Still, maybe we need someone else - some combination of Technorati and Google News and Wikipedia’s front page, which aggregates the words of bloggers not just in a popularity contest but in some deeper way that gives preferences to stories in deference to the extraordinarily delicate question of what sorts of things are genuinely important. Am I sure this is possible? Absolutely not, but at the very least we ought to be looking to do it as well as do the better print papers, or the BBC: only then can bloggers count themselves as a viable alternative to traditional journalism, and not just as valuable addition to it in some (growing) subset of fields.