Beantown Becomes Blogtown

At the Democratic convention, online journalism arrives.

In this essay John Fund writes about how blogging is changing the face of news journalism. And indeed it is. The blogsphere is analogous to the world of open source computing. In the world of open source the minds of many thousands or even millions of people are brought together to solve computing problems. Individuals acting on their own become part of a larger collective intellectual structure which can bring tremendous numbers of people and man hours to bear on a problem. The Internet works in the same way. The blogsphere is much bigger and certainly much more intellectually diverse than The Elite Media Monoculture. Where a newspaper may employ a few hundred, the blogsphere is made up of millions of people, many of whom are experts in their respective fields. Journalists simply don't have this level of knowledge of fields other than their own to fall back on, nor do they exhibit intellectual diversity. This is why blogging is here to stay and why it will continue to grow and develop as part of the country's new alternative media.