Washington Post and Slate reporter Anne Applebaum wrote a dismissive column about Wikileaks, saying that they “offer nothing more than raw data.”
Applebaum argues that “The notion that the Internet can replace traditional news-gathering has just been revealed to be a myth. . . . without more journalism, more investigation, more work, these documents just don’t matter that much.”
Fine. But don’t undervalue the role of mere data! The usual story is that we don’t get to see the raw data underlying newspaper stories. Wikileaks and other crowdsourced data can be extremely useful, whether or not they replace “traditional news-gathering.”
Uh, why not? Why can't the internet rival the newspapers in the future? By "internet" I assume they mean blogs and citizen journalism since actual "newspapers" will just be converted into pay-access websites sometime in the near future.
Not too long ago editorials were considered the premier pieces of opinion journalism, now it seems that there are blogs by plenty of people that beat out journalists commentary any day of the week. Economic blogs obviously are much better commentators on economics issues that journalists. We have political science commentary like Monkey Cage. You do random statistical commentary on stories at times. Legal commentary at Volokh etc.
So why such confidence if commentary has been taken over by the blogs that standard journalism can't, at least, be equally well done in the blogs?
Obviously there is a larger barrier to comparable quality reporting then there is commentary since it requires money (travel, wining-and-dining etc), access, etc. But in the future as online mediums become more and more popular, it's not out of the question that bloggers and online journalists (particularly collective groups of bloggers like Huffington Post) could gain enough money and power to have comparable access to compete with traditional newspapers.
Certainly "traditional news gathering" never produced such a trove in all of its history.
Regards,
Bill Drissel
While I don't know enough about Wikileaks to support its existence or not, raw data is great to see in media and the news. So often, news stories misrepresent the studies and findings done. After working in market research, I now know the first question to ask when reading statistics in the media is "How could these numbers be misrepresented?"
Wow quite the non-sequitur! I don't remember ever seeing Wikileaks think of itself as a newspaper or news magazine. It a a place where leaked documents are published. That is, more of a resource for newspapers. I don't ever remember a newspaper claiming that. I am old enough to remember the Pentagon papers.
This totally defensive reaction from print reporters is really tiresome, if understandable.
Here, here!
Among other things, it would be nice if newspaper's provided links to primary source data and peer-reviewed papers so we could decide for ourselves …