Nice letter received yesterday from a gungho library fan down in Larose, Louisana, who says a newspaper story to which I linked did not give the full picture. Check out my followup at the bottom of the original item on library-related gouges.
Interesting lessons arise here on the limitations of blogging. Other TeleBlog contributors and I will try to link to good publications, but we can’t police them in advance for accuracy, fairness or completeness. Especially when it comes to local stories, we’re at the mercy of whatever the reporter chooses to write from the scene. Blogs are useful as information filters, but should never be considered a substitute for conventional media.
Here at the TeleBlog, we link to a mix of both conventional and not-so-conventional sources but do our best to go for the most factual, whether they’re newspapers or blogs or radio networks. This appreciation of credible news sources, as blog grist, is one reason why we’ve been pushing for NPR not to fetter itself or Webfolks with stupid linking policies. Bad news for the level of discourse. Carrying the concept further, you can see the advantage of enriching the Net with thousands of books online to which bloggers and other Web publishers can send use stable links to direct surfers. Not that TeleRead or a perfect NPR linking policy would have saved us from linking to the botched news story from Larose. But you get the idea.
Meanwhile, speaking of the relationship between blogs and the conventional media, news consultant Steve Outing has just come out with a column suggesting that news organizations make blogs available to any reporter or photographer who wants one. Remember, blogs can carry pictures, too.
Great idea, just so the blogs augment conventional news stories but do not replace them. As Steve points out, however, reporters do notebook dumps anyway and hoard surplus material, so why not make it public?
An aside: It goes without saying that many of the TeleBlog links and maybe even most will not go to any news organization or even a quasi-news organization. Notice? Today I linked everywhere from Jack Valenti’s official bio–no, I cannot and will not verify the veracity of the facts there–to the home page of the Larose Chamber of Commerce. That just happens to be the nature of the Web. No endorsement implied. I myself prefer to see source material, not just predigested information from news organizations, even if it may be flawed.
