Nicholas Lemann’s Big Head is Full of the Wrong Information

I knew that the blogosphere was going to be buzzing from the second that I started reading Nicholas Lemann’s piece about the new media in The New Yorker this weekend. I wish that I could have posted sooner, but I’ve been without Internet access on Long Island for the past few days. I am currently blogging from a coffee shop on Columbus Circle in The City (is there any other?), so here goes…

The main problem with Lemann’s article is that he thinks he’s making a big point about an issue that has, in fact, already been settled. The blogosphere and the MSM are complimentary forms of media. They enhance one another and keep one another honest. But bloggers will never replace reporters, and I don’t think there’s very many of us who would even like to try.

Lemann cites the statistic from the recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that only 34% of bloggers consider what they do to be journalism. Yet he stubbornly presses on with his argument that bloggers will never replace the media as if this were a revelation.

But despite that glaring problem, I took the most issue with Lemann’s unfavorable comparison of bloggers to the early pamphleteers of later Stuart Britain and post-Revolutionary America:

They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.

The comparison shows just how off base Lemman’s understanding of the blogosphere really is. Has he not heard of The Long Tail, or is he just playing dumb?

Most bloggers have a very small, niche audience. That’s what blogs are good for. We’re not trying to be newspapers with wide circulation. We’re providing little nuggets of content that describes our individual experiences with a particular piece of the world at a particular time. When put together, and tagged (or microformatted) appropriately, those collected nuggets can paint a fuller picture of the quality of a product, the reliability of a service, the prescience of a book, or the seriousness of a political debacle.

The power of the new media is often described as a democratization of traditional media. Lemann has mistaken this to mean that bloggers believe we can be reporters. What it really means is that everyone has a method for broadcasting their voices that was previously reserved for a select few. It’s those collected voices that make us powerful and relevant to businesses, politicians, and yes, even to the press itself.