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Thursday, May 12, 2005

Human reporters wear glasses

Dave Winer is doing a podcast broadcast this weekend on KYOU-AM in San Francisco.

He talks about the difference between bloggers and professionals - Scripting News: Broadcasting a Podcast:
I remember how hard people were on us when we blogged the DNC, they expected, somehow, that we would turn into amateur Wolf Blitzers or Dan Rathers, maybe Ted Koppel or Judy Woodruff.

Nahhh, we're still bloggers, and the style guide for blogging, imho, is "Come as you are, we're just folks." There's no James Earl Jones voiceover saying "This is CNN."

The reason you send bloggers to a place like the DNC is so they can tell you what they see. If you read the blog regularly, you now have some data you didn't have before. That's all we can do. But if you get enough known views of an event, you can figure out what happened. The problem with the mainstream media approach is that they strive for an inhuman sameness, after all, they're pleasing the same commercial sponsors, fighting for the same ad dollar, so how different could their programming be? But human reporters are different, we bring color, we make mistakes, we wear glasses, all different tints. That's why we want lots of bloggers and lots of podcasters. What we lack in polish we make up in numbers.
Head meets nail.