In all the hand-wringing and hair-pulling about is blogging journalism or is it ain’t, two crucial aspects of the blogosphere—collaborative fact-checking and providing of context—managed to fall through the cracks. This is largely because it’s in corporate media’s collective best interest that our attention be diverted from such dangerous things—dangerous to the status quo but little else—whenever possible.
Yesterday, weblogger and community journalism maven Dan Gillmor provided a perfect example of the context providing function inherent in the blogosphere. In a New York Times story about Steve Jobs’ supremely arrogant decision to ban the sale of all Wiley books at Apple stores because of an unauthorized biography, venture capitalist Mitchell Kertzman was quoted:
“It is not possible, aside from things unimagined, to damage his reputation,” said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners in San Francisco. “Steve is on such a roll in both of his companies, he’s earned the right to do whatever he wants.”
Gillmor followed-up with Kertzman with an email—by golly, just like a real journalist—asking about the quote and got what has become a not unexpected response: the quote was taken out of context.
Read the piece on Gillmor’s website. It’s indicative of one of the most crucial functions blogging and the blogosphere provide.
Not for nothing, Gillmor’s also been banging the real estate bubble drum for more than a year, and he’s at it again in his next entry. The legacy media has been doing everything it can to inflate this particular bubble, and Gillmor has been consistently calling them on it.
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