Don Park ruminates on restarting the currently defunct SF Examiner with a stable of webloggers. This echoes something I'd like to throw into the lexicon that I'm calling Emergent Journalism.
I have no illusions that the idea is particularly brilliant, especially since I just cooked up the term today, but the premise is this. Can a horde of cheap, bad reporters be steered, guided, influenced into generating some coherent patterns that emulate what we currently think of as "journalism"? The protozoic forms of this are Advogato, Slashdot, and Plastic. But what are the patterns of journalism?
In short, naysayers always focus on the micro level of individual namebrand webloggers, e.g. Glenn Reynolds. Is there anyway we can see the macro level and is there actually anything to see?
Question: What the heck does a defunct SF Examiner actually bring to the table? No money, no distribution channels, no advertisers, some administration and editors. Doesn't look like much.
Answer: Cachet, imprimatur, and reputation. Things that it looks like will take a while for a community of webloggers to earn.
Memo to major media: look out for that meteor!