Entropic Journalism

The striking difference between traditional and participatory journalism is at the top of many minds these days. What's interesting to me is how an alternative form may have arisen unnoticed.

But first, in case you live in a cave, the story unfolds with a reaction to this post by Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee prompted this policy of editorial oversight, which has been analyzed here, here and here.

Eric Zorn puts it well [via Jeff Jarvis]:

To edit a blog almost instantly and whenever the blogger wants to post would require an expenditure of resources from the sponsoring publication that dwarfs the income -- right now, essentially zero in the free-access info-market of the web.

Yet to edit a blog conventionally -- putting it into a comparatively slow, one-way pipeline toward publication -- robs it of its essential blogness. It takes a potentially fresh new medium that, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, is a hybrid of talk radio and print, and turns it back into just more old medium...

...In reality, what needs to emerge here if the j-blog isn't going to die at birth, is an understanding on the part of editors and readers that, procedurally, a blog is much more like an appearance on a TV panel program or talk-radio show than it is a fully sanctioned, completely vetted declaration in cold type...

...Very, very rarely -- never in my case -- this freedom causes real problems.

Eric is right that the primary challenge is getting editors and readers to understand what is new. That's why blogging purists have raised their voices. Introducing editorial process into blogging practice is entropic. Social editing after publishing has proven its differentiated value. We need both.

But the way Daniel blogs now, running posts by an editor before posting is different from blogs or collumns -- its traditional journalism without deadlines. Something any journalist would like. Write when you want.

It may be a third form, but its not write what you want and publish when you want.

Comments

[Scott Rafer]

One other option may be to expose the entire editing workflow. It would be trivial to add a flag to each blog entry that indicated "writer only" versus "edited," so that readers who preferred (and would likely have to provide financial incentive of some sort) would have the option of only reading edited entries.

Can we alpha test this on Drudge?

[robert paterson]

Ross - A few friends and I have bene covering the Provincial Election on PEI with a Typepad blog.

http://smartpei.typepad.com/pei_election_watch/

We have not edited the contributions at all but have asked that posters ask to be let in. All the comments are free from editing. We have had ane testy series but it policed itself.

We have become THE place to follow the election - cost $15 a month