All the News That's Fit to Blog

Is there anything more tedious than the editorial page of the New York Times? Yes. There's Paul Krugman's column on the op-ed page of the New York Times. And there's Frank Rich's column every other Saturday on the op-ed page of the New York Times. And there's ... well, it's a long list, and you get the idea.

Boring pundits are not exclusive to the Times. They are everywhere. Part of what makes them boring is occupational determinism. Consider E.J. Dionne Jr., political columnist for the Washington Post. Dionne's job is to provide twice-weekly commentary on what's happening in the nation's capital. Let's say he takes four weeks of vacation. That means that he must write 96 columns every year. Here's the problem: No human being can produce more than 40 really original, interesting columns about Washington per year. It just can't be done -- even in wartime. Every year, Dionne is doomed before he begins.

Major metropolitan newspapers (and magazines) employ scads of talented people (like Dionne) who are chained to an idea of analysis, commentary, and opinion that is as stale as it is technologically archaic. That idea -- that the great all-knowing center broadcasts out to a sea of fools to shape their thoughts and opinions -- is as dead as smelt.

The market for analysis, commentary, and opinion has shifted because the underlying technology has changed. The emergent technology -- the one that we use every day when we email and instant-message one another and the one that gathers ever-greater force with each new increment of connectivity -- is peer to peer.

Peer groups organize themselves in hundreds of different ways. But what they all have in common is a shared sense of mission: what the military calls "unit cohesion." That cohesion -- a kind of network effect -- is what makes the peer group, or team, much stronger than the simple sum of its parts.

Am I overstating the adoption and impact of peer-to-peer architecture on everyday life? The number of emails (no, not a pure P2P application, but close enough) sent back and forth across the Web since the introduction of the Netscape browser is now estimated at 3.5 trillion per year. The number of instant messages (again, a nearly pure P2P application) will soon exceed the number of emails (instant messaging really took off in 2000). We are a long, long way beyond a centralized broadcast structure. This shift in the architecture of our communications -- from broadcast and client server to P2P -- has profound implications for serious news media.

The purpose of journalism is to inform -- first about basic facts (news gathering) and then about the meaning of those facts (news analysis, commentary, and opinion). Much of the business of news gathering has been commoditized by the Associated Press, Dow Jones, and Reuters. You don't really need the New York Times or the Washington Post to tell you what's going on at the White House. They don't know anything that the AP hasn't already published. And many business-section stories about financial markets are rewrites off of Dow Jones or Reuters news wires.

As a result, major newspapers and magazines (along with radio- and television-news programs) have concentrated their resources on analysis, commentary, and opinion as the "value added" proposition for their readers, listeners, and viewers. This is why the New York Sunday Times has little news in it, except for some late-breaking Saturday-afternoon story or a brief blurb about the president's radio address (and even that story is usually prewritten off of an advanced text). The major newspapers and magazines assume that you already know the news. What they've got to offer is what it means: the big picture.

But while the newspapers and magazines attempt to add value with perspective, their value-added proposition only applies within their own architecture. In the case of the New York Times, that means within the pages of the paper itself or on its Web site. It never wants you to wander off the reservation.

The architecture of their creation, however, is not our architecture. Our architecture is P2P. And so it is not surprising that in the business of analysis, commentary, and opinion, a new breed of cats has emerged. They even have a name. They call themselves "Webloggers" -- or "bloggers," for short -- and they're providing the most energetic, lively, and passionate analysis, commentary, and opinion around.

The system that enables their work can be found at www.blogger.com You can go there, sign up, get yourself a "blogspot," and start publishing on the Web today. The technology does the rest. And there's no fee. The only thing they ask is that your Weblog carry the Bloggers.com logo. Hook up with Amazon to solicit contributions for your site, and you're off to the races.