From:  jason@k...

Date:  Mon Sep 24, 2001  9:55 pm

Subject:  Re: My readers...





> The caution we need to inject here, of course, is figuring out 

what's 

> reliable or true. I have higher expectations of reliability from 

the 

> New York Times coverage than a first-person account or polemic from 

> someone I don't know. Sorting this out won't be easy. But it'll be 

> worth the trouble.



This is true of media, online and off, amateur and professional. CNN 

and MSNBC in particular were reporting all sorts of stuff that turned 

out to be more fiction than fact. One of the pitfalls of just-in-time 

reporting...there is often no time for fact checking or bothering 

with two *independent* sources (are these antiquated notions that 

will fall by the wayside as JIT journalism becomes more standard?).



> Blogs, Web postings and e-mail didn't replace anything. They added 

a 

> great deal. Traditional newsrooms should somehow find a way to fuel 

> and assist that engine of information.



This is one of the big lessons of the Internet in general. The 

Internet did not replace TV, newspapers, magazines, Sears, the US 

Postal Service, Barnes and Noble, or grocery stores in people's daily 

lives...it augmented them.



With the dot com crash, we learned what the Internet wasn't good for. 

Gradually, through careful analysis of the crash and events like