Scene: The castle of mainstream media. Characters: Three newspaper editors; eight million bloggers.

EDITOR 1: There, tomorrows edition is finished. I'm really pleased with this one, it's a classic.
EDITOR 2: Yeah? What's on your front page? That triple rape-murder? A sex scandal? Don't tell me its another bird flu story?
EDITOR 1: No no, none of that. We've been creative, we've done something nobody has done before us.

EDITOR 2: This should be interesting!
EDITOR 1: Do you remember the story we did last week? "Psychotic drug addicts stalk YOUR children on the internet"? And before that, "Tap water gives YOU and YOUR FAMILY cancer". Those sold really well, but we thought, not everybody has children or drink tap water, we're not exploiting our potential here. So why don't we do the ultimate death story? One that applies to all our readers. We put our top people on it, and they came up with a great angle. Imagine: You're Average Joe, on your way to work. You're a little tense, you're overworked and sleep deprived, but moderately content with life. You walk by a news stand, you're in a hurry and you don't plan to buy anything, but you glance down at the newspapers, and .. what do you see?
EDITOR 2: I can't wait to hear!
EDITOR 1: "This is how YOU will die." Wham! Average Joe stops. He looks closer, he sees a list. So-and-so percent will die of cancer, so-and-so of heart disease, accidents, alzheimers. Then: "See the pictures! Take the test!" We actually have pictures of corpses and diseases, of tumors and skin cancer and everything, so after you've taken the test and learned how you're going to die, you can see what that death is going to look like. Then there's an article on what happens to bodies as they decompose .. but we didn't go with pictures on that one, that would be lurid.
EDITOR 2: Wow, that's brilliant! I thought we had a good front page, it's a reality show sex shock story. Got some blurred nude shots, angry reactions from mad pastors, interviews with concerned parents, and so on. Good enough, but you've really outdone us this time. What about the rest of the paper, got any good commentaries?
EDITOR 1: Nothing special. We're launching a new cultural debate tomorrow, about the oppressive intellectual climate of literary criticism .. or whatever. Same crap we did last year, but the market segment we're doing it for won't notice. They're happy just to see those long words they remember from their student days in print. Then there's the usual science stories: Cancer, plague, electromagnetic fields, aliens.
EDITOR 2: Yeah, we got those too. I still don't understand what you see in those wannabe-intellectual readers, though. Hey, look who's coming, another of our colleagues. But what is this? He's all pale and out of breath. What's the matter?
EDITOR 3: You must come out at once! There's a crisis! Our castle is under siege!
EDITOR 2: What do you mean?
EDITOR 3: There's an army outside the walls! They call themselves "bloggers", and they're really angry.
EDITOR 1: "Blaghers"? Never heard of them.
EDITOR 3: No, bloggers. I'd never heard of them either, but apparently they're readers of ours who use the internet to make little newspapers of their own.
EDITOR 1: Our readers? You mean the schmucks?
EDITOR 3: Yeah!
EDITOR 2: But what do they want with us?
EDITOR 3: Come out and listen to them. See down there? Those nerds in underpants, they're saying we should be objective and stop secretly promoting our own political views. And the ones over there, with the sneers and the paper mache figures, they say we're controlled by corporate interests. And that swarm up on the hill, those angry little creatures barking at each other, they believe we're hopelessly incompetent and depraved and we don't ever do anything right.
EDITOR 2: This is horrible! Listen, they're shouting.
HORDE OF BLOGGERS: Give us truth! Give us objectivity!
EDITOR 2: Dear god, they want truth and objectivity. In the newspapers! No more fake science and pseudo-experts. We'd have to fact-check our own stories. But then they'd be half as fun to read, and twice as expensive to write!
HORDE OF BLOGGERS: Stop feeding us that celebrity and sensationalist crap! We want real news!
EDITOR 2: No more celebrities! No more sex and violence! Our sales will plummet! We'll have to hire foreign correspondents again, you know how I hate those guys.
EDITOR 3: They're preparing to storm the gates. This is the end.
EDITOR 2: They'll invade us and force us to be dull again.
EDITOR 3: Ever read one of those old newspapers? Tiny print, no pictures!
EDITOR 2: I'll miss the bright colors ..
EDITOR 3: .. and the snappy headlines
EDITOR 2: .. and reprinting press releases as if they were news
EDITOR 3: .. and cancer stories, I so love cancer stories.
EDITOR 1: Wait.
EDITOR 2: We have to get out of here.
EDITOR 1: I said wait. There's no reason to panic.
EDITOR 2: No reason to panic? They'll force us to write long articles with lots of facts
EDITOR 3: .. and we'll have to know what we're talking about
EDITOR 2: .. and have real news on the front page
EDITOR 1: I can hear what they say. But look closer. See that blogger down there? He criticizes us because we're not objective enough, but look at his blog. Whenever he reads something he agrees with he's happy, all "this is a brave an insightful piece of commentary" or "read the whole thing" or "this is what I've been saying for years". But when he reads something he disagrees with he gets angry: "what a poor excuse for journalism" or "and the MSM wonders why people don't trust them any more" or "get a life you lying scumbag". Don't you see? He doesn't want objectivity, he just wants others to tell him he's right.
EDITOR 2: Yes! And those bloggers over there, the ones locked in a big grouphug, they say we're sloppy, they say we never bother to verify a good story. But when they hear a rumour they want to believe in they talk about it for days. Just last month one of them misheard something on the radio and they went crazy over it, took them weeks to sort it out.
EDITOR 1: We don't need to be objective and careful to make these people happy, we just have to tell them things they want to hear.
EDITOR 2: We can do that.
EDITOR 3: We'll just hire a couple of hacks who see things from their point of view.
EDITOR 2: .. maybe some of the bloggers themselves?
EDITOR 3: Even better!
EDITOR 1: And look at those serious-looking bloggers in the back, the ones with the raised eyebrows and the fancy words. The ones who say we don't do real news any more. Look at what they write about, they're just picking stories off the AP feed.
EDITOR 2: Like we do!
EDITOR 1: They say they're tired of our war-of-the-week foreign news coverage, but they write about little else. They don't care about South America or Africa any more than we do.
EDITOR 3: And over there, that blogger says we do everything wrong, but everything he knows about commentary he learned from our pundits. His views are a little odd, but he's really one of ours.
EDITOR 2: You're right. I think we can do business with these people.
EDITOR 1: Let's go down and open the gates.

The "human interest" angle of news has evolved in an interaction between readers and newspapers; being a mass medium, papers cannot be tailored to any particular reader's wants, and readers simply pick a newspaper that is good enough, in most of its parts, most of the time. Each individual leader may, sincerely or not, lament the sorry state of the press, but what is seen as objective by some is the opposite for others.

Will the mobification of news change all this? Has the levee broken, fundamentally altering the system of readers and writers, to the point that a new style of journalism will emerge? Or will they simply be assimilated into the old system?

When so many people are broadcasting their opinions, some of which are worth a lot less than others, we need to sort the information. In the end, we will probably want to hire gatekeepers that look for the juiciest bits of opinion for us, much like the newspapers do now.

The blog myth about blogs being a corrective creating more neutrality is clearly a hype. A much better option to go for is to admit that no newspaper, blog or media stream whatsoever can be un-biased and deal with it from that.

Lars A: "no newspaper, blog or media stream whatsoever can be un-biased" and that is exactly why we should get our news from several different sources. Reading two articles written by writers who strongly disagree with eachother is so much more interesting than reading one "objective" article.

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