What Makes Journalism and Blogging Successful?

Monday, January 14, 2008
Posted by Steve Klein 1:00:32 PM

Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis loves bloggers, but is willing to criticize them too.No one has been more supportive of bloggers and more critical of mainstream media than Ted Leonsis, the former AOL executive who owns the NHL Washington Capitals. (OK, well maybe Mark Cuban is close.) Leonsis has paid to send independent bloggers to cover Caps prospects in Russia, and when long-time Washington Times hockey writer Dave Fay died late last year, no one was kinder.

So when Leonsis shelled out $124 million over 13 years last week to keep his franchise player, Alex Ovechkin, in town — it was the biggest contract in Washington D.C. sports history — Leonsis had a right to expect some accurate coverage in the MSM and some honest passion from the bloggers.

But to read the owner’s very active blog, Ted’s Take, it doesn’t appear he sees a great deal of either. “Don’t listen to mainstream media, they know nothing. Make your own decisions. Listen to your heart and to your own set of experiences,” Leonsis wrote after the New Hampshire primary.

And Leonsis couldn’t help but point out how wrong Washington Post columnist Tom Boswell was about the Washington Redskins retaining coach Joe Gibbs the day before he resigned.

However, the bloggers don’t escape Leonsis’ criticism, either, when he feels they are inappropriate. One blog had the scoop on Ovechkin, but it had the terms wrong.

“There are a lot of interesting pieces on the blogs now about the contract,” Paul Rovnak of the Caps’ media relations staff wrote to me in an e-mail. “It is just too bad that some of them have language not suitable for work e-mail and that the others were not posted earlier. I guess that is where mainstream media still has an advantage; there are deadlines to be answered.”

Leonsis also has a right to expect that Capitals fans put their fannies where their blog posts have been in demanding that he sign the superstar Russian to a long-term contract. (The team ranks 29th out of 30 in the league.) Canadian writers have been sniping in the north-of-the-border press that the Washington market is undeserving of Ovechkin’s massive talent — all documented on “Ted’s Take” for anyone to see. What the MSM and even the bloggers don’t provide, Leonsis does, in what is often a fascinating exercise in what transparency really means.

From these examples, I would make these distinctions between MSM and bloggers — something Colorado journalists seem anxious to do these days concerning state government coverage:
Journalists take deadlines seriously, as Rovnak points out, and generally report better. (Aren’t they supposed to by definition?)

However, Leonsis would argue with that: “I am constantly amazed at how silly this cycle is: someone reports badly; someone comments on the bad reporting; there are now two sources out there; it must be true; so now it is fact.”

Bloggers generally demonstrate more passion for their subject, which is why less discerning readers — fans in many instances — may prefer blogs.

Mainstream media would be better served by more passion, even at the cost of some objectivity. Blogging would be better served by better reporting, although access often limits the extent to which a blogger can gather information. But as journalism and blogging continue to merge, both would be well served to remember what makes the other successful.