Journalism icon Seymour Hersh on online journalism:
JJ: New York magazine has a profile this week of Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, and they call him “America’s Most Influential Journalist.” What have bloggers like Drudge done to journalism, and how do you think it compares to the muckrakers that you came of age with?
SH: There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually — and I hate to tell this to The New York Times or the Washington Post — we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism.
I’ve been working for The New Yorker recently since ’93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about. Couldn’t care less now. It doesn’t matter, because I’ll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it’s online, we just get flooded.
So, we have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven’t come to terms with it. I don’t think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff..
Certainly, in addition to Drudge, bloggers (like Knoxville's Glenn Reynolds) and sites like Digg have changed how news spreads. I'd go as far as to say being "America's Most Influential Journalist" doesn't have quite the cachet it might have had in the bygone era of mass media journalism.
(via Martin Stabe's excellent link roundups)
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I'd go so far as to say "America' Most Influential Journalist" will eventually be changing on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
It is good to see some people in the newspaper business are actually aware of what is going on. Just yesterday I saw a coworker reading a newspaper and wondered why someone would take the time to read day old news.