That’s what Ong Sor Fern wrote in the Straits Times yesterday. Of course, you can’t read the article ‘cos they charge you for to access their site. And their archives only go back seven days. Hey, a newspaper has to make money, right?
You can guess that Sor Fern didn’t have many positive things to say about blogs and bloggers.
Fellow social media observers and practitioners Van, Siva and Ivan have weighed in with responses on their blogs.
Van says:
[J]ust like there are good journalists and bad journalists, there are also good bloggers and bad bloggers. For every book like the Cult of the Amateur (current Amazon rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars), there are dozens if not hundreds of books and other forms of less traditional media celebrating the new, open-source or Web 2.0 culture. Bubbles have burst before, but that’s part of the experience of entrepreneurism.
Siva makes two pertinent points, highlighting the importance of information literacy and the fact that journalists can be as inaccurate as bloggers when it comes to scientific and technical topics:
[H]er disdain about blogs is the view most scientists hold about journalism efforts here. Colleagues in the community never wanted to talk to journalists during a crisis, for most that we encountered were poor at handling the facts or understanding context.
Over time I have learnt to be pleased when they get it mostly correct and have exercised great patience when they struggle with the facts. The good ones shrug and explain about editors, deadlines and diversity.
Ivan brings up three points, the most interesting of which is his final one, where he questions the method(s) Soh Fern derived her conclusions:
[T]he most telling was the opening statement — where the writer proclaims she has never read blogs.
I’m asking myself this: “If one has never read blogs, then how would one know that the quality is poor?”
Hear-say? Third-party information?
I thought part of verifying information was to check facts for ourselves.
It is a pity that Sor Fern will never read these responses to her opinion piece since she doesn’t read blogs. Perhaps that is another shortcoming of traditional media. It is largely one way. It’s not about conversation. It about people on pedestals telling us what’s good for us because they know.
Newspapers are not blind to this disadvantage. Hence, you have STOMP.
My two cents?
She mentions that the world will be worse off if Web 2.0 replaced print.
I can assure her that there is ample space for newspapers, books, magazines and blogs to co-exist. One of the things we are taught in media studies is that news editors have to constantly leave out content from newspapers due to space and time constraints. No such issues exist with blogs.
Radio didn’t kill the newspaper, television didn’t kill the radio, video didn’t kill television (or the radio star either) and the internet didn’t kill any of the preceding media outlets. Each time a new media form came up, there was a re-negotiation of roles and an re-examination of functions.
In pointing out her reservations about the democratization and proliferation of publishing capacity, Sor Fern pontificates about intellectual property:
The idea that anyone can be a writer/artist/critic is a seductive one, as Keen concedes. But the grim reality, he points out, is closer to 19th-century evolutionary biologist T.H. Huxley’s infinite monkey theorem.
The theory states that if you provide an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters, one will eventually produce a masterpiece to rival William Shakespeare.
The problem is, of course, trying to find that one talented monkey amidst the cacophony.
While Web 2.0 businesses are busy building more typewriters for more monkeys, it is also tearing down the infrastructure that used to support the William Shakespeares.
The idea of intellectual property, which Keen points out has sustained culture creation in Western civilisation for 200 years by paying people for their creative output, has been pulverised in the new information age.
Students plagiarise chunks of writing for their essays. People steal music and movies online. So-called citizen journalists do armchair reporting by cobbling together tidbits from legitimate websites.
I won’t take issue that she implied that I am a monkey with a typewriter. I will take issue with her poor understanding of intellectual property. This highlights what Siva pointed out about journalists not being entirely accurate with technical details.
- “The infrastructure that used to support the William Shakespeares” ironically did not exist when the bard was alive.
(If you don’t trust the preceding Wikipedia links, purchase Free Culture by Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig for an overview of the history of copyright. Or you can download a pdf of the entire book for free.) - People have created stuff from the beginning of time. Just because. The human drive to create pre-dated copyright law. Copyright served to give authors temporary monopoly right over their works so that they could get a fair return on their intellectual effort. This has temporary right to profit been grossly bastardized by the current copyright regime.
- Her final statement would make teachers of logic cringe. How did she jump from plagiarising students (not unique to the digital age) to people stealing music and movies online (behaviour that has been around since mix tapes) to bloggers pretending to be journalists stealing content from legitimate websites?
- What is a legitimate website?
- Bloggers comment on articles as there is limited space in the forum pages. Also, there may be vested interested in not publishing certain responses. Is there anything illegal about this? Is that considered stealing?
- What about when “legitimate websites” steal bloggers’ content? (Credit to Gwynne Lim for pointing this out.)
Okay, that’s all. To think I started out only intending to highlight a few points from my friends’ posts. I guess that’s what happens when a monkey starts typing.
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For someone who has never read blogs. How could she have come up with all these, and expect people to accept her words with any sense of credit?
Everything should be moot if she based on opinions on hear say or other sources.
Just because some people say 881 is nice doesn’t mean it Will be nice to me.
I think she needs to wake up. She just insulted quite a lot of people in that article.
Ladybug thinks its an editorial stance to create some polarity to ecite comment *shrug* but this time it was too silly to ignore.
Well written that monkey!
My own experience of the press exagerating a story goes back some years before Rowntree was bought by Nestle. They were entertaining a group of Japanese visitors to York and I was dancing with a group known as Ebor Morris Men. The story started in our local paper and even appeared in the Straits Times. In the large room below the room we were entertaining the visitors in was a dinner for the Society of Engineers. They had complained that our dancing was disturbing their dinner. The story was headlined “Cloggies spoil four star dinner” and then went on to describe us asleaping three feet into the air. If only we could leap that high whilst dancing, some of our members barely leave the floor! Also, for the style of dancing we do clogs are not worn.
This of course has left me always very skeptical of anything I read in the papers. As mentioned alsewhere you cannot trust science to newspapers as it is usually beyond their capability and they almost certainly don’tunderstand probability and statistics but there again why let the truth get in the way of a good story when you can shape it to sensationalism by ignoring all the hard science!
That is all from this monkey and his keyboard.
I took this module titled ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ in university, teaching us how to objectively dissect and analyse information presented by any media.
Clearly Ong’s article has many flaws, which has been pointed out by yourself and other people.
However, I doubt the angle of the article was entirely her idea: it could have been suggested/dictated by the desk editor to stir up some form of ‘controversy’ or argument among readers, and the writer (in my opinion, most of those writing the articles in ST/Today etc are not journalists because they do not follow journalism rules) has to comply.
She has also clearly overlooked the fact that many published writers of books, magazines and articles - whether scientific, fiction or non-fiction - are bloggers themselves. Their blogs allow them to reach out to their readers and gather feedback, as well as more ideas for future writing.
Overall, she has done nothing to reduce my distaste and distrust of journalism standards in the local media (what standards!?!) as well as the qualification and capacity of the local newspapers’ writers.
well this monkey has already started typing.
obviously this journalist never attend kristie lu stout’s talk 
You may indeed be right.
Heh, yes, I try to remember to call them reporters.
Hi Deadpoet,
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The Singapore Daily Team
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And you are right, there are so many people who are in the public sphere, who are opinion-leaders, who are journalists that also blog. She’s attempted to discredit all these people in one fell swoop.
“However, I doubt the angle of the article was entirely her idea: it could have been suggested/dictated by the desk editor ”
Yes you are 100% right that’s why I think, the chappies in the BP are threading so carefully.
Where angels fear to thread or is it tread >
This couldn’t have been done without the green light from those who hide behind those red doors.
Acroamatic asked whether I had ever been at RAF Changi, yes when I was 10 years old we lived at Lloyd Leas for a few months in 1957 and then moved onto the main camp and lived at Wittering Road until summer of 1958 then moved over to RAF Tengah until the summer of 1959. We spent two and a quarter glorious years in Singapore and it is like a second spritual home for me. Depending on price of flights I am hoping to visit again in November, now that I am a pensioner I have to watch the pennies carefully.
A perfect illustration of how journalists are not always careful in reporting science. There is a report here of a disagreement with press coverage at the British Association Science festival in York today. check out this Url on the BBC news site
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6988088.stm
Web 2.0… her apparent disdain of it makes me wonder if she’s secretly afraid she and her kind would one day be written out of a job.
Bloggers have already made it to the White House press corps. I’m already seeing newspapers in Australia scrambling to get on the online bandwagon, blogs and all. Sor Fern has to be careful she doesn’t start to write herself out of a job. She might be tasked to head a news blog one day.