The internet has forever changed the way we do news. Blogs are here to stay, and they make up a growing portion of the journalistic landscape. More and more traditional newspeople people are even going from print to online. Yet, for some reason (likely survival instincts), this reality and its consequences often prove tough to grasp for the traditional media. Many in the old guard still sneer at "bloggers." This dismissiveness is what gave rise to Atrios's ever present "Blogger Ethics Panel" joke - old media people keep complaining that bloggers have no ethical standards to live up to, and thus that they shouldn't be trusted. Of course, while this is true of some bloggers, you can tell which. The beauty of the internet is that it makes transparency possible, so that you can always look up what someone has written and determine for themselves if the writer's a hack (and if a writer not transparent, you can usually assume he is a hack.). People can also much more easily source-check within one piece. It's starting to become accepted in journalism circles that transparency is the new objectivity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this notion's acceptance is coming along as about the same speed as the acceptance of bloggers as legit news sources.
From a business standpoint, it just makes sense for old media to reflexively do this - new media has always been a huge threat, and not just because of lower costs. The entire old journalism business is built on the credibility derived from the anointing of reporters to be associated with the brand name. Bloggers, however, both can and must build their own brand. And of course, as the idea of transparency gains credence, the idea that we should have to trust a media outlet to be objective start to look more and more absurd. Both the lack of gatekeepers and the looming irrelevance of traditional notions of journalistic authority cut establishment media to its core, even if/when they do find a way to get online. Of course, their brand names are still relevant now, as they still make up 2/3 of the news traffic online, and "the top 7% collect 80% of the overall traffic." While those numbers are shrinking, the old media won't be replaced any time soon, as they're the ones with the resources to do news reporting.
Anyway, it is in this overall context that AP's announcement should be celebrated. The wire services are hugely important to the way we consume news - most newspaper stories come from there, and last year, even most internet news consumers received news from the wire services a ton. ("At the No. 1 website in terms of traffic, Yahoo News, 99% of the news coverage studied during the year was aggregated from elsewhere, most of it from wire services"). This, in my mind, signals an fundamental change in the acceptance of new media.
As Lauren Fisher suggested, AP is actually a bit late to the game.
In ‘The Source Cycle‘, an analysis of articles from the New York Times & Washington Post over 6 years finds that blogs are increasingly referenced as a credible news source. And this was carried out in 2008.However, as the word "increasingly" suggests, the decision whether to credit blogs has been an ad-hoc decision, rather than formal policy for the industry. That's the distinction here for AP - they set a lot of the accepted standards in the industry, and the fact that they see bloggers as legitimate will influence the debate in a big way, and in a sense, reflects the fact that we're ready to move on.
Another indication of the collapse of the blogger-reporter divide comes from the Senate, where Dianne Feinstein's feverish attempts to exclude bloggers from a federal shield law have failed so far, surprisingly enough. So really, I'm not sure whether AP's stance is reflective of changed attitudes or will push them. Likely both. But either way, bloggers are a large and growing part of the news and slowly but surely, transparency is supplanting objectivity. It's great to see this reality acknowledged by AP.
