everyone

I was talking to my husband about all this. He’s working on a project about media reception by citizens in France during its age of empire.

He said it’s conceivable journalism will have to adapt so that you no longer have generalists, but have fully-trained-up specialists in each field actually doing the reporting & writing.

My guess is that things won’t go that way; I also think generalists are important and valuable (see: Walter Russell Mead). Plus most genuine experts are going to prefer working in their field of expertise—and if they’re not working in their field of expertise their competence in that field is going to decline to some degree.

I said I thought journalism would have to develop much more serious fact-checking practices (this has always been true for magazines like THE NEW YORKER), or else develop much more serious & diverse standing rosters of real experts they can run stories by. (At present TIMES reporters have the same 2 guys they always call up on any particular story. I remember for years every single bioethics story would prominently feature yet another opinion from Arthur Kaplan. I came to loathe the very name, Arthur Kaplan. Same thing Fox Butterfield’s stories on violent crime. Somebody looked them over and found out he’d used the same experts and the same quotes from those experts, altered just a bit, for a couple of years running. Relying on my memory, here, btw–this post is not fact-checked.)

A diverse & robust roster of real experts, working inside the field being reported on, would solve a lot of problems.

For instance, the Kerry-in-Cambodia story only worked as long as it did because journalists know nothing about the military.

How would a generalist know that a Swift Boat is too noisy to serve as CIA ferry service?

He wouldn’t.

One of the main capacities you need to develop as a journalist is a good bull**** detector, and I think good journalists do have good BS detectors.

But when you’re radically outside your field, it gets harder to know when you’re being had.

So my husband said conventional journalism probably needs to team up with the bloggers, and rely on bloggers as a source of expertise.

Over time it will become apparent which bloggers know what they’re talking about and which don’t; journalists could go to bloggers to get a reading on whether a story passes the smell test as administered by someone who knows the field.

If it does, fine.

If it doesn’t, the journalist will either drop the story, or investigate further.