JOURNALISTS, BLOGGERS SHARE MUTUALISTIC RELATIONSHIP

I can’t stand it when people write “the blank dictionary defines blank as…” so I won’t do that. Plus, since The Palmetto Scoop has a college undergrad reading level, I’m going to assume you all know what symbiosis means.

As you can see in the awesome stock photo of a shark and some parasite-eating fish above, one of the symbiotic relationships is mutualism; in this case the fish get to eat and the shark gets some bugs removed. And I think that’s an adequate way of describing the relationship between the old media and the new media. Except, not for blogger-consultant Joshua Gross who today took me to task.

Adam Fogle over at the Palmetto Scoop revels in the blogosphere’s resilience, but misses the point entirely. Political blogs (especially consultant driven outlets like Fogle’s) can never fill the void that honest journalism should have been filling (but largely hasn’t in years) – unbiased, unvarnished truth-telling (and we’ve had it better in SC because of Hoover, Stanton, Davenport and Bandy than the MSM in most states).

Apparently when I wrote about the downfall of the old media yesterday, I wasn’t clear enough in saying that, like it or not, traditional journalists and bloggers have a mutualistic relationship. Either I wasn’t clear enough, or Gross was just pissed that I took his sugar daddy, Gov. Mark Sanford, to task in the following post.

Anyway, my point yesterday was that, while the journalists have been the shark for the decade or so since the creation of blogging, their inability to adapt to 21st Century technology means bloggers are increasingly turning that symbiosis upside down. If you consider Matt Drudge a blogger (he’s more of a news aggregator) then there’s no doubt he’s a Great White to the New York Times’ minnow.