On Monday, my class had the pleasure of an insightful visit by Mike Fancher, the editor-at-large of The Seattle Times. Fancher, the grandfatherly former executive editor of The Times, recently stepped down from that post and his prolific "Inside the Times" column in order to spend more time outside the newsroom as a sort of roaming advocate for what he calls "media literacy."

As part of this semi-retired role, he has started a new blog, Press Here, that will deal with the many multi-faceted changes journalism will be facing in the next few years — something of great interest to myself and my peers in the UW’s journalism program.

Fancher made a number of observations during his talk with my classmates. The first and most important was that just because there’s a lot of places to get information out on the ‘Net, that doesn’t mean that traditional journalism is useless and therefore dead.

"There’s a lot more talk out there than actual journalism," he said, with a dearth of original, creative reporting in an age of a burgeoning blogosphere. Bloggers are commentators, and, as such, need the original work of professional journalists if they want to say anything about "the news" to begin with.

The proliferation of singular points of view (i.e. bloggers) and the decline of newspapers is thus a mixed blessing. Fancher said that technology has the nasty side-effect of ennobling both the noble-minded bloggers and thus who pretty much just hate the guts of the other side. And that’s not good for a democratic society that desperately needs a functioning marketplace of ideas.

If the marketplace is getting bombed by increasingly polarized and vitriol-driven factions, how can people shop for the right ideas?

Fancher said that reporters are often criticized for simply doing their jobs; among his biggest concerns is a trend toward selective news intake, or choosing what you want to hear as opposed to what you should hear (or read, for that matter).

Political campaigns attempt to cut out the middleman of the media and "go straight to the public" to get their message out, he said. That sounds like a good idea in practice, but the modern-day spin machines that candidates are forced to drive often but good, old-fashioned Truth (yes, with a capital "T") on the backburner.

It’s the job of journalist to act as the guardians or holders of the public trust, and watch out for their interests. While rather archaic-sounding, this ideal can and should survive beyond the first decade of this new century, he said. Journalists should embrace new technologies such as blogging and pod casting, and should become media guides, explorers and navigators for a public increasingly swallowed up in the faceless "chatter" of the Internet.

Journalism should also be about community and authenticity, he said. In his last column to Times readers, he wrote:

"To earn public trust, journalists must lead in developing the nascent concept of ‘news literacy,’ which aims to help people be better, more knowledgeable consumers of news. Journalists must articulate the standards that set their craft apart and create methods to assist the public in determining whether those standards are being met. Knowing their best efforts will always fall short, journalists must commit to introspection and transparency."

The old cliché about Web journalism runs something like this: journalists hoard information and bloggers give it away. Fancher said that journalists should emulate bloggers and become the "professional amateurs" they started out as, asking the right questions and getting access to people and stories that bloggers can’t get to.

"Print journalists still think of themselves as ‘the experts’ … but if the public doesn’t feel like they’re working on their behalf, they’ll look elsewhere," he said.

For my sake, I hope I can become the sort of trusted Web river guide that Fancher talked about.

To begin, I’ll tell you a little bit about myself: I am a senior at the University of Washington in Seattle majoring in journalism and history. As part of a class on blogging and politics this quarter from Prof. David Domke, I will be posting thoughts on politics in general and this year's presidential race in particular, from the perspective of a wannabe journalist. I work for the school paper and am a bit of a political news junkie. I am a conservative Christian, but I enjoy interacting with people very different than myself, and so I welcome dialogue and debate.

That's the reasoning behind the blog's title: audiatur et altera pars means "let the other side be heard too." It’s a legal term that expresses the notion of fairness in a court of law, but works equally well in the sometimes very rowdy world of blogging in the online marketplace of ideas.

So, in the spirit of that good-natured, sporting fairness, I’ll start with a review of what Joan McCarter of Daily Kos had to say about blogging in general and political blogging in particular during a recent visit to my class at the UW.

McCarter is a "Kos Fellow," which basically means she’s one of only about 12 full-time lefty bloggers in the nation. She’s halfway through this full-time stint and posts regularly on the Daily Kos’ front page, which she says gets up to 400,000-500,000 hits a day. "McJoan," as she is known to Kos devotees, made it very clear that she wasn’t a journalist per se, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, McCarter identified herself as more a cross between a pundit and an activist, in her own words, "We don’t consider ourselves as journalists [but more] … as political pundits."

She also hesitated to use the term, "mainstream media" (or MSM) to describe what she called the "traditional media" of newspapers and cable TV. The idea of the MSM is one born in the fires of conservative talk radio, and has become a loaded term, she said.
 

Instead, she sees her job (and, by extension, the job of the Daily Kos) as a way of keeping a proverbial eye on the traditional media, and acting as a check on what she sees as its conservative tendencies. To that end, she said that one of the Kos’ main goals this past year has been to try and influence political candidates, Democratic leaders in Congress (such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Henry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate’s majority leader) and the general public (i.e. the blog-reading public) to adopt more progressive policies on the war in Iraq (ending it, mainly), so-called warrant-less wiretapping, raising the minimum wage, and other issues near and dear to both her own heart and the heart of her readership, which is largely liberal, and, perhaps ironically enough, composed of an older, not younger demographic, with an average Kos-blog fan being in his or her late 40s.

"We’re not just trying to elect Democrats, we’re trying to elect progressive Democrats," she said, in an attempt to "reform" the party. "We push opinion, trying to reshape political and media narratives," she said.

Pelosi, Reid and John Kerry, or at least members of their respective staffs or media entourages, have all blogged or continue to blog on Daily Kos. When asked about how political bloggers can keep their independence from their parties, she said that in the case of the Kos blog, their more left-leaning stance keeps them at odds with the establishment, at least for now. But Daily Kos does keep in fairly constant contact with the legislative powers that be.

This sometimes comfy relationship with the DNC didn’t seem to be something that concerned McCarter, who said that bloggers aren’t after "the truth with a capital T" like journalists. Their job is to help people string often disparate stories together into cohesive, if admittedly biased, narratives.

There is still a role for traditional media, she argued, for the foremost reason that bloggers need the shoe leather reporting of reporters to actually get their news to begin with. Bloggers then comment and dissect the results. Journalists, McCarter said, should be "unbiased." Bloggers, on the other hand, shouldn’t be shy about expressing their opinions.

"They [the traditional media] should not be disregarding us, but not necessarily being some kind of broker between us and politics," she said. Bloggers keep journalists accountable, McCarter said. When asked about who watches the watchers, as the saying goes, she said that their readers are the ones who keep tabs on them.

And as far as the future is concerned, McCarter thinks that blogging itself will become more mainstream and dispersed throughout traditional media. Bloggers could become their own worst enemy — they could become the establishment.

But McCarter isn’t too concerned. "People power" will keep bloggers on the right track to become something more akin to a hybrid of social commentary and information-gathering, which she said is being pioneered by the likes of Talking Points Memo or even the Drudge Report (which is more of a selective news aggregate site, with crosscut.com being a local example).

Still, she said that, "I worry about buying too much into the Democrats," and would like to stay as "ideologically pure" as possible as the left flank of the party. This could more and more difficult, especially during a raucous election year.

Last quarter, I took a political reporting class from David Postman and Jim Simon from The Seattle Times, and wrote a story about just how influential local bloggers are, or at least think they are. Many of the same issues of independence came out, and so it might be worth checking out. Postman, incidentally, is also a good example of a journalist-turned-blogger.