The new new journalism
I have seen the future of journalism and his name is Andy Abramson. — I happened to be looking at Techmeme last night, and I saw that the lead story - at the very tippy top of the heap - was a piece by Abramson, from his blog VoIP Watch.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nick Carr's short post lands in the middle of a debate that ran through 2006: Jack Shafer's Slate column on blogging pressed the question of whether blog writing counts as journalism, and Dave Winer's October reflection on what comes after kept the argument alive. What Carr adds is a concrete exhibit — a single-author trade blog, Andy Abramson's VoIP Watch, sitting at the top of Techmeme's ranked lead.
First-order effects
- Techmeme's ranking hands an independent practitioner-blog the visibility of a front page, letting Abramson's VoIP Watch outrank staffed news outlets on a story at the moment of peak attention.
- Carr's framing turns Abramson into the emblem of the model — a consultant-publishing-on-the-side beating mastheads at their own game.
Second-order effects
- Tech news sites now have to treat an algorithmic aggregator's leaderboard, not just rivals' mastheads, as the competition for reader attention.
- Other industry consultants and analysts have a template to copy: publish fast on a niche blog and let aggregation do the distribution.
Third-order effects
- If leaderboard placement keeps rewarding speed and niche expertise over institutional reporting, tech journalism's authority migrates from named publications toward a combination of individual voices and the algorithm deciding who leads — the structural question the 2006 blogging debate was circling without an example this stark.
The trend: Tech journalism's gatekeeping is shifting from editorial mastheads to algorithmic aggregators that can elevate a lone practitioner-blogger above established outlets.