One of the recent recurring themes on Jay Rosen’s Twitter feed goes something like this:

1. Someone writes a story like this, where the writer or someone quoted defends the value of newspapers and says something along the lines of “X” can’t replace newspapers, where X = blogs, citizen journalism, and other things along those lines.
2. Jay would then respond with something in this vein:

As reported at CJR:

NYU prof and Press Thinker Jay Rosen has had it with what he calls “replaceniks”—those who throw out the red herring of people saying bloggers will replace newspaper journalists, an assertion that’s rarely backed up with a quote of anyone actually saying that.

“Show me the links to where people make that claim!” Jay basically says. So that got me thinking: Are there links to be shown? Is there any evidence that this notion of “replacement” exists, as claimed by those who debunk it?

This is why God created Google, or at least bought lots of its stocks.

What I found:

• Rarely is “X will replace newspapers” mentioned by those who blog about media and journalism (see exception below).
• However, from what I could see, there is talk of blogs replacing newspaper journalists. It generally resides outside the media-watch blogosphere.

Some Examples

One media blogger who does talk about bloggers/twitterers replacing newspapers is Dave Winer, who does a podcast with Jay every week. He wrote in a February post:

The news people talk about paying for news, but the suppliers of news, the sources, are never paid. So if we can find a way to do what reporters do, without paying reporters, then voila, we can have our news for free. Before you rattle off some tired rationale, think about it. What are reporters doing that amateurs and/or software can’t do?

Jay Rosen explained this to me once — the word for what reporters do that machines don’t is “authority.” Humans convey authority. But — only until humans teach us how to do it for them.

…

News people are all around you, anxious to get in there and work, for free, on the news. At first thousands of them, and then once the glitches are worked out, tens of thousands. There’s no shortage of people who want to inform others. The challenge is to figure out which ones want to do it for love. And that might not be such a challenge. I can show you a few dozen, and I bet they could show you a few more and so on.

In another piece, Winer writes:

… I said the sources would take over the news. Not enough reporters covering the courtroom? The judge will report, as will the jurors, the attorneys, the plaintiff, the defendent. It will be messier, I would have said had I had the time to complete the thought, but more truth will come out.

I said that fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists.

I also came across an interesting interview with newspaper designer Jacek Utko, in which he says:

Most of them say that newspapers should stay because, if newspapers die, nothing will replace them.

But that’s not actually true. It’s already slowly being replaced by the Internet. Blogs, for example, are an opinion-making medium. They’ll probably become more powerful than the newspapers themselves were.

And then there was this piece, titled “What do we need reporters for now anyway?”, which basically argues that there will be no need or place for professional journalists.

As I said above, often the “replacement” sentiment is expressed in the comments section of blog posts about the subject, like here and here.

And finally, on a related note, I stumbled across this nugget from Rasmussen Reports, which conducted a survey and found the following:

… 61% of American adults are confident that online and other news sources will make up the difference and report things people want to know about if many newspapers go out of business.

…

Thirty percent (30%) are now Very Confident that sources other than newspapers will provide the news they want, while only eight percent (8%) are not at all confident of that.

Conclusions

• Media bloggers, overwhelmingly, are not saying blogs will replace newspapers/professional journalists. In fact, most blog posts I found on the subject assert that blogs and citizen journalism will NOT replace newspapers or the need for professional journalists. This makes sense if you think about it. From a blogger’s perspective, saying what you do can replace a newspaper does you no good. Putting forth such a statement would bring with it increased obligation to live up to it, hence limiting what you can do with your blog and dictating how much and how often you have to do it.
• However, just because most of the people writing blogs haven’t said blogs can replace newspapers/pro journalists, it doesn’necessarily follow that the sentiment hasn’t been expressed by others. As the examples above illustrate, the notion isn’t a red herring. It exists, just not within the media-watch blogosphere.
• Since the notion of “replacement” does exist, stories refuting it cannot be said to be making a strawman argument as long as they aren’t saying that media bloggers are the ones making the “replacement” claim.