If the connected mass of readers participating in collaborative journalism have a leader, it's Dan Gillmor, an insightful yet modest blogger who would balk at the honorary title.

Nevertheless, Gillmor cemented his status as one of blogdom's leaders when he announced in May 2003 that he is writing a book about the intersection of technology and journalism called "Making the News: What Happens to Journalism and Society When Every Reader Can Be a Writer".

To demonstrate his confidence in the new online journalism, Gillmor has opened his upcoming book-in-progress to comments from his blog readers. The book will be published by technology book publisher and conference organizer O'Reilly & Associates this fall.

"I've been covering [blogs] for a long time," said Gillmor. "It was time to put my money where my mouth is."

Gillmor has called the rise of weblogging "Journalism 3.0." Collaborative journalism is made possible, he argues, by new communications tools such as blogs and wiki. The technology eases online interaction and "give[s] us the ability to take advantage, in the best sense of the word, of the fact that our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds any one person's grasp of almost any subject."

"I wouldn't go so far as to call what Gillmor is talking about as Journalism 3.0," said Joshua Fouts, editor of Online Journalism Review. "I don't think it's changing the way traditional journalism is practiced."

Fouts defines traditional journalism as work which is vetted for accuracy, objectivity, and overall balance.

"That's something that [most blogs] don't and can't do, said Fouts. "Journalism is a constantly evolving medium, and faces challenges from [blogs] that [have] no editors [and from] the lone wolf beat reporter whose work [also] goes unedited. I think Gillmor's journalism falls into that spectrum, but the industry won't be abandoning editors anytime soon."

It's a Blog-Eat-Blog World

Blogs may not replace big media anytime soon, but some of them are popular enough to draw millions of page views a month. For example, Andrew Sullivan's conservative blog AndrewSullivan.com receives 62,693 unique visits a day. Glenn Reynolds' libertarian Instapundit averages 80,623 visits per day.

Blogs of that size are more similar to broadcast media, argues Clay Shirky, a prominent social theorist of online culture and a professor in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

"There is a subtext of much of the writing that says 'this is the revolution, we are its vanguard,'" Shirky said. "[But] What Glenn Reynolds does at Instapundit, that's broadcast. You can't have a conversation with a million people at a time."

Shirky agrees that blogs help people converse about current events in a way that has never been possible before. But during the first week of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," Shirky pointed out that one of the most popular topics in the blogging world wasn't the Middle East or American foreign policy, but stylesheet rendering in the Safari browser. (A stylesheet is code that determines the formatting of certain elements of a webpage, such as font sizes and layout.)

"There's a war on, right? And the thing that's floating to the top is an experimental new browser for a very tiny subset of technologically savvy users for people who want to program for that audience. So the self-referentialness of blogging makes it an inadequate replacement for general-class journalism right now."

Making the News

All of the debate about blogs' journalistic potential suggests that Gillmor is on the right track with his book. Collaborative journalism, via blogs and reader responses, takes advantage of what many believe is the Internet's greatest potential: The ability to connect unprecedented numbers of geographically-disbursed people.

"The idea of doing journalism that involves the reader as a contributor to content is a tremendous positive change," said Mitchell. "It makes sense to have blogs complement mass media the same way it makes sense to rely not only on embedded journalists but also journalists outside of military units."

Steve Bryant is a freelance journalist, co-managing editor of ReadMe, and, as of issue 4.2, editor of the ReadMe blog, DriftNet. He lives and works in New York City.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. (c) Glenn Reynolds 2003.