Editorial: Web no worse for expertise

Yesterday's print edition of the Herald carried an article (p A12) lamenting that mass media are beginning to move into the world of website journalism known as blogging. The mass media have been there for years of course, ever since newspapers and broadcasters put their content online. The article's lament was that increasingly mass media are charging for access to their online material. This, so it was argued, threatens to kill the sharing culture of the internet and turn the web into "a slick commercial machine".

Well, the warning makes a change from the usual prediction that the blogging phenomenon - one new site is said to be set up every couple of seconds - is steadily undermining the established media which seemed fatally unaware of the threat.

One established media conglomerate, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, has been sufficiently moved by those warnings to set aside at least US$1 billion recently for online investments. News Corp has bought an established network of blogs for teenagers and twentysomethings and is looking to buy a search engine.

Suddenly it seems the net is no longer beyond business or political control. The fearful suspect that Mr Murdoch intends to "take possession of the web allotments that all but the most hardened geeks depend on to pitch their tents", as the article put it. The strategy, supposedly, is to monopolise not only the material that web users like to exchange but also the tools that make the exchange easy. If that is possible it will be music to the ears of media companies which have been giving away on-the-web material that is expensive to produce.

It is hard, though, to see that the freedom of the net will be unfairly constrained if media companies buy the sites that enable people to set up blogs. The network's infinite capacity will always allow independent services to be set up as they have been - free and open to any passing traffic. The real reason that free bloggers might fear the arrival of moneyed interests is that they will be beaten on quality, credibility and - this is important - security from some of that passing traffic.

Roam the net now and you are liable to attract the unwelcome attention of all sorts of scam-dealers.

Media owners, according to the article, will be able to offer "walled gardens" with "havens of manicured web content, provided on subscription, guaranteed free of bad guys, well stocked with familiar brands". If that does not sound nearly as good as the wild and sometimes dangerous paths of the free web then there is nothing to fear from subscription services; they will not attract enough patronage.

But the truth is, people probably will pay for reputable, reliable sites that provide links to authoritative sources and comparable sites.

Mass media sites will be more reliable than the average blog simply because they are in a different market. A newspaper or television programme is public in a way that a personal blog is not. Unless it is the blog of a very well known person or organisation it is unlikely to attract the attention of more than a few thousand regular readers at best. It can make the most outrageous errors and nobody will care.

Blog culture is very proud of its exposure of a false item on the CBS television network in the United States last year but they miss the lesson of that success. They were able to discredit the item, and end the career of a leading US broadcaster, Dan Rather, precisely because mass media are answerable for errors in a way that most blogs are not. If media companies can colonise the net they might change it, but mostly for the better.