http://www.longbets.org/bet/2 A $2000 bet held by Long Bets, an spin-off of the Long Now Foundation: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."
This question is not at all well put--is Google going to be around in 2007?--but, procedural issues aside, if the question is whether the New York Times will decline significantly in importance in response to pressure from weblogs, my answer is a firm no. Especially if we're talking about the "top five news stories."
A professional journalist is not an amateur journalist whose work just happens to be distributed to a few hundred thousand people every day. This is a weblogger's conceit. The work of professional journalists has prominence for several reasons: (1) they are professional writers and researchers; (2) they are paid to spend every hour of every day on their stories; (3) they know how to get and how to deal with sources; (4) they have significant resources at their disposal; (5) their stories are invested with the authority of their employer.
Dave Winer, who proposed the bet, carps that reporters sometimes get their facts wrong. This is true. But the New York Times is much easier to trust than some guy with a website. (Why should I trust what this guy Dave says? Who is he?) People like brands, because they provide some guarantee of quality (deliberately provocative link). In my city, now even tradespeople have brands.
How are webloggers ever going to cover the war in Afghanistan? Enron? The New York Times has a six reporters working on Portraits of Grief alone: webloggers won't trump journalists by 2007, or ever. 11:47
