Come Clean On Adopt-A-Reporter

Jay Rosen has written a great blog post at PressThink about the idea we've been all kicking around, that big media reporters need to be adopted - each one will get a new foster parent in a blogger, who will study and post information about their work, in order to apply some scrutiny to how biased their reporting is, or simply to celebrate how accurate it is.

He says he loves and dreads the idea.

I love it if it lets us see who is twisting the facts about politicians to their own or their friends' partisan advantages and denying the American public factual information about what's going on in Washington. Just like giving up on Santa Claus being real, none of us really believe the media is objective anymore, do we? If the dirt on folks like Karl Rove is correct and they manipulate the media to destroy people just for the fun of it and for the big fees their benefactors pay them, this is a problem. A big problem. I'd like to trust journalists. I'd like journalists to help me be educated, to help me be an informed citizen, to help me participate in democracy. Am I naive? Probably, but I vote yes for foster parenting journalists if this can be the result.

I dread it too, as Jay points out, because it's got the potential to be simply hateful. Let's call a spade a spade here. Bloggers are just plain jealous of PAID reporters who have expense accounts, offices, chairs, coffee cups, pencils and a BYLINE with a BRANDED BIG NAME PUBLICATION. Bloggers are journalist-wannabes in many instances. We were all slobbering -- and you know it -- when Cinderella Elizabeth Spiers got plucked from scrubbing the floors at the blog Gawker into the bright ballroom at the castle -- New York Magazine. I was at BloggerCon, right after it happened and was watching the royal treatment she got (and I think deserved). It was a revelatory moment. I admit to envying her -- be real! Who woulldn't?! And as for bloggers not being partisan -- come on!

So, I think we actually are talking AROUND the subject. There is a middle ground we haven't found yet. We're at a flashpoint in terms of media technology. Bloggers instituting Adopt-A-Reporter is to journalists as Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz were to your travel agent, a transparency mechanism. The big difference being what's at stake -- an open democracy, or a cheap fare to Tampa/St. Pete. As we learned in the "transparentification" of the travel industry, there is no going back, but when it comes to democracy, I think we better proceed with caution.