Borg Journalism – We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated:

“As a journalist covering the weblog beat, I officially love weblogs. But sometimes that love can be sorely tested. Weblogs scoop you at every turn, breaking “your” stories before you have a chance to rush your article to press. And even if you do manage to break a story, weblogs take it over, dissecting every point you made and pushing your logic to every inevitable conclusion. Forget that follow-up you had planned – ‘blogs have already anticipated and published every point you might have made.

…(I)f you’re a journalist trying to break news, Blogs are the new Borg. Blogs relentlessly track down every scrap of news, assimilating it into the Blog Collective hive-mind with stunning efficiency. It doesn’t stop there: individual blogs each add a small insight to the story, drawing on their personal experience and contributing to the conversation. Then the conversation takes over, exploring every possible implication and insight with a ferocity that astounds…” — John Hiler Microcontent News

This is, in contrast to the Wood column to which I blinked below, a more level-headed appraisal of the dialectic between hive mind and individualism in the blog world, its relationship to journalism, the emergent aspects of the weblogging network, and the balanced strengths and limitations of ‘the Blog Collective’.

This has helped me think further about my distress about the gap between the peacebloggers and the warbloggers in my What Am I Doing Here? post of several weeks ago. Hiler points out that as a journalist he’s had to deal with his consternation over the fact that the weblog world often ‘scoops’ his insights about a story by the time he gets around to writing and publishing it. In this case as well, some of the responses from readers, especially other webloggers, to my angst about ‘preaching to the converted’ presaged what I read in Hiler’s essay.