• by Tom Hespos , April 13, 2004

When the 1990 Persian Gulf War began, I was still in college. My friends and I were in the middle of a typical beer-soaked fraternity party when the party suddenly stopped and about 50 people crowded around a 27-inch TV to see what was going on. We were tuned to CNN, and I don't think that particular TV showed anything but CNN war coverage for several weeks.

CNN brought the war right into our living rooms like no other broadcast news institution. At the time, we perceived CNN to be the closest thing we had to unfiltered news about what was actually going on. We saw the bombs drop, the SCUD missiles being intercepted, the explosions rocking buildings and the night skies being lit up with artillery and rockets.

We had never witnessed a war through a lens like this. The action was playing out live right before us, essentially unfiltered. CNN won praise for such coverage in the following days and weeks and Americans turned to CNN in record numbers as they learned to appreciate the immediacy and accuracy of its war coverage.

These days, the credibility landscape looks much different. Americans are growing frustrated in trying to corroborate facts presented in news coverage with emerging new truths: Were Iraq's weapons programs overblown? Was there sufficient prior warning of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to hold the administration directly accountable? Is the situation with North Korea and its nuclear programs at a critical stage?

Think for a second about how you, as a citizen who uses the Internet, gather information to answer questions like these. How does that compare to your news consumption habits of 10 or 15 years ago? If you're like me, you consult more sources of news and your newsgathering is more active (seeking out news and accounts of events online) than passive (watching CNN for an hour).

One of the drivers behind this shift in news consumption habits involves credibility of mainstream news outlets. Especially in the wake of audience fragmentation and increased pressure on news organizations to prioritize "getting it first" over "getting it right," we have learned that our trust in big media isn't what it used to be.

A plethora of online news sources is now stepping up to fill this credibility gap. I've discussed this movement in this column before, but caveating my comments by saying that we need aggregation tools that will not only pull news from a large number of niche environments together, but also allow the new newsgatherers to support their online endeavors.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I'm talking about the blogging movement. Two of the biggest problems facing the blogging community now are:

1. It's tough for bloggers to support themselves through online publishing. Only the most influential bloggers are pulling in enough revenue to underwrite the time and effort they put into their blogs.
2. It's even tougher for the reader to get the information they need from multiple blogs within an acceptable timeframe.

So far, few things can address #1 adequately. Programs like Google's AdSense and BlogAds have helped, but haven't solved the problem. Blogs have broken some of the most important stories in recent history, but they rarely pull enough audience to develop a healthy ad revenue stream.

Aggregators have made plays to address #2, but nothing has emerged as a dominant standard. RSS readers need to break out of the geekosphere in order to be effective on a large scale. RSS aggregators like Feedster and Daypop are getting there, but are not well known outside the blogging community.

What about something that addresses #1 and #2? Perhaps a web portal might take up the mission of letting end users customize a page of news feeds while providing bloggers with a revenue-sharing model to allow them to get paid for their efforts. As a blogger myself, I would appreciate the efforts of a portal to deliver audiences to my content in exchange for some moolah, if the stuff actually gets read by a significant number of people.

If we provide the profit motive to the bloggers and the content tools to the end consumer, we could see a terrific shift in news consumption. And it wouldn't be limited to the folks currently residing in the blogosphere.