Blogging from the trenches : What do we need and how do we want it?

I think people want a "Journalist" (be it professional or hobby) to provide plain language information that they can take home and cross reference and check and research on their own instead of caustic and extreme one end or the other of the issues.

Everyone wants some sanity to the health care issues, no one wants to talk about the UK and Canada where folks who are ill have to wait 6 to 9 months to see a specialist or get tests run. Folks need to have all the facts, not just the parts that support anyone's political objective. Voters can't make informed choices if they dont have balanced reporting.

I would point out that blogging allows a discussion about UK vs Canadian vs US health care means and methods by folks who actually use the systems, in ways never before possible. I do it on my page every day about whatever issues. I have readers from Asia, Australia, Canada, UK, all regions of the US, etc etc.

The other premise is it needs to be a safe place, where anyone feels comfortable to express there views without fear of attack.

I'm a user of the Canadian health care system. In fact, I used it just two weeks ago for a routine checkup and some tests. My 92-year-old grandmother broke her hip in June and spent months in the hospital. She received excellent care from surgery to physio, all paid for by the BC Medical Plan. Now she's back in her own home, which she won't have to sell to pay her medical bills.

You can't evaluate health care systems by swapping anecdotes. This is a good example of the kind of information that journalists need to cover: The hard numbers for entire systems instead of just individual cases.

In order to cover comparative health care system stories, journalists need to know something about health care. Sure, it sounds frustrating to say that you have to wait 3 weeks for a routine knee MRI, but what percentage of the people who need MRIs eventually get them, and is there any measurable health benefit to getting an MRI on the same day vs. getting one a 3 weeks later?

American scare stories about the Canadian health care system always focus on people who are medium-sick who have to wait a long time for something they could probably get quicker in the USA if they had the money. They don't usually mention the guy who needs to wait for six weights to get a heart bypass got a lifetime of prompt primary care, and a lot of specialized cardiac assessment and treatment up to the bottleneck point. They don't usually mention that guy isn't stressing about losing his house, because his publicly-funded health insurance will pick up the bill for the entire procedure. He doesn't have to worry that his doctor didn't even suggest a bypass because the doctor knew he'd have no hope in hell of paying for it. (Studies show that a third of US healthcare professionals have deliberately refrained for mentioning beneficial treatments to patients who couldn't pay for them.)

Of course, journalists also have to know something about economics. Even if it's true that the Canadian health care system isn't as efficient as the US one, it's also true that Canada spends a fraction of what the US does. If we're asking what a US health care system on the Canadian model would be like, it's important to consider what the Canadian system could do if it had a little more money to spend.

I think bloggers and news media cooperate because bloggers have the advantage of translating news stories through different perspectives. Take the current war, for example. In any given blog, you can find out perspectives from the troops, Iraqi civilians, feminists, libertarians, lobbyists, pro-war advocates, anti-war advocates, economists, sociologists, psychologists, political pundits, political commentators, historians, and the average citizen herself. And whether or not you agree with the spin and the analysis brought to the forefront, blogging promotes dialogue and collaboration on it. In most mainstream media, a particular type of viewpoint takes centerstage, along with a type of delivery. Blogging can be as no-holds-barred or as formal as you'd like.

The citizenry needs a media that is not corporately controlled in order be informed. That's why public access tv & micro-radio & blogging are so important. The citizens have all the skills they need, finely honed bullshit detectors. That's why they are so turned off by everything corporate, including corporate political parties and corporate art. New media is just old school media reborn -- tabletop printing presses and samidzat -- it's all the same. The job of new media is the same, not to reflect the garbage spewed by the corporate media, but to seek out unheard voices and amplify them. The essential information in new media is helping like minded people know they are not alone, helping them re-build the communities that used to exist before the commons was stolen from us and a shopping mall was raised there.

This point doesn't fit into any of the questions neatly, but one thing I find invaluable about blogging is the fact that news stories and viewpoints that don't get a lot of space in the MSM get it in the blogosphere, and that energy can and has created enough momentum to get people to stand up and take notice. Even though the bankruptcy bill passed in Congress, communication via blogs got a critical mass of people to call and fax their representatives--to the point where the lines were jammed.

I think we also have to be careful--there's this idea that blogging is somehow pure because it's not controlled by GiantMegaCorp, Inc. But blogs are used in guerilla and viral marketing schemes, and they are used to astroturf for companies and industries.

Hope this is useful.

I found an old Aspen Institute report yesterday, from 1994, called Society, Cyberspace, and the Future. You can find it here:

http://www.ub.es/prometheus21/articulos/obsciberprome/aspen.pdf

Back then, it was addressing how the advances in technology (specifically growth of the Internet and online communities) would affect the flow of communication. It had a clear vision of the world we now live in; however, it doesn't address the "what happens now" aspect of how those of us who communicate effectively using this new means of community play a role beyond our computer screens.

The most important thing to happen in the next ten years or so will be the transfer of this "information filtering" being done by online communities back into the real world. This is going to happen either the "old-fashioned" way, through people bringing this news full-circle, from source through filter and back to original, traditional sources; or it's going to be a matter of online communities forming "real world" connections and spreading the word face to face.

Probably it will be a combination of the two, as people have individual learning styles and comfort zones; however, as that 1994 report points out, there is still a risk of the exertion of top-down control over the Internet (and, subsequently, the flow of information that is now dramatically affecting media and politics and everything else, in turn).

The whole thing is up for grabs depending upon the power gained by AT&T as Ma Bell is allowed to remake itself. Will Net Neutrality still be in place ten years from now? I'm optimistic, but there are some powerful forces still out there working against it.

Read that report, and imagine in your mind you were participating in the group writing a report looking at the next ten years... I'll bet you come up with some good stuff.

The single greatest thing that local and state blogs can do is dig up what the media won't.

This last cycle, our local blog (loadedorygun.blogspot.com) dug up and published several stories on local politicos that the regular media wasn't writing about.

Those stories eventually creeped into the regular media, giving them the kind of exposure they would never have had.

Good local bloggers can create information networks with political staffers, insiders, various journalists and other informed folks. These folks give us great news tips and then we suss them out.

We have a code of ethics at our blog where we will not publish a story that we can't independently cooberate. That's given our blog a sense of independence while still allowing us to advocate for progressive candidates and issues.

Its crucial for bloggers to push stories that the media either won't or can't seek out. That kind of push eventually gets them seen...which creates a pushback against the rightwing media stuff that we constantly fight.

I think one of the most important things that any sort of blogging or citizen journalism requires is lateral communications. For too long, the view of journalistic communications has been uni-directional. Whether it is the anchor, or the editor, they provide information about what they think the rest of us need to know.

Sure, there have always been letters to the editor where the editors decide which letters they think we need to know about, so it isn't completely unidirectional, but it is damn close.

Providing a means for a real dialog is a great step forward, such as we see in comment threads on blogs. Yet the real benefit comes when the discussion becomes multilateral. When one persons picks up another's ideas, riffs on it and then cross-pollinates other discussions.

That is where, IMHO, important new ideas and observations emerge.

As always, MHO, YMMV.