Best Blog: Westword Taps “The Spot”

by elpresidente | 5:31 pm, March 31, 2011 | Comments Off

For what appears to be the first time, Westword has honored a traditional media outlet in the new media category–best blog honors for the Denver Post’s “The Spot.”

Past winners have included individual bloggers and outfits from both sides of the political spectrum. Say what you will about the Post’s political coverage–that is up for readers to decide–the relatively new project (beginning early 2010) has paid dividends in bringing traditional beat political reporting into the new era. Providing the reporters with a platform for quick hits and commentary or longer form pieces that might not make it into the print edition, folks like Lynn Bartels (who was already doing this stuff in a less formal way at the Rocky), Chuck Plunkett, Curtis Hubbard, Allison Sherry, and Tim Hoover have brought an reporter’s eye and crowdsourcing to their political coverage that wasn’t there before The Spot.

As a blogger and then a paid journalist/blogger for NRO last year, I saw the new effort put into play, and the dividends provided by rapid-fire coverage that took some of the sting away from losing the Rocky back in 2009. Combined with the aggressive tweeting efforts from the Post, breaking political coverage vastly improved over the past 15 months, quite a bit due to the stories broken first at The Spot and then developed later.

For many years, old media outlets and new media ones viewed each other–rightly or wrongly–as adversaries, or in the case of the print/TV folks, as bulwarks of time-honored journalistic practices against the rowdy, upstart, and loose-cannoned bloggertariat who played fast-and-free with facts and with old media content. The bloggers, in turn, put much emphasis on old media biases, and criticized their outdated methods.

But more recently, rather than viewing each other with hostility, a growing symbiosis has emerged. Blog etiquette has improved in providing citations to the materials in question (the Post’s copyright shenanigans notwithstanding), and bloggers have also slowly morphed into citizen journalists who combine a blogger’s snarkiness with the ability to break stories using traditional journalist techniques. Rather than eschewing blogs altogether, folks in the media now regularly scour blogs for breaking, insider, or original investigative work. The online media world isn’t, as yet, entirely harmonious (see the Post’s affiliation with a questionable legal outfit), but there has been a very marked softening in attitudes from 2005, when I started.

Back then, most people didn’t even know what a blogger was. Most viewed them as suspicious. Now they are an accepted–first grudgingly, then overtly–part of the media cycle.

So what does this all mean? Well, for bloggers/citizen journalists it means that the media has caught up in many ways, and the casual hobby attitude practiced in the halcyon days of just a few years ago is gone. Some cite social media, but as with any tool, if the content is poor, it doesn’t really matter. Despite the repeated pronunciations of the death knell of old media, that day is still (thankfully) not upon us.

As I said before, the judgment of the content is up to the reader, but the Post should be congratulated for providing an increase in quality political access, and “The Spot” has certainly provided that outlet in a way that not many expected just a few months ago. Cheers!

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