What traditonal and new media do right and what they do wrong.

Many people both inside and outside the media argue about the merits and the drawbacks of traditional news outlets versus social media. I've decided to play fair and analyze what they both get right and what they get wrong

What traditional media get right:

Traditional news outlets have standards that they expect their journalists to adhere to. Large news organizations, such as Reuters, The Economist, and the Associated Press, enforce a consistent style among all journalists through style guides.

They back journalists up whenever they run afoul of opressive governments or someone thinks an article portrayed them in a bad light and sues for libel.

They also check facts. Journalists can't just report unsubstantiated rumors. Facts have to be verifiable. In theory, you could call up a person quoted in an article and ask if what they actually said matches the quote. Sure, people like Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke occasionally fabricate stories, but they usually get caught.

Now here's what traditional media get wrong:

News outlets are businesses, and businesses have to make money. Journalists often find themselves being told not to cover stories that would make an advertiser look bad.

Traditional news outlets tend to focus on elitle people and elite nations. You mostly hear about what's going on in big business and Euro-American nations. The newspaper has a "business" section, not a "labor" section.

News media appeals to prevailing ideologies. What is historical, and hence open to change, will be represented as natural and inevitable.

Now we'll turn our attention to new media or citizen journalism:

The main benefit is immediacy: anyone with a camera phone or computer can break news. The US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson river was first reporter by a Twitter user who snapped a picture of the plane with his iPhone.

People can also report news that is actually relevant to them. People have a wide variety of skills and interests, many of which are ignored by traditional media. They can help add to the richness of human life by explaining their social worlds to the rest of us.

People can also write what they want without an editor telling them "No." Writers can experiment with new genres. Perhaps the next Tom WolfeTom Wolfe or Hunter S. ThompsonHunter S. Thompson will come out of a site like Allvoices.

Although citizen journalism has a lot of promise, there still are some problems:

It's easy to report unsubstantiated rumors. Citizen journalists seem to want to grind their own axes. This sometimes results in spreading conspiracy theories like Barack ObamaBarack Obama's supposed lack of U.S. citizenship.

In relation, there are no editors that can catch inaccurate and potentially libelous content. This might be overcome by having users on sites that can act as editors. Right now, writers have to be their own editors.

There also seems to be more opinion than first-hand reporting. There's nothing actually wrong with opinion. In fact, I'd like to see more of it in the news, as opposed to the tendency in mainstream media to "de-politicize" subjects. Ironically, most of the events that people offer their opinions on are from the mainstream media.

It seems that old media will be around for quite a while, and new media seem to be renegotiating the rules of traditional media. We'll have to see how these opposites interact and affect each other in the future.