David Newberger has an interview with Jason DeRusha of WCCO-TV in Minnesota. Most of the questions deal with blogs and/or blogging, but it's interesting to hear answers from an old media journalist. Also interesting to note about this interview is that it's available as an mp3 and was transcribed by CastingWords.com, a company who uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Anyway, back to the interview. Here are some highlights, although I recommend going to read the whole thing:

What effect do you see bloggers having on current media in the next 5 years?

Bloggers will continue to provide a check on media… but I fear that people will go too far. Bloggers love to attack the mainstream media. But if we shut down CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, what would the bloggers link to? What would they talk about? We need each other. They feed on us. I expect to see blogging transform itself from personal diaries and rants by radicals, to collaborative journalism. I expect to see hyper-local blogs dealing with neighborhoods. And I expect the media will cull those sources for stories, much like we read community newspapers for ideas.

[snip]

David: What effect do you see bloggers having on what we currently call mainstream media, in, say, the next five or even ten years

Jason: It’s hard to tell. Right now, you know, just like people lump the media together, people are lumping blogs together. And on one end of blogs you have these kind of rabid right or rabid left wing Web sites, that are just, they nitpick every single word the big networks say on every story. And everything has an agenda. And you’ll see different blogs taking the same story and saying “this was horribly tilted in favor of the Bush White House” and “this was, ” same story. “This was horribly biased.” To me, I don’t know how productive that is. It’s kind of like talk radio. And, I think a lot of blogs, that’s kind of like what they are. They share the opinions of their readers and so it’s kind of this mutual admiration society where people come and read it because they agree with it. It’s like, most people who listen to Rush Limbaugh are not listening because they disagree with him. Most are listening because they agree.

I think the same thing is happening in the blogosphere where you have the right‑wing and the left‑wing sites. I think right now the blogosphere probably has a disproportionate impact because the mainstream media is so desperate to look like we’re in touch with what is going on in the cutting‑edge world, and I wonder if, as a percentage of society, I would say probably blogs are getting, have more influence than necessarily they deserve, based on the percentage of people who are reading and participating and that kind of stuff.

I agree to an extent, but unlike talk radio, blogs have the potential for more.

Lots of good thoughts here, though. We need more of this - not making blogs more than they are, but not downplaying them too much either.

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