The Press Sphere as the Sum of the Parts of Journalism

The New York Times and the blogs that I’ve been reading have been rather complementary of each other. For the most part, The Times and the two blogs I’ve been keeping up with, The Daily Dish and FiveThirtyEight, have focused on the same stories. This, however, has not become repetitive, because each website has their own characteristics that make their take on the news to be unique.

For blogs, the inherent limitation is that it is oftentimes just one person’s opinions regarding current events. Obviously, someone would not want the entirety of their news to be filtered through a singular person (e.g. a blog). Because blogs are based, for the most part, on one person, they create a sensibility that other websites lack. The New York Times is very informative and formal, and Sullivan’s blog is also informative, it simply has a different feel. The New York Times has its advantages, such as its use of multiple writers covering a plethora of topics (ranging from health care to Halloween costumes, for example). The fact that The New York Times has so much breadth makes it hard to discern its sensibility. The blogs, however, are not limited by this. Just after a few weeks, I feel that I know the personalities of Sullivan and Nate Silver. I don’t know if it is possible, on the other hand, to be able to discern the personality of The Times.

The fact that these different entities have different characteristics benefits the overall press sphere. FiveThirtyEight, The Daily Dish, and The New York Times all report on the same major issues, but their unique characteristics makes them each distinguishable. In Sullivan’s “Why I Blog,” he analogizes that blogging is to journalism as jazz is to music. The idea that blogging adds to journalism as a whole relates to the idea of a press-sphere existing. The press sphere, or news ecology, is the sum of all of the unique, individual parts that relay the news to people. Usually, the more unique parts there are, the greater the sum is.