Media Mavens Talk Blogs, Politics at Summit

"If you look at the front page of The New York Times, all those things that are news stories 10 years ago would've been slugged 'analysis' or 'commentary' or 'editorial.'"

That's Time magazine editor Rick Stengel, speaking this afternoon at the Time Warner Politics 2008 Summit. Stengel was talking, approvingly, about what he sees as a blog-influenced trend toward mainstream media outlets adopting stronger points of view. "When I became editor of Time, one of the things I said was 'I don't want to put question marks on the cover. I want to have a point of view.'"

Politico co-founder Jim Vandehei agreed: "Now what we have to guard against is not allowing too much opinion into our analysis."

A lot of the discussion -- which was moderated by CNN's Campbell Brown -- centered on what blogs are doing to journalism and whether it's good or bad. Stengel said it's both: "The thing I like about blogging is it's democratic with a small 'd.' It allows people to be involved who wouldn't otherwise be involved. At the same time it doesn't have the rigor we would have traditionally....On the one hand I like the idea of no gatekeepers. On the other hand it means a lot of information gets out there that's absolutely not correct."

CNN president Jon Klein described what he termed a "flattening" of the news, with bloggers and small websites providing as much fodder for discussion as The New York Times and other institutions. "Now anyone can drive a story," said Klein.

VandeHei said the web revolution has in general stripped institutions of their inherited influence. "What the modern media does is it puts a real premium more on the individual and less on the entity. Reporters have build up their own signatures." Older journalists who don't blog or engage in any form of multi-media reporting, he said, have become "less relevant" in this election cycle, he said.

But Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said he doesn't want the journalists working for him trying to compete with the kids in the blogosphere. "We're going to leave the blogging to the experts. It's not what we do well," he said. "Everybody else does it so much better."

That may have sounded like a slap at the contributors to VF Daily, Vanity Fair's group blog, but Carter said afterwards that it wasn't. "I was just trying to be modest. I think we have fantastic blogs. They do it better. We do our own thing."