Blogs The Famous Media Reads: Jason Pontin
September 7, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Now, the next installment in Extreme Mortman’s regular feature: A peek inside the blog-reading habits of our nation’s top reporters and media celebrities. Jason Pontin is editor in chief of Technology Review, responsible for the editorial direction of the award-winning magazine and Technologyreview.com. From 1996 to 2002 Jason Pontin was editor of technology business magazine Red Herring. Most recently, he was the editor in chief of The Acumen Journal, which covered the business, economic, and policy implications of discoveries in biotechnology and the life sciences. He has written for many national and international publications, including The Economist, The Financial Times, Wired, and The Believer, and he is a frequent guest on television and radio, including ABC News, CNN, and National Public Radio. Please give a warm Extreme Mortman welcome to Jason Pontin. Here are the blogs Jason Pontin tells Extreme Mortman he reads:
This year, my daily reading probably included more blogs than anything else. I value them for the same things every one else does: their immediacy, their voice, their energy, and their corrective influence on the MSM media as they catch errors, biases, and lacunae. They’re fun!
As an MSM editor and publisher, I am not totally convinced that blogs are very good at generating fresh news, although obviously there are exceptions. Mainly, I see blogs as performing an important, but secondary role-as criticism amplifies and clarifies literature.
The aggregator sites like digg, fark, and slashot are something else again, and are a powerful and as yet little understood influence on journalism. Readers like to read opinions and stories suggested by like-minded readers, and they like social networks arranged around those stories and opinions. Aggregator sites, like blogs, have a secondary, parasitical relationship to the MSM-but are even more powerful. Aggregator sites have become the single largest source of Web traffic to technologyreview.com. MSM editors and publishers are divided on whether one should court the aggregator sites. We certainly don’t know what, exactly, to do about them except write good stories.
My daily blog and aggregator reading includes:
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