People have been tossing around the possibility that blogging might be the next “mass media” to emerge for a long time now. Most recently, Bene Diction pointed out a column by geek political analyst John C. Dvorak about the phenomenon:

Let me stop here for a moment and make some specific predictions. Within the next year, both David Letterman and Jay Leno will make jokes about blogs and even discuss them. “Nightline” will do an entire show on blogging.

Do I think that blogs can become mainstream? Absolutely. I’ve only been blogging for a little while, but I’ve been reading blogs much, much longer, and I believe that blogs have the potential to one day surpass mainstream media in the current arena of competition among the media – news analysis and commentary.

The characteristic definition for a blog has been a frequently-updated page with dated entries, newest entries on top. This definition is very broad; it covers everything from diaries to blogs maintained by traditional media outlets, such as Christianity Today. In this entry, I’m only going to be referring to bloggers who are more or less freelance news commentators.

Traditional media is in a pretty secure position. They have a network of reporters worldwide, contracts with news syndicators like Associated Press and Reuters, and lots of cash on hand. There’s two places where blogs might be able to get their collective foot in the door – deadlines and space.

First, traditional media is limited to a deadline. They have a limited amount of time to get their stories ready before newspapers go to press or sound bites go to the editing room. For a blog, updates could potentially be made 24 hours a day, and they can be made in minutes because there’s no footage to edit and no page to lay out.

The second limiting factor is the restricted number of pages for print media or minutes for TV and radio, which I’m collectively calling “space.” Traditional media cannot cover every single story to the amount of detail they’d like to, because there’s simply not enough space to do so. They work around this limitation through a process called gatekeeping. Basically, editors look through all the possible ways media could use their space, and they choose the stories that are unique, involve a hotly debated issue, or are timely. Any stories that don’t make the current edition might be used later, or they might even be discarded – resulting in wasted resources.

In contrast, a blog, in theory, has unlimited space to cover whatever they want, given available manpower. Resources will never be wasted, because any article deemed worthy of publication can be posted. Gatekeeping becomes a process of quality assurance, rather than filtering a limited resource.

Another unique feature of blogs that might shift the balance of power is the fact that blogs can be looked at either individually or collectively. Just as many reporters are gathered together to publish one newspaper, bloggers can collaborate to produce an aggregate publication. The beauty of the blog system, however, is that each blog can also be read separately. It’s almost as if a newspaper printed one edition for every reporter, columnist, and editor on staff. The result is the useful combination of the same kind of agenda setting that traditional media is capable of, as well as independence allowing hundreds or thousands of different points of view to emerge. Imagine CNN with a million editors and you may begin to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Now, with all this forward-thinking, I may seem to be endorsing Dvorak’s point-of-view wholeheartedly. In fact, I’m not nearly as optimistic. I have no doubt that Leno or Letterman will joke about blogs one day, but I don’t see it happening in the next year; the critical mass is not there yet. Ditto with Nightline, although I am holding out hope that they’ll do a segment at some point.

As far as I’m concerned, we’ll know when blogs are “mainstream” because traditional media will stop talking about them.