"Country Journal" does Cape Cod Today

Host Greg O'Brien on left interviews Julie Brooks & Walter Brooks of cctoday

CapeCodTODAY.com editor and eCape.com president get a little electronic ink
Interviewed on the amazing growth of blogs and new media

Cape Cod Community TV station channel 17's host, Greg O'Brien (above on left) interviewed Julie Brooks, President of eCape.com and Walter Brooks, editor of this online newspaper on Greg's weekly show "Country Journal."

The show airs tonight at 10 pm on channel 17, and at 1 pm on Monday, March 13, and at 10 pm on Wednesday, March 15th in Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis, Harwich and Chatham.    Run times for other Cape towns TBA.

Walter Brooks and his daughter-in-law Julie launched cctoday.com seven years ago, and its web traffic has tripled in the past year, mostly due to the new Cape Blogs and readers' ability to comment on them as well as all news stories immediately. The comments are not filtered, but the editors check them for profanity or personal attacks which are altered or deleted.

The site a part of eCape.com which is managed by Julie Brooks who created the "Cape Cod 24/7" group of portals. Her company has created hundreds of local web sites, and is an industry leader in building content management sites like capecodtoday.com

With a little help from their friends

They are assisted by Brewster resident and web developer Nate Welch, and editor Maggie Kulbokas of Dennis who manages the news content, features and calendars.

O'Brien, who writes two blogs for the newspaper, Codfish Press and Boston Cod, grilled Mr. Brooks and his daughter-in-law on how the blogs on cctoday work, as well as the background of that phenomenon. The Cape Bloggers are all availabe in Blog Chowder, and every time a bloggers posts a new item, his or her blog leaps to the top of the list here.

Blog Chowder has over forty local writers contributing, many updating their material daily.

CapeCodToday.com offers anyone a free blog on the newspaper - no previous experience needed - just good thoughts about anything Cape Cod.

O'Brien and the senior Brooks themselves have long roots in "old media", and unlike most of their peers have segued successfully into the strange new world of electronic journalism.  Brooks had his first newspaper job at The Naugatuck CT Daily News in 1951, segued to Greenwich CT Times and The New York Post fetching up at The Cape Codder in 1965.

O'Brien came to the latter as a cub reporter around 1970 and after a side trip to the Phoenix AZ Republic returned to The Cape Codder to eventually become its Editor and later Publisher.

Blogs threaten the ancient newspaper hierarchy

Brooks often quotes Judge Richard Posner who wrote a major piece on blogs in The New York Times last summer.

Posner said, "The latest, and perhaps gravest, challenge to the journalistic establishment is the blog. Journalists accuse bloggers of having lowered standards. But their real concern is less high-minded - it is the threat that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs, pose to professional journalists and their principal employers, the conventional news media.

A serious newspaper, like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision and correction between the reporter and the published report and that to finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and hence on the good will of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great extent on circulation) readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of ways. But in addition, with its reputation heavily invested in accuracy, so that every serious error is a potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay publication of many stories to permit adequate checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding error - like requiring more than a single source for a story or limiting its reporters' reliance on anonymous sources - that cost it many scoops.

Blogs don't have these worries. Their only cost is the time of the blogger, and that cost may actually be negative if the blogger can use the publicity that he obtains from blogging to generate lecture fees and book royalties. Having no staff, the blogger is not expected to be accurate. Having no advertisers (though this is changing), he has no reason to pull his punches. And not needing a large circulation to cover costs, he can target a segment of the reading public much narrower than a newspaper or a television news channel could aim for. He may even be able to pry that segment away from the conventional media. Blogs pick off the mainstream media's customers one by one, as it were."

The show will be repeated at 1 pm on Monday, March 13, and at 10 pm on Wednesday, March 15th. 

Read the entire Posner article here, and comment below