The Power of the Internet

I'm old enough to remember the dawn of online journalism, circa 1975. It was incredibly primitive.

To read the headlines, you put a telephone handset on an acoustic coupler and called New York. National news stories from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and a handful of regional city papers were searchable by keyword, if their editors made an effort to upload a 5 word headline and 100 word abstract of something that appeared in yesterday's paper.

That was back in the day when people read newspapers and most American cities had two or three mass circulation dailies. AP and UPI never published anything themselves, and Reuters was a distant foreign thingamabob that never got a stick of credit on page one. Wire service stories rattled on teletypes at US radio stations and newsrooms, where re-write men used typewriters to cut and condense items from around the country if they thought local readers cared a hoot about plane crashes or shipwrecks somewhere else.

In those days, long before university researchers developed a graphical network called the World Wide Web, newspapers paid little attention to oilfield blowouts or pollution. That illustrates how profoundly things have changed in the past 40 years with the advent of personal computers and high speed digital infobahns.

Newspapers have vanished or consolidated, cut staff, and print fewer copies. Their internet portals are more important than yesterday's news in ink on paper. I suppose there will always be local readers and advertisers to support old fashioned printed journalism, if you think that group photos, birth announcements, weddings, charity fundraisers, and respectful obituaries are journalism.

I still read The Wall Street Journal occasionally, throwing away the fitness, sports, and advertising supplements that always outweigh hard news. I hate The Journal's cultural coverage. If I wanted a book review or gushy praise of bad theater, "The Gray Lady" is full of it figuratively and otherwise.

Financial Times and Wall Street Journal still do a good job of covering world business and finance, although I read most of their news online. If I'm following a business story that has an impact on my investment strategy, I need to know right now, not tomorrow morning when it's too late.

And that's where the internet really shines. Between Google Finance and Google News, I get everything I need to assess company specific news, market action, trend analysis, government shenanigans, and 20 years of technical and scientific briefings 24 hours a day.

Bloomberg pales in comparison. I still use Reuters for option quotes, but Google News compiles most of these premium services, along with Morningstar, London Times, BBC, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and about a half million blogs.

Why are web logs important?

Very simply, they are independent and outside the mainstream tradition of news gathering and analysis. For instance, I read every word that Macro Man publishes at Seeking Alpha. More days than not I'm drawn to Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis (which isn't global at all, but has important coverage of state and local news), FT Alphaville Markets Live, and Jesse's Cafe.

But I confess that's not really the purpose of today's column. The blogosphere is more than a cranky alternative news stream by clever iconoclasts who know more than I do. Here's why.

On May 20, 2010, one month to the day after the Transocean Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, killing 11 and injuring 17 of her crew, a crucial causative factor in the disaster was admitted after weeks of speculation on the web.

Almost single-handed, when no one in traditional newsrooms wanted to touch this news lead, a non-profit website called The Oil Drum hollered that something important was missing from official accounts of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy.

Indeed it was, and without The Oil Drum's persistent investigation of a rumor, it would have never come to light. The New Orleans Times-Picayune daily newspaper subsequently picked it up and did a professional job of blowing the story wide open. The oilfield contractor involved was compelled to come forward and publically admit that The Oil Drum allegation was true.

On April 20th, Schlumberger was standing by on the DWH rig to do a cement bonding wireline test which would have detected gaps in Halliburton's foam cement work, which in turn would have saved the rig by prompting BP to "perf and squeeze" extra cement where it was needed to seal the well casing and render it safe to displace the marine riser mud.

But BP sent the Schlumberger crew packing on a helicopter 11 hours before the blowout. No cement bonding test needed, BP decided. Too time consuming, too expensive. Don't want to delay the rig move. Kaboom. Eleven dead and the rig destroyed.

I salute The Oil Drum editors Gail the Actuary and Professor Goose for years of ceaseless effort and expense to create and maintain their blog. In many, many ways The Oil Drum performs a vital service, especially facilitating global discussion of peak oil research and statistical methology.

I salute everyone who posted to the Deepwater Horizon threads on The Oil Drum, gCaptain Forum, The Drilling Club, and a half dozen other blogs, each of whom played an essential role in piecing together what happened at Macondo.

They collectively demonstrated that internet journalism by amateur investigators and specialists is more important than Congressional committees and mainstream media mesmerized by "official" waffle that can be quoted as gospel, no matter how inane, empty, self-serving or devious.

Bloggers are the future, in defense of reason and justice.

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