JEFF JARVIS: “We pay attention to big numbers. And whose fault is that? Media’s, first and foremost.”

Even in the area of reporting about blogs, I’ve noticed this tendency: Journalists want biggests and mosts. They want the blogs with big traffic, and they want to talk about big stories like Rathergate. But there’s a good argument that blogs with small traffic matter more in the aggregate — because they’re read by people who know the author personally and thus care more about what he/she says — and I agree with something Duncan Black once said that the real impact of blogs isn’t big stories, but ongoing posting on topics that interest the authors. If you focus on big numbers, you often miss the real stories.