Posted on August 16th, 2006 by Gavin M.
Pardon me for a bit of inside-baseballing, but trust-funder Steven Johnson has been a fountain of underconsidered cyber-discourse (e.g. ‘people are like ants’) ever since his grandmother gave him the money to start FEED magazine; and it’s clearly still the late ’90s in the hearts of many, for Johnson remains a reputed explainer-of-things.
Johnson: An expert via direct-deposit
Why do people pay attention to Johnson, as opposed to other less-wealthy guys who actually know what they’re talking about? That’s a question that society isn’t too eager to answer.
Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?)
Long-time readers of this blog know that I have very rarely posted anything here on the “bloggers versus mainstream journalism” debate, largely because the market for good ideas on this topic has long been saturated, in my opinion. But Nicholas Lemann’s piece in the New Yorker this week has finally pushed me over the edge. Don’t get me wrong — Lemann is a superb journalist, and I agree with just about everything he says in the article. But that’s the problem. I think everyone agrees with just about everything he says in the article. Jay Rosen tried to kill off this kind of discussion a year or two ago with his smart essay, Bloggers Versus Journalists Is Over, but obviously it didn’t stick. So let me propose a slightly more blunt approach. Does anyone disagree with the following concepts:
1. Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should.
2. Bloggers will grow increasingly adept at covering certain kinds of news events, but not all. They will play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of all kinds of news.
3. The majority of bloggers won’t be concerned with traditional news at all.
4. Professional, edited journalism will have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than blogging; examples of sloppy, offensive, factually incorrect, or tedious writing will be abundant in the blogosphere. But diamonds in that rough will be abundant as well.
5. Blogs — like all modes of contemporary media — are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus.
So here’s my proposal: if you’re writing an article or a blog post about this issue, and your argument revolves around one or more of these points — and doesn’t add anything else of substance — STOP WRITING. Pick a new topic. Move on. There’s nothing to see here.
Hummana-blubbida. Yes, this is simply the last word on blogs. All sane people agree. “STOP WRITING.”
Not exactly. The fact is that certain blogs have proven themselves extremely reliable as sources of news and commentary — e.g., Digby’s, Billmon’s, Glenn Greenwald’s, and others — while ‘blogs’ as an analytical category is just as scattershot and meaningless as the notion of ‘print’ as an arbiter of sober and reasoned discourse. Briefly: A ‘blog’ is a means of transmission, just as a photocopier (or a videocam, or an offset press) is a means of transmission. What matters is the content — the information and analysis which the medium transmits –, and certain people are extremely good at creating such intelligent and useful content, while most others aren’t or don’t care to be.
The ones that are good over time are ‘reputable,’ while the ones that aren’t are ‘not reputable’ — much like print publications are (e.g., the New York Review of Books vs. the Weekly World News), and much like the people whom one knows.
This would seem easy to figure out after ten years in the ‘digerati,’ but maybe not. Maybe Wired ought to do a story on it first. Shake the bugs out of it, sort of thing. That way it’ll be safe for Steven to ‘pioneer’ the idea, maybe in 2008 or so, with a $500,000-advance book called “Like I’ve Been Saying: Blogs Are Unfortunately Not Exactly Transmissions From An Alien, Post-Human Civilization.”
