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Dawning of the blog
by Garrison Frost The personal website has been a staple of the Internet ever since the medium became accessible to anybody with the money for a computer and a willingness to fiddle with software. For this reason, the electronic ether is full of sites devoted to these folks’ fetishes, poetry, cats, milk carton art and everything else. Sometimes the world is all the better for these contributions, and sometimes it’s not. And while the big corporations have had their asses handed to them trying to make the Internet commercially viable, the medium is wildly successful and popular, mostly due to the efforts of these individuals and small businesses sharing their obsessions on their own sites. Which brings us to the blog — a term derived from web log — which refers to an online journal of commentary, links, free expression, eating habits, what have you. While the blog, in one form or another, has been with us as long as the Internet, the the number of these sites has exploded in the last year. Most of the growth has come in the form of political blogs, wherein the writers aim to compete with the mainstream pundits on current events. Other blogs focus on technology, art or simply the random musings of the author. This is the blogs’ heyday. A recent article in the American Journalism Review claimed that the blogs are presenting a real alternative to mainstream news sources such as newspapers and television. One media watcher recently predicted that soon the most visited news sites on the Internet will be blogs. Watch now as mainstream online content providers are jumping to catch the blog bandwagon. Both Slate and Salon have created blog-like columns that encourage people to comment and respond, and Salon has even created a feature wherein readers can create their own blogs and promote them through the larger site. All this interest has given the advocates of blogging much to crow about. Scan the blogs and you will assuredly find the writers challenging the legitimacy of the mainstream press. Matt Welch, who operates laexaminer.com — which links to news about Los Angeles and bashes the Los Angeles Times — has even been quoted saying that someday his site will be more vital than the Times itself. For all their popularity, it’s hard to see the blogs making too much of a challenge to the mainstream news media for a number of reasons, most having to do with the fact that blogs, by their very definition, don’t have staffs and do very little direct reporting. Find us a blog that has dozens of trained, paid journalists out collecting news and writing stories. What little direct reporting they do is fairly man-on-the-street, that is to say, not journalistic in the sense of someone interviewing people and digging for information. Bloggers tend to be passive in collecting information; they gather the fruits of other people’s active efforts to collect information. Which is not necessarily bad, mind you. Blogging with all its links and outsider opinions has a real utility as far as providing a bibliography and sounding board for ideas. But a blog is no closer to being CNN than a guy sitting at a lunch counter reading the newspaper. This said, book and magazine publishers ought to be scared out of their wits. Writers of fiction and non-fiction will simply post their information and, perhaps, find a way to charge for it someday. The best of these will float to the top. Blogs that focus on gossip or eclectic topics — usually the bastion of magazines — can be particularly effective, because all it takes is one or more obsessives to produce all-inclusive content. Another group that should be scared is all the so-called experts and pundits whose only expertise on the subject matter is that they read a lot — which is all but about 10 percent of the talking heads in the mainstream media. The blogs are proving that it’s not that hard to have and express these types of informed opinions. In fact, the glut of opinion has already made most of the voices one reads and hears sound rather pedestrian. The solution will no doubt be bad for all pundits, either mainstream or online. The mainstream media will be forced to only embrace those voices with tangible credentials in their given fields. No more hauling out some windbag whose entire expertise is that they read five major newspapers a day, or maybe worked on a campaign. Still, the political blogs are probably the least interesting of what’s out there. Here are few we recommend, both locally and elsewhere: noahgrey.com/journal |
