Why blogs are relevant
Oliver Kamm doesn’t quite know what he’s talking about in this piece on blogging (which also appears in today’s Times), but he’s quite confident about what he says. (He’s spot-on with regard to Arianna Huffington, though; she did show up to my party in LA last year, but I didn’t invite her, Mickey Kaus did.)
You can read my lengthy response, or just insert the word ‘people’ everywhere that Kamm uses the word ‘blogs,’ and it’ll quickly be apparent where he’s gone wrong.
Blogs may not change how news is gathered and reported (I think that Jeff Jarvis, a newspaper guy who knows better, or Jay Rosen can field that claim more credibly and eloquently than I) but they do change how the news is read. Change how the news is read, and eventually you will change how it is gathered and reported. (Just curious: Would anyone care to argue that blogs have had - and will have - no effect on the level of transparency in reporting?)
(One thing Hillary Johnson, my friend and former editor of the Ventura County Reporter, said to me during our 10+ hours of drive time talk in California last week was that people fail to grasp the main difference between newspapers and blogs: With newspapers, you have to fill the gaps between the ads; that’s the nature of the business model. With blogs, you may decide to implement ads at some point, but the publication is content-driven. I’m paraphrasing here; Hillary should write about this in her typically much more articulate way.)
These are not a new form of journalism, but new packaging for a venerable part of a newspaper. Even the best blogs are parasitic on what their practitioners contemptuously call the “mainstream media”. Without a story to comment on or an editorial to rubbish, they would have nothing to say.
I am not sure why Oliver says this, when even his own blog is evidence to the contrary. But I can only assume that he is unaware of the legions of blogs authored by experts and other professionals in countless fields and disciplines. Would Larry Lessig, JP Rangaswami, Jonathan Schwartz, Seth Godin, Mark Cuban, or Kathy Sierra have nothing to say if not for other media outlets?
If Oliver is strictly speaking about political blogs – which, if so, should have been made clear – then I can only assume that he is still reading the same blogs he’s been reading for the last few years. He might like to familiarize himself with – from the top of my head – the work of Christopher Allbritton, Michael Totten, Iain Dale, or Norm Geras, all of whom regularly produce volumes of the sort of content which Oliver doesn’t seem to know is out there.
Most blogs have nothing to say even then.
Most books have nothing to say – not to me, anyway. I don’t see the relevance of this, and I’m not sure why any of us should be concerned with those publications which are not relevant or valuable to us.
Without editorial control, they are unconstrained by sense, proportion or grammar.
The network of blogs has an in-built editorial control, which comes from other bloggers. Oliver himself is no stranger to the ongoing peer review of this network. As for grammar...yawn. I don’t bother with blogs that are truly unreadable, but I also don’t condemn those brimming with bright ideas for the occasional usage error or spelling mistake.
Almost by definition, they are the preserve of those with time on their hands.
I’m not sure how this is supposed to be damning. People who have or make time to express opinions and connect with others are doing so. And…? I can’t help but think of John Bryant, whose home I visited in Los Angeles last year. This is the guy who flew to Davos for the World Economic Forum for a day, flew back to DC to meet with President Bush, flew back to Switzerland for the rest of the summit, and still made time to blog. (And all while running a non-profit.) Why? Because he, like everyone who blogs, gets something out of it. It’s difficult to see the relevance of the fact that this group of millions includes many people who may be complete layabouts. How much time do you spend reading the blogs of those who do nothing, think nothing, and have nothing interesting to say?
Oliver isn’t the only one making proclamations about a network he participates in but doesn’t really understand. One thing we found when trying to recruit employees for the Big Blog Company - and this is a challenge that Adriana still faces - is that most bloggers don’t get why blogs work, or indeed how they work. For instance, lots of bloggers actually believe that linking to other bloggers on their website is some kind of big favour they do for those bloggers, and not a value they provide to their readers. This ignorance of the network effect, and why it is in their interest to optimise their blogs as much as possible to be part of that network, is most common amongst those who think that what differentiates blogs is their format or, in Oliver’s words, ‘packaging’. I wrote in 2004, in a piece on blogging CEOs:
[Y]es, the software that drives blogs is revolutionary, but it’s how the network allows you to disseminate ideas and make connections with people that is truly mind-boggling.
Sure, some of those ideas are nonsense, but the words ‘baby’ and ‘bathwater’ spring to mind. Jeff Jarvis said this to The New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller:
Blogs are just people talking. And maybe that’s the way journalists should look at them. Oh, yes, blogs do journalism. But when you read bloggers and think of them in your terms as journalists—and then you hear these voices that are passionate, personal, brash, opinionated, immediate, irreverent, persistent, grating, and loud—I’ll bet it shoots a hot spike up your spine. Journalists don’t talk like that! Mobs do! I understand that. I went to J-school and drank from the cup. It was hard for me to deprogram when I became a columnist, let alone a blogger. But I’ve come to cherish this new medium precisely because the voice is so earnest and honest and human.
So, if you want, think of bloggers not as journalists but as citizens (no, sorry, I almost forgot you didn’t like that). Or think of them as the people (no, that’s still not it—too Internationale, don’t you think?). Instead, think of bloggers as readers (if we’re lucky). But to paraphrase Jay Rosen, these readers can now write—and so your writers should now be reading. Do you and your staff want to hear what your readers have to say? I hope you do. Of course, you do.
I actually can’t believe this piece was even published, because it’s an old line that I haven’t heard raised (outside of casual conversation with non-bloggers) for a while. The bigger, and more interesting, story is the effect of blogging and other disruptive technology on so many business models. But then, if blogs are irrelevant, I guess all those businesses have nothing to worry about and can relax and rest assured that we still live in the world of one-way information channels that they know and love, rather than a world of networks and many-to-many conversations. Right?