SCN: Blogging

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

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(J.D. Lasica, Online Journalism Review)---Back around 1993, in the 
Web's neolithic days, starry-eyed Net denizens waxed poetic about 
a million Web sites blooming and supplanting the mainstream 
media as a source of news, information and insight. Then reality set 
in and those individual voices became lost in the ether as a million 
businesses lumbered onto the cyberspace stage, newspapers 
clumsily grasped at viable online business models, and a handful of 
giant corporations made the Web safe for snoozing.  

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Web's irrelevance: the 
blogging phenomenon, a grassroots movement that may sow the 
seeds for new forms of journalism, public discourse, interactivity 
and online community.  

While no one is really sure where this is all heading, my hunch is 
that blogging represents Ground Zero of the personal Webcasting 
revolution. Weblogging will drive a powerful new form of amateur 
journalism as millions of Net users  -  young people especially  -  
take on the role of columnist, reporter, analyst and publisher while 
fashioning their own personal broadcasting networks. It won't 
happen overnight, and we're now seeing only version 1.0, but just 
wait a few years when broadband and multimedia arrive in a big 
way.  

For the uninitiated, a blog consists of a running commentary with 
pointers to other sites. Some, like Librarian.net, Jim Romenesko's 
Media News or Steve Outing's E-Media Tidbits, cover entire 
industries by providing quick bursts of news with links to full 
stories. But most blogs are simply personal journals  -  links-laden 
riffs on a favorite subject.  

I spoke this month with six journalists or writers who publish 
Weblogs and asked for their take on the phenomenon and its 
significance for journalism. Three appear below and three will 
appear next week.  

Paul Andrews  

Andrews, who now lives in San Francisco, was technology columnist 
for the Seattle Times before taking an early buyout. He co-authored 
the book "Gates" (Doubleday, 1993) and wrote "How the Web Was 
Won" (Broadway Books, 1999), about Microsoft's embrace of the 
Internet. He began his Weblog in November.  

Weblogs come in all shapes and flavors, and Andrews has sampled 
plenty of them. "Some are tech-based, some are glorified dating 
services, some are nothing but a collection of links. The ones I like 
the most give something personal as well," he says.  

Not everyone who keeps a journal is a journalist, he points out, and 
"you can write on the Web about your work and life without being a 
journalist." But professional journalists too often dismiss those who 
don't work for traditional media, he says, when the truth is that the 
most vital and moral dispatches on the Web are being created by 
amateurs.  

"It's the role of institutional media to act as gatekeepers," he says, 
"but what you have in print publishing today is a consolidation that's 
inimical to the diversity that exists in everyday life. With the rise of 
the Internet, people don't need to be bounded by those traditional 
filters anymore."  

The Net opens up the spigots for those who want to take on the 
mantle of journalist. "The Web gives voice to a lot of alternative 
points of view," Andrews says. "Anyone connected with the WTO 
protests in Seattle and Quebec City knows that the protestors' 
viewpoints were either ignored or misrepresented by the radio, TV 
and newspaper coverage. The commentary was almost willfully 
ignorant. How silly, how arrogant that alternative voices were not 
allowed to be heard. I always thought the role of the journalist is to 
ensure that the voice of the people should be exposed.  

"Now, thankfully, the protesters who want to get their story out can 
bypass the media by using live audio or a Webcam to offer raw 
feeds during a live protest or forum. If you're a guy with a video 
recorder filming an event in a certain neighborhood and streaming it 
on the Internet and reporting it on your Weblog, you're practicing a 
straightforward kind of amateur journalism."  

Andrews thinks Weblogs and other forms of online journalism are on 
the rise in part because of the rapid decline in the credibility of big 
media. "I think the Web is actually becoming more credible while 
established media are losing ground," he says. "And name me the 
last five serious efforts at public-interest journalism by 
institutionalized media."  

Andrews doubts that we'll see many journalists at traditional media 
companies launch their own personal Weblogs. (New Republic 
columnist Andrew Sullivan is one exception.) "I think newspapers 
still look askance at the Web and they don't want their reporters 
online even on their own time," he says.  

Part of the reason for the upsurge in blogging at sites like 
Weblogger.com and Blogger.com is that the tools for self-publishing 
have become far easier and more automated. "When the first 
browsers were invented, you still had to know how to script," 
Andrews says. "Now you've got templates and applications and free 
server space so that all the nuts and bolts are taken care of for you 
and all you have to do is concentrate on the writing."  

Andrews lays out a sort of manifesto for journalism blogging in a 
disquisition called Who Are Your Gatekeepers? In it he gives a 
fascinating historical survey of the role played by publishers of first-
person journals, noting that Columbus' ship log with his personal 
ruminations became the hot news publication of its day, and that the 
first newspaper in America was shut down by colonial authorities for 
printing unsanctioned gossip about the king of France's sex life and 
a local suicide.  

Writes Andrews: "A new style of journalism, based on a 'raw feed' 
directly from the source, is emerging. Journalists testing the new 
waters are ... bound to wreak havoc on institutionalized media. ... 
Where the Weblog changes the nature of 'news' is in the migration 
of information from the personal to the public. ... Hit the 'post' button 
and any personal writing becomes published writing. ... As a 
thousand flowers bloom, the Web's garden of information becomes 
more diverse, enlightening and transformative than anything the 
traditional paper-based print world can provide."  

Since writing that several weeks ago, Andrews has dialed back his 
rhetorical flourishes a notch. "I'm a little more measured today," he 
says. "The dot-com implosion and the vision for the Internet has a 
lot of us going through a reassessment. It's also been sobering to 
realize what a demanding form of expression Weblogging is. On the 
whole it'll be a slower uptick than I predicted earlier. But my kids 
and their kids live on the Internet, and as their world evolves it will 
be much more of an electronically published world."  

Does he still think Weblogs will bring about a new form of 
journalism?  

"That's the key question," he says. "I don't know. If the tools 
become more sophisticated, if bots can point you to other bloggers 
whose ideas match criteria you've set up, then I think we'll evolve to 
a different kind of journalism. Right now it's still too hard to make 
those connections. But I'm still hopeful. We're getting there."  

Deborah Branscum  

Branscum, based in Berkeley, Calif., is a contributing editor to 
Newsweek who wrote a feature on blogging for the magazine's 
March 5 issue, is also a contributor to Fortune.com, Macworld, 
Wired, PC World and other publications. She began her Weblog in 
December.  

"I began doing a Weblog for a patently self-serving reason: to 
promote my not-yet-world-famous conference for technology and PR 
executives," Branscum says. "A Weblog gives me a forum where I 
can bitch bluntly about the many failings of media PR. But it's 
become just addictive and incredibly fun to do."  

Branscum ticks off four cool things about Weblogs:  

...Creative freedom. Part of a blog's allure is its unmediated quality. 
"For a working journalist, there's no luxury like the luxury of the 
unedited essay," she says. "I've been an editor longer than I've 
been a writer, and I know the value that an editor brings to your 
copy. Even so, there's an enormous freedom in being able to 
present yourself precisely as you want to, however sloppily or 
irrationally or erratically. I don't have an editor to pitch the story to, 
or a copy editor who decides he's not happy with my syntax... You 
think it, you write it, you put it out to the world."  

...Instantaneity. "Even when you're writing for a weekly magazine, it 
seems like it takes forever to see your work in print," Branscum 
says. "With a Weblog, you hit the send key and it's out there. It's 
the perfect disposable journalism for our age."  

...Interactivity. "It's a kick to get feedback from people you've never 
heard of who stumble on your Weblog," she says. Branscum 
estimates that 30 readers might surf her blog on a slow day and 900 
might read it on a busy day, with pointers from other sites and other 
bloggers often driving traffic to archived material.  

...Lack of marketing constraints. "The people who are interested in 
your perspective find you, instead of you having to find a publication 
that reflects their interests," she says. "You don't have to 
necessarily tailor your work for a certain readership or 
demographic."  

Like most bloggers, Branscum updates her Weblog sporadically, 
averaging twice a week. She blogs mostly about media matters, 
from the state of entertainment journalism to a rant on rude 
reporters.  

Does Branscum think we're slouching toward some new form of 
journalism? "I'm not quite willing to go there," she says, "but I do 
think it's an interesting question for PR folks and the people who 
have to deal with Webloggers. My attitude is, if you haven't 
established your credibility by writing for any major publications, 
it's not written down anywhere that people have to answer your 
questions. So far, the Weblogs I've seen tend to be less about 
actual reporting and more about analysis and punditry and 
opinionated commentary."  

For now, independent journalists will continue to devote their time 
and energy to publications that pay, Branscum says. "Unless 
someone figures out a way to pay journalists for our Weblogs, my 
best efforts will go to Fortune.com and Newsweek. For now, 
Weblogs are a fabulous exercise in self-indulgence because you're 
writing for yourself."  

Glenn Fleishman  

Fleishman, based in Seattle, is a free-lance reporter for The New 
York Times, Wired and Fortune and a computer columnist for The 
Seattle Times. He began writing a Weblog on technology and his 
personal life in November.  

"Blogging was this phenomenon that I thought of as not very 
interesting for a long while," recalls Fleishman, a free-lancer since 
1994. "When the Guild at the Seattle Times went on strike last 
November, I came across Paul Andrews' Weblog and discovered 
how easy it was to set up the tools. I decided to try it out."  

Fleishman came to the same conclusion as Branscum: that 
Weblogs are taken more seriously than a static Web page. "It's this 
gem, this nut, that people interact with differently," Fleishman says. 
"A Weblog gives off a patina of credibility and authoritativeness that 
you don't find in other corners of the Web."  

The medium seemed well-suited to Fleishman, a self-described 
"pretty opinionated guy." His Weblog tends to focus on technology 
issues like low-speed wireless networks or his six-month stint at 
Amazon.com. His goal is to parlay his blog into a "dead-tree job" as 
a full-time columnist for a print publication.  

Fleishman found that he could use his Weblog to report or discuss 
issues that fell outside the scope of an article he was writing for a 
print publication. "Issues kept coming up in my reporting that I 
couldn't include in my report, often because I was expressing an 
opinion and my story wasn't an analysis or how-to piece," he says. 
His Weblog gave him a forum to publish relevant reporting that 
would have remained buried in his notebook.  

Another advantage of Weblogs is that you're not completely at the 
mercy of big media. Fleishman cites the example of Dave Winer, a 
software entrepreneur whom John Markoff interviewed for an article 
in the New York Times last month. "Dave said the article gave an 
inaccurate interpretation of what he had to say. He gave his own 
account on his site to clarify his position."  

For journalists, Fleishman says, Weblogs offer one overriding 
appeal: Here's a media form that lets you write at any length about 
any issue you care deeply about. "As a reporter, it's nice to be able 
to present an informed conclusion, based on your own experience, 
without having to go to the requisite two dozen so-called expert 
analysts who cancel each other out," he says. "You're the only one 
who's standing behind this opinion."  

Fleishman doesn't buy into the standard blogger mantra that 
unmediated writing is superior to copy that has passed through the 
editorial sausage factory. He finds blogging neither superior nor 
inferior to traditional journalism  -  just infinitely fascinating. "One of 
the most interesting things about blogs is how often they've made 
me change my mind about issues," he says. "There's something 
about the medium that lets people share opinions in a less 
judgmental way than when you interact with people in the real 
world."  

That's what seems to resonate with bloggers: not the publication of 
a first-person journal but the chain of interaction it often ignites. 
Says Fleishman: "Someone spots an article or commentary you've 
posted, which triggers a blog entry, which triggers further 
responses, and before you know it your blog becomes part of an 
interactive discussion in this obscure backwater of the Web that's 
being read and cited by thousands of people. It's pretty amazing."  

Copyright 2001 Online Journalism Review   





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