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February 1, 2005
David Akin of CTV in Canada: It's Not the Blog. It's the Net.How has doing a weblog changed you as a journalist? "It hasn't, I'm afraid to say. What has changed me as a journalist is the Internet." Akin has covered the tech biz. This week he shifts to politics in Ottawa. Not ga-ga over blogging. Not dismissive. Instead, precise.David Akin, who has an elegant weblog, was, until recently, the National Business and Technology Correspondent for CTV News in Canada and a Contributing Writer for The Toronto Globe and Mail’s business section. Yesterday he shifted beats from the tech biz to Ottawa and the Parliamentary Bureau of CTV National News. (He’ll no longer be with the Globe and Mail.) “My beat responsibilities including covering the Conservative Party of Canada (currently the party that holds Official Opposition status in Canada’s Parliament and whose politics would be roughly analagous to a liberal Republican) and the Supreme Court of Canada.” For a beat reporter, that’s a dramatic shift in perspective. Like leaving Silicon Valley for Capitol Hill. I met David Akin at a conference on participatory journalism in Toronto, put together by Len Witt and others. He moderated part of it. Extremely well-informed about Net developments and the media business in Canada and the U.S. Not ga-ga over blogging and not dismissive of it, either. He stands for blog realism in the press. For Akin, blogging is normalized practice, and that is how he speaks of it. He’s a television reporter, primarily. But he keeps a blog for a reason. Before the recent meeting of Big Wigs on blogging, journalism and trust, I asked him some very basic questions about those three things. I was trying to find out if being a blogger made a difference to his journalism. As he pointed out, my questions often contained an assumption that didn’t hold. Why do you have a blog? David Akin: It seems wholly unremarkable to me that I’m blogging. I’ve been online for more than 15 years and reporting on the Web for almost 10. Whenever a new tool pops up to let people communicate, I jump in. That’s my job. Whether it’s Napster or blogs or IRC — if people are using some new social software tool, I ought to be using it, too, if I’m going to report intelligently about that tool and the communities it helps to create. So how has doing a weblog changed you as a journalist? David Akin: It hasn’t, I’m afraid to say. What has changed me as a journalist is the Internet. And I think it’s important to realize that, as you and others try to end that irrelevant bloggers vs. journalists debate, the Internet is really the thing that has changed everything. (Scott Rosenberg suggests this too. ) It’s the Internet that has empowered citizen journalists. Before we had blog publishing systems, we had relatively easy-to-use Web page creation tools—anyone remember Tripod?—and listservs and chat rooms. The blog form, of course, is a tremendous improvement on many of these tools. But, really, the challenge that many bloggers believe they are taking to mainstream media were challenges that predated the blog form; they were caused by widespread use of the Internet. Let me take that a bit further. The so-called blog challenge to mainstream journalism could not have existed without Archie and Gopher and all the depositories of online artifacts of the early Internet. That’s because the blogs that are challenging mainstream thinking are blogs full of links. Someone had to create those things to link to. (Oddly, most often, they are links back to mainstream media.) The best blogs link to primary documents and primary sources. But most bloggers (and many journalists, for that matter) have trouble distinguishing primary sources from secondary sources. E-mail, the Web browser, and always-on, wireless high-speed Internet connections are doing way more to “change me” as a journalist. With those tools, I can find new voices and new sources faster and that, I’m sure, improves the quality of my work. Okay. It’s the Internet that’s changing journalism. If that’s the case, why blog? David Akin: The blog is an increasingly important tool for newsgathering and for maintaining a connection with the community or ecosystem of those that you report on. That last part was the bit that surprised me as I started blogging. It has made my print reporting interactive. I write; I publish. And that used to be the end of it. Now, I write, I publish and a community of people who have special knowledge or who are deeply interested in the topic amplify, correct, modify, or extend the reportage. For a beat reporter, this is fabulous, because I now have more knowledge about my beat. I haven’t seen this work for my television reporting and I think there are a couple of reasons. First, blogs, like newspapers, are a logocentric medium and TV is not. Second, you can’t easily link to TV pieces or “quote” TV pieces or respond in the same way as the original piece, that is, with video. If blogging is good for maintaining a journalist’s connection with a news “community,” does that build trust? David Akin: Trust is the most important thing for any journalism outfit—big or small—to create because if readers, viewers trust you, they’ll keep coming back. And that, of course, is a big problem for mainstream media nowadays. Fewer and fewer people are coming back. Can blogs help with trust? They can, but if I was a newsroom manager, getting blogs going would be a low priority for trust-building (but a high priority if I wanted to increase circulation or viewership because I think they’re good for building brand and loyalty, something different than trust). Trust is lost by a newspaper when it spells names wrong. Trust is lost by a network news program when it can’t afford to send a camera crew beyond major metropolitan areas. Trust is lost by reporters who push people around in the name of newsgathering. And, of course, trust is lost when news outlets lie. Trust is not being lost because we don’t blog. And trust won’t be regained just by blogging. In fact, it’s my sincere hope that newsroom managers never learn of this conference for fear that they will believe that through blogging lies their news organization’s salvation. It does not. People trust people they meet. And that means news organizations ought to spend more on reporters and tell their reporters to get out of the office more! What changes, for a journalist, or looks different, when a journalist blogs? David Akin: Well, again, I don’t think bloggers deserve the privileged attention that such a question affords them. It’s really the Internet that has made things look different. And don’t forget, while the Internet is the conduit that carries blogs, the Internet is also the conduit, in many cases, that carries the raw news data that the mainstream media processes and feeds to the blogosphere which, in turn, modifies it once again. At CTV, IP-based networks are carrying digital video from around the world. Globe and Mail reporters from all parts of the world are contributing to the paper in near real-time thanks to IP-based networks. What raw data, if you will, are bloggers putting into the system? Where is the reportage? I say that knowing that there are some perfectly excellent examples of this sort of ‘raw media data’ — from tsunami video footage to eyewitness accounts of bombs falling in Baghdad. But it’s so rare that bloggers create real ‘value’, that a blog post becomes a primary document. Bloggers will tell you they are witnesses. I don’t think so. They are lawyers trying to convince you of a case. Well-trained, top-flight reporters are witnesses (See this from Akin’s blog.) Let me ask it another way. If you cross the room and stand with the bloggers and look “back” at Big Journalism, what does it look like? David Akin: Swap out bloggers and replace it with, say, environmental activists. Or “Republican Party members”. Or “University professors”. The answer will not change no matter who is ‘looking back” at Big Journalism. Big Journalism just looks plain weird to all of them! Why are some items in a network newscast and some are not? Why did the newspaper devote 100 column inches to that story and not to that one? Why do those journalists ask such stupid questions? Bloggers say they are now in a position to challenge that weird-looking MSM. Fair enough. It’s clear bloggers are doing just that. But environmental activists, the Republican Party, and university professors have also been doing a fairly decent job for years challenging mainstream media. Why are bloggers so special? Maybe they’re not. But would you—David Akin, journalist—describe blogging as a professional challenge? David Akin: One of the reasons I blog is because I seek out and look forward to readers of my blog challenging my work. I’m one of those who doesn’t believe “objectivity” is possible or even that it is an appropriate goal for journalists. I do believe, though, that it is a noble goal for mainstream media to be accurate (above all else), to be fair, and to be honest about its own shortcomings. To be honest about your own shortcomings, blind spots, assumptions, one ought to be challenged and challenged often about ‘the text’ one creates (or fails to create) every day. If you commit yourself as a journalist to accuracy and to fairness in your coverage, then, by implication, you commit yourself to challenges of your work. That can sound scary, I suppose, to some journalists and perhaps that fear is at the root of the some of nervousness in MSM to bloggers and online media. It’s not scary, of course. The challenge has always been there —whether it’s been from letters to the editor, academic papers or, in a rather bizarre way, Fox News! What’s different about the challenge to our work from blogs? The velocity. END Jay Rosen comments: Akin’s grasp of blogging, journalism, and trust is the opposite of evangelical. It’s practical. I heard these main points:
Right. You need an idea. After Matter: Notes, reactions & links… New PressThink (Feb. 3) The Befuddling Complexity Defense. “Sarah Boxer’s article about Iraq the Model was really about the Net and how you can’t trust anyone or anything that originated on it.” David Akin’s blog: Working notes by a Canadian politics reporter. And here is his post about our Q & A. “I can no longer use the excuse that I’m just fiddling around here so I can be a good tech reporter. I’m now doing this because it’s become part of the core communications tools, along with the phone, e-mail, and early morning breakfasts, that help me do my new job.” A blog is a central tool of Akin’s journalism, as e-mail is. Ed Cone in his reply to this post: There comes a moment where a technology becomes so cheap and easy to use that it becomes ubiquitous, and that’s a new thing, a social change built on the original technology change. Think about the brick-sized car phones that were so amazing in the ’80s, versus the routine use of mobile phones now. Commenting on this Q & A, Mitch Ratcliffe goes big picture: …it’s not just about the act of publishing or mode of transmission, it’s how people get the news that has changed, too. The organization of audiences, if you can call people who talk back an audience… has changed dramatically, perhaps evaporated into the social current. Now you have to read it a few times. But he’s saying our language for describing this shift is junk technology. Jim Elve, the builder of Blogs Canada in the comments to this post: Right now, there is a lively debate in Parliament on the same-sex marriage issue. (CBC account.) Canadian blogs are all over it. The blog coverage, however, is not news. It’s op-ed. Where David Akin responds: Big Journalism has been rightly criticized for too much ‘institutional’ coverage, for putting same-sex marriage into the headlines only if the Prime Minister is talking about it. So when we get assigned these stories, the first thing Big J journalists do is find a way to describe in concrete specific ways how this legislation will affect Canadians. Blogs can help us find those real-life stories. Later… Jim answers himself. Dan Gillmor: “…David Akin, who totally gets this stuff.” Mark Tapscott of the Heritage Foundation in comments: “Akins’ basic point - it’s the internet, not the blog - is true but perhaps not as significant as he seems to think it is.. It’s the blog that makes it possible via the internet to aggregate ‘the wisdom of crowds,’ to use James Surowiecki’s notable description.” Bill Doskoch is a journalist who has a weblog, works for CTV online, and says this stuff about being challenged by readers at your blog doesn’t match his experience. “The price of professionalizing journalism was the de-voicing of the journalist,” I wrote in Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. Because it’s part of the “re-voicing” story, and because it’s a reply to this incident, a must read for PressThink readers is the first person account of Farnaz Fassihi, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal: Iraq Breaks From Past. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, in announcing a hiatus from blogging in the “always on” position, says it was about having voice amid the news: Five years ago, I wanted to prove that a lone writer could carve out a readership as influential as any political magazine, dispense with editors, and make a living. It took a while, but it happened. I also wanted to experiment with a new kind of writing-in-real-time— more free-form, colloquial, confessional and open. And then he says it: “Blogging is indeed a revolution; and I am very proud to have played a part in pioneering it.” Don’t say “revolution.” People start throwing things at you. In Greensboro at the News & Record, they just do things. It’s blogging as normalized practice, as I said in my post. Now they have letters to the editor re-born as a blog, with comments on the letters. This is just a step. Check it out. Lex Alexander at the Lex files. “As we continue to change our online presence from lecture to conversation…” Meanwhile, a site that is potentially a rival portal to the News & Record, Greensboro 101, starts to appoint an editorial board, edging a little bit closer to being a journalism site. As Ed Cone wrote, “Online alt-media continues to define itself.” Ed’s closer to the situation than I am, but I don’t believe Roch Smith, Jr. thinks of his site as all that “alt.” (See my earlier interview with him.) Do, you, Hoggard?
Posted by Jay Rosen at February 1, 2005 1:30 PM
Comments
Good interview, Jay. I was at that Toronto PJNet conference, too, and was inpressed by David's professionalism. I remember in our after dinner discussion his use of the phrase "reputational capital." This, as I understand it, is what creates the level of trust in journalists - MSM or otherwise. I fully agree with Akin on the point that, for the most part, bloggers react and opine about news. We seldom report news. I chalk that up to budget constraints. Being in th eright place at the right time costs money. Right now, there is a lively debate in Parliament on the same-sex marriage issue. Canadian blogs are all over it. The blog coverage, however, is not news. It's op-ed. Bloggers who might like to cover Parliamentary debate will need to travel to Ottawa, somehow get into the Parliamentary chamber and then do their reporting. MSM reporters from Halifax to Vancouver will be sent to cover the debate. They'll have expenses paid and they'll have recognized press credentials. When I'm asked if I consider bloging to be citizen journalism, I reply that it is more like citizen op-ed writing. I don't necessarily see that as a negative. The idea of being able to discuss an opinion piece through the comments section of a blog is stimulating and can be useful in gauging and indeed, shaping public opinion. If editorial writers are journalists, then bloggers are journalists. For the most part, though, we aren't reporters. Akins' basic point - it's the internet, not the blog - is true but perhaps not as significant as he seems to think it is. The proper analogy might be the 1903 Curved Dash Oldsmobile and the first Ford Model T, which appeared in prototype form in 1908. Yes, the Olds was the first "mass-produced" car and Henry Ford learned some crucial lessons from it, but the Model T made wheels affordable for Everyman, thus creating a mass market. It's the blog that makes it possible via the internet to aggregate "the wisdom of crowds," to use James Surowiecki's notable description. Posted by: Mark Tapscott at February 1, 2005 3:53 PM | Permalink I'm glad Jim Elve raised the points he did because I think this is a really good illustration of why a Journalism 101 Workshop for Bloggers would be a great idea. Jim thinks that, in order to cover the same sex debate here, you need to be in Ottawa. In fact, Ottawa's probably the last place you want to be. The story is in Boston, where an affluent professional gay couple are saying goodbye to George Bush's America and heading for what they perceive as a more tolerant state. The story is happening in a small town in British Columbia where a local Knights of Columbus is refusing to rent their hall for the wedding reception of a gay couple. The story is in city halls everywhere where the civil servants who will be required to officiate at these gay weddings are struggling in some cases with their own beliefs. Now, these are precisely the kinds of stories that, it seems to me, bloggers anywhere can seek out and find in their own community. Big Journalism has been rightly criticized for too much 'institutional' coverage, for putting same-sex marriage into the headlines only if the Prime Minister is talking about it. So when we get assigned these stories, the first thing Big J journalists do is find a way to describe in concrete specific ways how this legislation will affect Canadians. Blogs can help us find those real-life stories. And if bloggers want to do what Big J journalists are doing when it comes to reporting on this debate, they don't need a big expense account and a trip to Ottawa. You just need to ask your neighbour what's going on! Posted by: David Akin at February 1, 2005 4:36 PM | Permalink "Don't start blogging in your newsroom just to start blogging." Thanks, Jay, for taking down the bunk beds. We keep hitting our heads on the top bunk. Akin would have been an additional voice of realism to the BloJo conference. Maybe next time. (This was the best I could do.) It's the Internet. The key contribution of amateurs is opening the discussion to issues that the professionals won't touch, for good professional reasons. Men's issues are a great example. Consider the recent media imbroglio over Larry Summer's remarks about the sex ratio among engineering professors. The consider some men's issue, see e.g. fathers-4-justice.org and trueequality.com Gay marriage? Are professional journalists afraid to report on that? Hell no! Choice for men? Whoa! Hide under the desk!
Posted by: Bill Swift at February 1, 2005 8:16 PM | Permalink Re the Journalism 101 workshop - it looks like Dan Gillmor is thinking about this stuff too, when he's not engaged in Dances With Trolls. Also it looks like Craig Newmark has citizen journalism plans (via Lasica via Waldman) Posted by: Anna at February 1, 2005 10:02 PM | Permalink And it was in PressThink a few days before JD had it: Q: Is journalism something Craigslist might pursue? Not that it matters much. But we do try to keep up here. "If editorial writers are journalists, then bloggers are journalists," Jim writes. "For the most part, though, we aren't reporters." Op-ed, reporter. I'm not sure these terms help us that much. Some bloggers edit the Web. That's neither an editorial writer nor a reporter. They focus attention: some do. They (some) become forums, points of affinity, mini-associations. "News stories," says Josh Marshall in the Kennedy School report on the Trent Lott case, "have a 24 hour audition on the news stage, and if they don't catch fire in that 24 hours, there's no second chance." This is something blogging has altered a bit. There is now sometimes that second chance. The blogs can talk it up, re-do the audition. Arguably that does some good for the ecosystem of news. A second crowd of excitables judging whether a story has merit. Exactly how this second "cut" on the news operates in relation to the first, we do not know. It's never been described very well. Often blogging suffers from being oversold, but this is partly because it is under-described. Posted by: Jay Rosen at February 1, 2005 11:08 PM | Permalink This is a good discussion and has got me thinking about the "nature of blogging." Jay's comment about "oversold and under-described" rings true. I see that my own previous comments were rather parochial. I tend to read and write more on politics than any other topic. I'm guilty of under-describing blogs by mainly thinking about political blogs when I ramble on about blogging. I maintain a Yahoo-style directory of almost 10,000 Canadian blogs and the vast majority of bloggers submitting their sites classify their blogs as "personal", as in personal journals or diaries. So-called serious bloggers tend to cringe when blogs are described in MSM articles as diaries but the fact is, many of them are just that. What really got me thinking, though, was David's response that bloggers could benefit from a Journalism 101 course. I don't disagree... entirely. Bloggers who want to be more like what we traditionally consider as journalists could, indeed, benefit. Many bloggers would benefit as much from a creative writing course or a simple grammar course. It all depends on their motivation and the scope of their blogs. There's also a real risk that spontaneity - one of the hallmarks of blogging - could be stifled by asking bloggers to respect the "rules". If we assume that bloggers and journalists are the basically the same thing, I think we fall into the trap of under-describing bloggers. Just as all writers are not journalists, neither are all bloggers journalists - or wannabe journalists. I took David's advice to heart about the real story in the Canadian SSM debate being outside Ottawa - outside the Beltway, in US lingo. I did a little soul-searching about whether I would have the inclination or nerve to walk down the street and ask a lesbian couple about their views. You see, I'm sort of in that "don't ask, don't tell" camp. Although I assume the two women in my neighbourhood are a couple, I've never seen them engaged in any public displays of affection. I'd think of myself as a "nosy reporter" if I started probing their relationship with the intention of writing about it. In other words, my excuses about budget and travel were just excuses for not wanting to get off my ass and actually report. I suspect that I'm like plenty of other pundit types. I'm too lazy to report and I'd rather draw on what guys like David have reported as fodder for my opinionizing. I like to tell myself that such opinionizing has value, even if it does not report any news, per se. The level of discussion/debate going on in the comments section of my blog posts validates that notion, even if it doesn't earn me much money. Here is how I put some of those points in March '04, Jim: "When I wrote my list, Ten Things Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism, I was discussing only that, the shift in what’s possible, or at least thinkable within the social practice of journalism, worldwide. What’s probable in the world we inhabit today is a far different story. "From what we know so far, it is probable that most weblogs will be short lived, and wind up abandoned, just as most conversations are abandoned. It is probable that a few popular blogs will have huge user base and the vast majority will be invisible most of the time, a pattern that reminds some of the “old” mass media. Since the software and interface are highly flexible, and the uses of an easily updated, good-looking page are endless, weblogs will be commonly used in closed systems—private and company networks—as much as the open waters of the Web. "Most, in fact, will not attempt to reach a public, even if they are in theory reachable by all Net users. The great majority of weblogs will probably be for personal use; and the user base will be peer to peer, not author to public. Teenagers will be the biggest market for weblog software and hosting services. For the public display of private life no easier tool has ever been invented, and it should surprise no one that people use it to record their lives, even when the details are, to most others, insignificant." Posted by: Jay Rosen at February 2, 2005 10:44 AM | Permalink This statement caught my eye, "Well-trained, top-flight reporters are witnesses". To get my car or computer fixed, I'd definitely want to find a 'well-trained' mechanic or technician. The proof would be in the pudding, too, if my car then ran well or my computer no longer crashed, say. How would I determine a 'well-trained' reporter's credentials? His attendance at a school of journalism, or maybe, some courses in composition? d At best, a journalism school might grant one the status of a novice in one's trade. Actual practice might make one 'experienced', but, trained? The statement strikes me as a pretense to elite status. Posted by: Thomas Hazlewood at February 2, 2005 2:20 PM | Permalink I'm an MSM journo, working as a writer for CTV News Online. I also maintain a blog. I was also at the participatory journalism session that Rosen, Akin and Elves attended. David Akin wrote above: "One of the reasons I blog is because I seek out and look forward to readers of my blog challenging my work." So do I, but I can't think of one posting of my CTV work that's received a serious critique via my blog. Actually, with the exception of Akin--who wrote me about the blogger payola scandal--and maybe two other posts out of nearly 600 since mid-August, most of the comments have been stuff endorsing my views. As a result, I'm not so sure blogs are the best way to engage in a dialogue with one's readers and be challenged about one's work. I was interviewed on this topic by a local j-student doing an article on blogging. I wish more (some? any?)journos would have posted thoughts on the matter (and it is a blog followed by some Canadian journos). But when I look around blogging communities --DailyKOS to Little Green Footballs -- I don't see much in the way of dissenting views there. Methinks it's the nature of much of the blogging beast. Posted by: Bill Doskoch at February 2, 2005 2:27 PM | Permalink I think you are quite right. Posted by: schlank jetzt at February 2, 2005 5:46 PM | Permalink I think that people like David Akin should not be very fond of blogs. This new technology endangers conventional journalism as a trade. Posted by: Circus Guy at February 2, 2005 5:52 PM | Permalink Bill Doskoch, But when I look around blogging communities --DailyKOS to Little Green Footballs -- I don't see much in the way of dissenting views there. Methinks it's the nature of much of the blogging beast.One of my concerns, espeically in the wake of the webcred conference, is that blogging will be defined in narrow terms such as from "DailyKos to Little Green Footballs". It's like looking at the now defunct Crossfire table and defining that as the totality - or even representative of - public discourse. As much as I enjoy, and appreciate, what dKos and LGF are - they are the aberrations. Journalists, for love of celebrity or some other structural bias, love to see the world in terms of the aberrations. The rest of us live elsewhere. I think Sisyphus's interpretations of my remarks says much more about his worldview than anything else. I used the two blogs in question as the endpoints of the spectrum. What I found striking about dKOS and LGF was how they represented the endpoint but were remarkably similar from the perspective of the narrow range of opinions within them. If anyone can point me to blogging communities that are politically oriented yet have a wide range of debate within them, I'd love to know their URLs. In terms of my own blog, the people who gravitate towards it are those who agree with me. As a journalist, you shouldn't just interact with your fan club. You should be talking with your critics too. A blog might not be the best place to do that. Posted by: Bill Doskoch at February 2, 2005 10:46 PM | Permalink I think Sisyphus's interpretations of my remarks says much more about his worldview than anything else.I think so too. I certainly wouldn't expect my comments to reflect anyone else's worldview than my own. In fact, my point was that my worldview, and the blogosphere's worldview is broader than the one you presented here - or, perhaps - that you possess in general. For example: Methinks it's the nature of much of the blogging beast.Is not a statement specific to your "beat". It's a statement about the "blogging beast". But how well do you know that beast? Are you the blind man feeling just the tail of the elephant and declaring it rope? If anyone can point me to blogging communities that are politically oriented yet have a wide range of debate within them, I'd love to know their URLs.Well, I'm part of the blog community. I'm not sure what a blogging community is. You might find this post and comments instructive as an exchange between critics within the blog community. Posted by: Sisyphus at February 2, 2005 11:44 PM | Permalink Sisyphus, I explained the context in which I used the dKOS -LGF analogy, and for the second straight time, you've ignored it. That's troll-like behaviour. In terms of how well I know the beast -- not well enough. However, that being said, I still might know it better than most. Given the millions of blogs and the volumes of postings, I'm not sure any one person can truthfully know it all. Since you're not sure what a blogging community is, here's my take. Anyone's blog can eventually become a community. I have regulars at mine. In most cases, I've become a regular visitor at theirs. People who visit mine regularly like my writing style, my choice of topics and my general worldview. As a journalist (and I'm here at PressThink to talk about the intersection of journalism and blogging), I would appreciate informed criticism beyond "I liked your piece." I like the paradigm of news as conversation. To have a really good one requires, IMO, a tolerant, respectful, heterogenous community. Journalists, of all people, should speak with people outside of their comfort zone -- which in blog terms probably means identifying your critics and visiting their sites, rather than waiting for them to come to yours. To build one's one community a bit, my only thought for tonight is to link to thoughtful pieces of criticism and hope people follow the trackbacks. While I try to widely sample the blogosphere, I'm not finding my dream heterogenous communities in my surfing. Some of the most successful ones, in terms of traffic numbers, are the narrowest in their view. The blog world, in my experience, has its pluses and minuses. Selling it as a venue for feedback from one's MSM audience isn't the best one, IMO. But as David Akin said in a comment on my blog: "All the other core communication tools -- e-mail, phone, and fax -- presume that you know who the intended recipient is of your correspondence. With a blog, you put it out there and you just have to trust that it finds someone and that they get back to you. It's a great way to find complete strangers and find completely new twists on old ideas." Jim Elves concurred on that point. So do I. Serendipity can be a good, even wondrous, thing. Posted by: Bill Doskoch at February 3, 2005 3:28 AM | Permalink You may enjoy more "centrist" views; I especially like the pro-war liberal hawk Michael Totten, who voted Bush yet has a wife who voted Kerry and seems open minded. His friend Marc Cooper was highly critical of Kerry, despite voting for him and being even more critical of Bush. Then there is CenterField, and FreeSpeech, both trying to be group blogs open to Left and Right. Many blogs I like ARE personal op-ed folk; you're welcome to visit Some other open liberal (anti-Bush, possibly pro-war) Harry's Place (UK), and Mayflower Hill: (Harry is close to pro-war Marxist Norm Geras, who has no comments, but good thinking.) But this "facts" fetish of journalists is nearly patently false (as mentioned in prior posts). What folk want to know is: was it "worth" it? (Vietnam; race to the moon; defying communism; avoiding involvement in Rwanda; invading Iraq; changing Social Security). What will the future be? is likely to be? with one policy, or another? What should be done? (Lenin DID have one right question) and Why? (the alternatives) [who is to Blame? -- the political!] Facts are boring. Many stories are NOT "factual", though good news stories are mostly facts. The meaning behind the facts involves values. Even before the Iraq election results were known, it could be said: if less then 10% of the eligible people vote, it's a sham. If more than 90%, it's a huge success. What's the minimum turnout for a success? Each person's "minimum" is their own opinion.
Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at February 3, 2005 8:52 AM | Permalink Jay, Hugh Hewitt is challenging you about Eason Jordan (CNN)-- and his verbal claim that the US military "targeted" journalists. And his partial backpedalling. Where are you on this? Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at February 3, 2005 9:45 AM | Permalink Bill Doskoch has it just about right here. Blogs aren't necessarily good "one size fits all" tools for gathering feedback. Within a niche of people giving honest, well-reasoned feedback, yes. But many blogs are simply echo chambers in which dissenting views are quickly chased away. At the other end of the scale -- if Peter Jennings suddenly started blogging and threw open the floodgates, you'd get every crank in America drowning out any discussion you could possibly have. And then there are the very good blogs that get no feedback. The implicit assumption among many bloggers is that the best blogs will get the most attention, the best reputation and the most credibility. This is nonsense. Yes, some big-time blogs will be worthy of their attention. Others will simply be shrill ideologues who attract fanatical fan bases of like-minded people, and others will be the ones who come up with catchy names that stick out in the supposedly democratic "blog rolls" that give readers no insight beyond a list of names. Meanwhile, the best blogs on the Web (great example: Lex Alexander's personal blog, Blog on the Run) won't get the attention they deserve. There will be some bloggers who are good at making the most noise, and they'll get noticed -- just as some activists are better than others than getting noticed, just as some journalists are masters of attention. (They're called "pundits.") I sympathize with Akin. Those of us who did Web content in the notepad-and-FTP days love blogs as publishing tools. I think Akin might underplay the notion of blogs bringing Web publishing to the masses, but his pragmatism is a welcome addition to any discussion over what that revolution really means, especially for journalists. Posted by: Beau Dure at February 3, 2005 10:54 AM | Permalink Bill Doskoch, That's troll-like behaviour.I can see part of your problem cultivating a community that includes your critics. Let's review, shall we? I liked everything about your first comment, here, and took exception to this: But when I look around blogging communities --DailyKOS to Little Green Footballs -- I don't see much in the way of dissenting views there.I don't think it's the nature of the "blogging beast". I don't think LGF or dKos tell us much about the "blogging beast". Why did you choose them? I used the two blogs in question as the endpoints of the spectrum.What spectrum, Bill? The Big Blog spectrum? The hyperbolic political pundit blog spectrum? While I try to widely sample the blogosphere, I'm not finding my dream heterogenous communities in my surfing. Some of the most successful ones, in terms of traffic numbers, are the narrowest in their view.It's easy to build a "community" of like-minded visitors and commenters with demagogic posts. It's political blogporn. That's the LGF-dKos spectrum. Not that's there's anything wrong with that. I like alittle blogporn now and then. It's just not the community that I want to belong to or cultivate at my blog. But I also don't complain about the "blog beast" using them as an example. By why think of them as successful? Why is traffic the indicator? Why comments? Why incoming links/trackbacks? Is it because they are all quantifiers of the amount of conversation? Are they qualifiers? Not to long ago, comments fell out of favor among "successful" bloggers. Seth Finkelstein has been developing his own theories of what it's not like to have a "blogging community" (here, here, and here, for example). What spectrum does your blog belong in? How about InfoThought? How about PressThink? How about Sisyphean Musings? Are we between the LGF-dKos endpoints, somewhere? I'm not ignoring your point, Bill. I'm drawing it out. I'm doing what you say you want. Given the millions of blogs and the volumes of postings, I'm not sure any one person can truthfully know it all.Right. Hold onto that thought. It's a big Blogiverse. Your criticism, if I understand it correctly without employing any troll-like behavior, is that your blog isn't building the community you want and you don't like the communities built by others in the LGF-dKos spectrum. Journalists, of all people, should speak with people outside of their comfort zone -- which in blog terms probably means identifying your critics and visiting their sites, rather than waiting for them to come to yours.I applaud your take on the relationship journalists should have with their readers. The "blogging beast" is just a manifestation of another Internet application. Like the "E-mail beast" or any other. But, as you point out, it's also different. Think of it this way: "the other core communication tools [journalists currently use and are comfortable with] -- e-mail, phone, and fax --" are push communications. A blog is both push and pull. It can be passive, with a post lingering waiting for the right kind of attention (or any attention at all). Or it can be more active, using trackbacks and comments with links back to your post. It's not magic. And, it's not a mature space on the Internet. In fact, it may be transitory and replaced by something else - son of blog - or completely different. What I'm trying to tell you, as your critic, is don't fall for the hype - and don't contribute to it. Any spectrum that is enclosed by LGF and dKos is hyped. Posted by: Sisyphus at February 3, 2005 12:06 PM | Permalink Thomas Hazlewood writes above ...
Posted by: David Akin at February 3, 2005 2:07 PM | Permalink Plug for sbw: Journalist an earned accolade Hi Sisyphus: You make some very good points. I'll try to ignore that which I find to be gratuitously caustic and address them. I don't think it's the nature of the "blogging beast". I don't think LGF or dKos tell us much about the "blogging beast". Why did you choose them?I used the two blogs in question as the endpoints of the spectrum. I was thinking ideological within the political wing of the blogosphere, but in some ways, dKOS and LGF are very much alike. To that extent, I agree with this statement of yours: It's easy to build a "community" of like-minded visitors and commenters with demagogic posts. It's political blogporn. That's the LGF-dKos spectrum. You went on to say: Not that's there's anything wrong with that. I like a little blogporn now and then. It's just not the community that I want to belong to or cultivate at my blog. But I also don't complain about the "blog beast" using them as an example. As a generalization, I stand by my statement. But I accept there are islands of rational debate between people of differing points of view within the blogosphere. What spectrum does your blog belong in? How about InfoThought? How about PressThink? How about Sisyphean Musings? Are we between the LGF-dKos endpoints, somewhere? I would generally say yes. But in the case of my own blog, the only community (such as it is) that has sprung up around it tends to be people who agree with what I say. I think one thing missing in the blogging/journalism debate is an agreed-upon vocabulary and/or taxonomy system (thanks for the Blogiverse link). As an example, my little blog has one author and it is funded entirely by me. A massive one like dKos has one editor-publisher and a host of contributing diarists. It is also funded by advertising. Wonkette is the creation of Gawker Media. Ana Marie Cox has three editorial staff helping her out. All three are considered blogs, but they are different. Does audience size make a difference? Yes and no. If you look on your blog as a commercial venture, it most certainly does. If you look on your blog as an act of citizenship or merely a hobby, less so. But if you're a journalist and you're being honest with yourself, are you writing to be read or not? If not, then why have a blog (or any other publishing outlet) at all? You can just write angry screeds in Word. Personally, I think it's important for MSM journalists to know what other people think. I like the paradigm of journalism as conversation. I know a lot of journalists who think of their stories as stone tablets carved by the hand of God, perfect in their judgment and forever immutable. They don't want to hear from their critics at all. As for successful bloggers who don't post comments or trackbacks, I think that's moving away from what I see as the spirit and soul of blogging. Anyways, Sisyphus, thanks for your thoughts and the many useful links. To all who have read this far, here is a piece of online art [scroll down and click on carnivore.build.(32)] from a few years ago that, for whatever reason, I thought about today. To me, it shows why the Internet should be considered a living thing. Posted by: Bill Doskoch at February 3, 2005 10:41 PM | Permalink I am starting to realize my error. Blogging has no nature. I knew that, but haven't been emphasizing it enough. I'm not sure it will make it on the air, but I did a sit down with Brooke Gladstone, host of NPR's On the Media, for this weekend's program. It was a "word watch" segment on the term MSM. Somehow we got to talking about the term blogging and I said to her what many people involved in "blog talk" know to be true: "blogging" is a temporary term that probably won't make sense in a few years. It will become a relic. She said: what do you mean? Well, I don't refer to Fred Barnes, an editor at the Weekly Standard, as "noted e-mailer Fred Barnes," even though he uses e-mail and the description is technically correct. "That's what I mean about 'blogger'," I said. Listen for it. Posted by: Jay Rosen at February 3, 2005 11:21 PM | Permalink Jay Rosen wrote: I am starting to realize my error. Blogging has no nature. I knew that, but haven't been emphasizing it enough. Has no nature, or has a nature that hasn't yet been properly defined and classified? Posted by: Bill Doskoch at February 4, 2005 2:00 AM | Permalink As I have said previously, my concern is the misleading, generic use of the term "blogger". It is a totally meaningless term. At best, it is an empty vessel into which the initiated pour their own meaning. The point behind sending out my original post was that having assembled some very smart people, willing to engage on the topic, we ought to be spending our time attempting to give this term meaning rather than pouring over transcripts to see who shot John. |
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