Rachel Smolkin of the American Journalism Review– a very sharp writer and an old friend from college journalism days– has a new story in the AJR on “The Expanding Blogosphere,” in large part about the nexus between bloggers and the political press and accordingly concentrating on the pro/ semipro world of bloggers and blogs currently or formerly associated with magazines and newspapers, with a bit about les affaires Lott [Trent, not John] and Kos. No real surprises for those of us who follow this stuff anyways, but a very nice piece that avoids either blog triumphalism or dismissiveness. One good passage:
Kevin Drum, a self-described “centrist liberal” and one of the more contemplative bloggers, spent two decades as a software-marketing executive before launching his blog in August 2002. In mid-March, he agreed to blog for The Washington Monthly (www.washingtonmonthly.com).
His unedited blog is a comfortable fit with the magazine’s advocacy. But Drum notes that bloggers such as Reynolds and the anonymous Atrios (www.atrios.blogspot.com) are not nearly so sober, and that style “is part of what makes blogs a lot of fun.” Drum worries “if you try to put the rules of mainstream journalism onto blogs, you end up sucking the life out of them.”
While professional journalism has standards for sourcing and reporting, with blogs, the whole point “is that the standards are lower,” Drum says. “They’re able to toss stuff out that a reporter on a daily newspaper couldn’t. They express opinions loudly and with fervor. It’s not clear to me how those two things can intersect.”
Drum, who holds a journalism degree from California State University, Long Beach, admits to “some doubt about whether blogging and professional journalism can go together… If it turns out at the end of the year that the five most popular blogs are associated with professional journalism, it would change the nature of blogging.”
Update:
In his post on the article, Kevin says
A reporter working on a blog article talked to me last week and asked how many blogs I read. I told him there were 30-40 that I read daily and probably another 30-40 that I read less frequently. He was surprised: the other bloggers he had talked to had all virtuously claimed to read only two or three blogs a day.
My blog reading habits may be extreme, but I have a funny feeling that mainstream reporters (and apparently some bloggers too) tell little white lies when asked how many blogs they read. After all, it only takes a couple of minutes to read the latest posts on a blog, less if you’re skimming via an RSS feed. My guess is that many national political reporters read more blogs than they’re fessing up to — not one of them admits to reading Atrios, for example — but are embarrassed to admit it, sort of like a serious novelist not wanting to confess that he likes reality TV shows.
So add this to the great lies of our time: how many blogs do you read? Only two or three? Sure, sure…..
Sixty to eighty altogether? If I really feel like I’ve got time on my hands I might read (counting on fingers… looking for more fingers… checking my blogroll, and the Conspiracy’s, and Crooked Timber’s which is what I mostly use to click back and forth from) 25, counting the three TNR blogs separately. And I don’t do much clicking through to other blog posts out of those couple of dozen; I’m looking for the posts by those writers, and for the links to newspaper or magazine stories, journal articles, etc that they provide. Twenty-five is down a bit; Josh Cherniss and Russell Arben Fox seem to be on long-term hiatus, Invisible Adjunct is gone, some bloggers I read have joined group blogs that I already read anyways. But 25 isn’t a daily number, in any event; it’s a max. Beyond that… well, beyond that there are all these books on my shelves I haven’t read yet…
Comments are closed.