Last week the Financial Times newspaper published a 4,500-word article, written by Washington, D.C. freelancer Trevor Butterworth, which dismissed blogging as basically a big, fat nothing.
Bloggers should hang it up, take down the posts, delete their blogs and go back to watching Survivor, seemed the article's main thrust. Leave journalism to the professionals, all you yahoos out there in the blogosphere. You haven't challenged the mainstream media, which are alive and well, so you might as well just take your ball and go home. Blogging, touted a few years ago as the Next Big Thing, turned out to be nothing bigger or more lasting to the culture than Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire (remember Darva Conger, anyone?)
Well, the first question that popped into my mind after reading this article was, "If blogging is such a big, fat nothing, why has the Financial Times devoted 4,500 words to dismissing it?" Surely a big, fat nothing doesn't deserve 50 inches of space in one of the world's biggest newspapers.
I detect the gatekeeper mentality here, by which I mean the age-old attitude of those who have finally, after endless social climbing, sycophancy and possibly a few greased palms here and there, been admitted to the Snotty Acres Country Club. They're inside, and they don't want to let anyone else in. "I'm a professional journalist, here are my credentials, and by the way here's the check I got for that piece in the Financial Times. You so-called "citizen journalists" don't even have union cards. Get lost."
I always hesitate to use the term "elite" when talking about the media, and it annoys me when others do. "Elite" is a positive term: "The Marines are a military elite." "He belongs to an elite group, the world's ten best cherry-pit spitters." Wasn't there an old James Caan movie called The Killer Elite?
I'm happy to report that there are those who speak for the other side, such as influential blogger Glenn Reynolds, who has written a book about blogging:
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5601300
When discussing the establishment media and its insistence on dismissing the johnny-come-latelies, the word that comes to my mind is not "elite," but rather, "snobbery," and with all the insecurity that "snobbery" implies. Let me be clear: I will agree with Mr. Butterworth that bloggers are probably not going to put the New York Times out of business. (They don't have to. the New York Times is busy engineering its own obsolescence even as we speak.) But when Dave Barry described newspaper editors, a few years ago already, as "a group of men who hold meetings at which they discuss what to do about the Internet," he was being serious as only really fine humor can be.
Yes, the blogosphere is total anarchy. (Rather like the Internet was in its own infancy.) And yes, there is a lot of crap in the blogosphere. There's also a lot of crap in paper-and-ink journalism, just stroll down to any busy street corner in a major city and look over the myriad "free" newspapers available for the grabbing. As professional journalism, many of them make the better blogs look like back issues of Intellectual Digest.
I confess that I find most blogs unreadable. Too much blogging is done on the fly, with a scissors-and-paste approach: a sentence will be broken up with two or three links to something completely irrelevant, or so obscure that you scratch your head and mutter "Who cares?" followed at the end of the paragraph by a photo of someone's elbow on a restaurant table, a half-empty glass of beer next to it.
Up to a point, the Trevor Butterworths of this world do have a point: a lot of blogging is silly, narcissistic, sloppy, half-baked and obtuse. That's what happens when you make something available to anyone and everyone, make it free no less, and make it easy. If everyone can be his own journalist, any idiot can be a journalist. And there are legions of bloggers out there who can't push a noun against a verb, and if they do, they usually spell it wrong.
But there are a lot of excellent blogs out there, too. You're looking at one. In case you haven't noticed, you're reading an essay here, an editorial, not some crazed pastiche of what my friend J.D. and I had for lunch yesterday at Ernie's Diner. That's what I do when I'm not writing other things. See, I have a union card, like Butterworth: I've written for the "real" media, the kind that dirty your fingers with cheap ink, as many, many bloggers have. I haven't published in the Financial Times, but I have written for a number of newspapers, and--why not toot my own horn a little bit?--I even won an award from the San Diego Press Club a couple of years ago.
Unlike Mr. Butterworth, the fact that I have worked in the "real" media doesn't make me dismissive of blogging. There are some heavy-hitters in the "real" media blogging on the side these days. And in fairness to Butterworth, he does acknowledge that fact, when he notes that "established" journalists, operating as bloggers, took down the arrogant and oh-so-smug Dan Rather in 2004. But a side-note here, Trevor: the memos that Rather peddled to CBS regarding President Bush's National Guard service were not "supposedly fake," as you assert; they were fake, period. Got it? Had they been "supposedly fake," Rather would still have his job.
Yes, making everyone his own journalist seems, on the surface, about as silly as making everyone his own pope. But wait a minute: wasn't that what the Reformation was all about?
Just because a certain medium is swamped at the moment, and swamped with a lot of detritus, doesn't mean we should take the tents down. The term "weblog" is only 10 years old, and any new phenomenon, especially if it's related to disseminating information, is going to generate a lot of brush that will later need clearing. I have been blogging since 2004; Night Thoughts At Noon is my fourth blog in about a year and a half. I've been putting them up and taking them down, experimenting and refining my act until I get it the way I want it. I like the fact that I'm free to do this.
Does it bother me that no one reads my blog? Yes, of course it does. After each posting, I attach its link to an e-mail and send it around to 10 or 15 friends. If I'm lucky, one will respond, which means the other 14 didn't even bother clicking on my link.
But even though that does bother me, I try not to let it. I've been writing since I was in my teens, (which means that when I started I was using a typewriter, a device many under-30 bloggers have never seen) and plan to be blogging long after the novelty has worn off among those out there for whom blogging is indeed just a novelty.
Let's not forget that there was a time when the discursive essay itself, the "editorial," if you will, was also something nobody had ever heard of. The "other directedness" (to use a 1960s term) of the medieval mind-set, in which the only thing that separated man from God was sin, would no doubt have dismissed such assertion of the individual personality as frivolous. Then along came a fellow named Montaigne, and a new level of discourse became available.
So let anarchy reign, I say. Who knows? When the dust settles, maybe blogging will have its own version of the Pulitzer.
See you at the luncheon. It should be interesting.
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