Sunday, April 10, 2005
Essays, blogs, and the friend from talk radio. I had a long phone call tonight with my friend from junior high days. He's been doing talk radio for years, and I asked him if he gets any resources lately from blogs. He scoffed and suggested that there's no reason to read blogs beyond Drudge because most blogs aren't as well-written or as carefully researched as mainstream journalism. So he reads several papers and many magazines and skips nearly all blogs. Even though he's quite conservative, he finds Maureen Dowd to be a brilliant writer, and he doesn't find the same quality in bloggers, no matter what their politics are.
I found myself saying that bloggers were performing a different function than columnists. Sure, once in awhile bloggers carry out a direct act of reporting or research that could just as well have been done by a journalist. I think bloggers are processing issues and facts, passing ideas around, turning them over and over, nudging them, extending their reach, recontextualizing them, and otherwise living with ideas and information and drawing them out into wider communities to test them and to see how they hold up.
My friend didn't buy it, and I need to keep thinking it over to see how I think it holds up as an idea myself. If bloggers are journalists, they inhabit an expanded realm of journalism; if they are something else, we know that something best as a process. Most blogs don't break news or make news, but they do process the news of a field for the blog's writer and for others. If we have to call some aspect of blogging news, the news is that somebody woke up today and took a fresh look at his or her unfolding field and had these new thoughts about it. The news of a blog is personal.
Once in awhile somebody talks about blogs and essays as similar genres. This is a good comparision, I think -- not school essays but the literary essays of the last few centuries, starting with Montaigne. On their best days, blogs are a way of thinking for yourself and sharing with others. On its bad days, when it surrenders to bullying and persuasion at any cost, talk radio has a lot to gain from being more like essays and blogs. If we care about democracy, we should prize any genre that resembles the essay. [0 & P]
I found myself saying that bloggers were performing a different function than columnists. Sure, once in awhile bloggers carry out a direct act of reporting or research that could just as well have been done by a journalist. I think bloggers are processing issues and facts, passing ideas around, turning them over and over, nudging them, extending their reach, recontextualizing them, and otherwise living with ideas and information and drawing them out into wider communities to test them and to see how they hold up.
My friend didn't buy it, and I need to keep thinking it over to see how I think it holds up as an idea myself. If bloggers are journalists, they inhabit an expanded realm of journalism; if they are something else, we know that something best as a process. Most blogs don't break news or make news, but they do process the news of a field for the blog's writer and for others. If we have to call some aspect of blogging news, the news is that somebody woke up today and took a fresh look at his or her unfolding field and had these new thoughts about it. The news of a blog is personal.
Once in awhile somebody talks about blogs and essays as similar genres. This is a good comparision, I think -- not school essays but the literary essays of the last few centuries, starting with Montaigne. On their best days, blogs are a way of thinking for yourself and sharing with others. On its bad days, when it surrenders to bullying and persuasion at any cost, talk radio has a lot to gain from being more like essays and blogs. If we care about democracy, we should prize any genre that resembles the essay. [0 & P]