— Writing in The Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan describes blogs to his readers as a new form of journalism:
Blogging is the first journalistic model that harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It’s a new medium finally finding a unique voice. Stay tuned as that voice gets louder and louder
This isn’t surprising given that Sullivan is himself a journalist, and he writes a personal story highlighting the Enron/punditgate story with which he was so obsessed for so long. The blogger/journalist connection is also a given for anyone whose knowledge of blogs is limited to the selection of new voices promoted by Fox News this past week.
But I think this misses the point. As the Far Eastern Economic Review points out in a piece quoted by Sullivan, blogs are an evolution of the Internet, not of the newspaper:
?Weblogs are where the real action is. They are the creation of individuals, usually musings on national, local or personal events, links to interesting articles, a few lines of comment or discussion collected and presented by one person. Weblogs are a milestone in the short history of the internet.?
For every journalist, former journalist, or free-lancer with a blog, there are hundreds of civilians. And while journalists delight in the freedom to express without the mediation of the tyrannical editor, civilians delight in the ability to reach an audience without the space and content constraints of the Letters to the Editor section, as well as the ability to get the inside dope on any manner of things straight from an insider without the mediation of an enterprise whose primary skills are sentence structure and ad sales.
If many blog postings are stimulated by news and opinion features in the press, the better ones go far beyond the superficial and provide insider’s perspective and detail, without the space constraints and mannerly concerns that govern all journalistic enterprises, in print or on the Internet.
The Internet’s first applications enabled engineering researchers to communicate with each other about matters of common interest, typically their work on government contracts. With the advent of the accessible blog, we’re finding it enables citizens to communicate with each other regarding larger matters of common interest: our culture, our politics, and our government. This is way beyond free-lance journalists with computers.
Before everybody who’s ever had a drink with a reporter jumps up and screams that I’m being mean to journalists, let me just toss out this observation: the journalist as we know him today is a creation of a certain form of technology, a generalist with an ability to quickly ferret out information using a limited set of tools (a telephone and a Rolodex,) made necessary because high-speed web printing presses are a scarce commodity to which only a few have access. Now that every computer is a press capable of reaching more people than the New York Times dreams of on their best day, journalists will have to reinvent themselves in order to remain relevant. Blogging, to be sure, is part of that process, but it’s also much more than that. And as a non-journalist who’s had plenty of contact with political reporters for several years, it’s the “much more” that interests me.