Blogging by bobos
I'm confused about blogging, specifically how newspapers and tv shows can blog. Web logging was always intended as an alternative media source, a way for non-journalists to share with others what they were experiencing. Clearly we were all interested, because that's what broadcast journalists covered anyway ("Mrs Smith, how did you feel when your sleeping son Timmy was eaten alive by rats?").
So why now, do big papers like the Washington Post and television news shows have blogs? I assume that from their perspective there is less editorial control than there is over a print article. But none? I doubt that.
Is a blog a news article that happens to be online and told in a casual manner?
Wikipedia defines blogs as
...A blog (or weblog) is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed with the newest at the top. Like other media, blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. Some blogs function as online diaries.
That may be true, but there is a social expectation for a blog. A blog is the reality television of journalism. We expect it to be more revealing, more honest than a conventional news story and more importantly, there is an expectation, IMHO, for it to be amateur, not amateurish, which is a different thing entirely.
The big media players writing blogs are silly. It's an attempt to use a fashionable word and a slight change of editorial policy to do what they were doing all along, anyway.
It feels to me like it would if Frank Sinatra were alive today and I had to watch him singing duets with Eminem.
Blogs are alternative media.
Blogs are erosive, not institutionally accretive.
Blogs are subversive.
Posted on March 23, 2006
