Blogging May Suck, But It’s Not THAT Bad, Or: Quick, Get This Post Up So I Can Do A Gross More

There was an essay in yesterday’s Inquirer about how blogs aren’t the future of media and how the blogoverse values speed over quality writing and it’s angry and blah blah blog blog blog.

It’s funny that the article — by Weekly Standard online editor Jonathan Last — downplaying the significance of blogs was in the Inky, which has approximately 4500 blogs and seems to view them as a panacea for the paper’s future. But I digress. I need to pump out this post so I can do a dozen more by day’s end.

Last’s essay generalizes the following about blogs: They lead to navel-gazing, they don’t value good writing, they are ultimately pointless. Because the media never naval-gazed before blogs.

Does Last make some good points? Certainly. I’m as skeptical about blogging as anyone. But to pigeonhole blogging, the medium, as simply a nothing but little meta-media commentary is just silly.

At its core, blogging is nothing more than an easy way to create and update your own webpage, to publish your thoughts for the world to see. The importance of blogs isn’t that they allow Citizen Joe the opportunity to tear down the “mainstream media,” they allow Citizen Joe to write his thoughts, his views, his fears, whatever. Citizen Joe could do this before, too, by standing on a soapbox, or publishing his own newsletter, or even making his own hard-coded HTML page. Blogging just made it easier. Or he can post photos of cute puppies, write recipes for applesauce or self-publish his poetry.

So what if there are 20 blogs posting about their problems with the Sudanese New York Times story? In 1955, maybe there were 20 people sitting around, complaining about a Times‘ story on Sudan. They couldn’t get their unfiltered words out there very easily. Some may have valid points, some may say that the Times screws up its Sudan reporting because it’s biased toward the Kraft Corporation. Some may have confused the article with one about sedans and is really confused. Sure, the signal-to-noise ratio may be small. But how does that make the Times‘ story any less important? Hell, some writing online may expand on the story, may add to it.

I know: Nothing on a blog is fact-checked or vetted and could even intentionally try to bend the facts to support a point of view. It’s a danger, and it’s not perfect. I tend to think that if you write something wrong, especially intentionally wrong, you’ll be corrected by your audience — but even if not, the danger in unchecked writing is not a reason to dismiss everything right away.

Complaining that a commentary blog — and, yes, there are other kinds of blogs — doesn’t do much or any original reporting is like complaining that Donovan McNabb didn’t kick any field goals this year. It’s not the aim of said blog. And since it’s easier and quicker to sit at your computer and tap tap tap instead of going out there, most popular blogs are at this point simply commentary, often meta-commentary.

But why do only the popular blogs count? Sure, right not it seems lots of popular blogs have shitty writing. But to say that all blogs don’t value writing is silly — there are blogs out there that are simply about the craft of writing, that post fiction and personal essays and I even know one blogger whose writing got him a big ol’ job blogging for Philadelphia Weekly. (Gee, I wonder who?) Should I discount all fiction simply because The Da Vinci Code is a piece of crap? Or the work of Jonathan V. Last in the Inquirer because the Weekly Standard blows? (There’s that vitriol again! Dang it!)

Look, if you’re a good writer and a good reporter in the year 2006, right now you’re most likely employed by, say, a major news organization, one that has been around for years and years. Oh, really, recent Pulitzer winners James Risen and Eric Lichtblau are employed by the New York Times instead of blogging on their own? What a shocker! By virtue of being a largely self-published medium, people with other jobs, other things to do, are going to be blogging. But that doesn’t mean we should discount the whole general populace of it.

Sure, blogs aren’t the giant-killer of old-style media as we know it. We should temper our love of this whole blogging world, this whole giant mess that is the realm of online publishing, most of it self-published. But simply because a large portion of the relatively new medium has gone the way of slapdash meta commentary so far doesn’t mean it’s not going to change in the future. It’s just a publishing tool. It’s just the Internet.

On the other hand, I wish somebody would have edited this before I sent it out to the world. Or at least looked it over.

One Last Thing | Blog, humbug! [Inky]
Dec. 5, 2005: An introduction