bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Friday, February 13, 2004 ::

In which the intrepid blogger once again navel-gazes in the hall of mirrors that is the blogosphere
I was perusing Gideon Strauss's weblog the other day when I ran across this link to Terry Teachout's 15 notes on blogging. He compares blogs -- correctly, I believe -- to the "little" (usually literary) magazines of the 20th century, publications whose "influence will be disproportionate to their circulation," and describes blogs as "what online magazines were supposed to be."

Teachout's ninth point -- "Within a decade, blogs will replace op-ed pages" -- reminded me of something I read about blogging nearly two years ago in an actual paper publication. The May ~~2005~~ 2002 issue of Wired (thanks, Paul, for setting me straight) carried this wager between Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz, the CEO of New York Times Digital.

The bet: Weblogs will outrank theNew York Times Web site by 2007 (based on a Google search of five keywords or phrases reflecting the top five news stories).

Winer (who bets yes): "We're returning to what I call amateur journalism: created for the love of writing, without expectation of financial compensation. This process is fed by the changing economics of the publishing industry, which is employing fewer writers and editors. The Web has taught us to expect more information, not less, and that's the sea change the Times faces: how to remain relevant to a population that can do for themselves what the big publications won't. The "dumb it down" philosophy forces all stories through too narrow a channel to serve the diverse world we live in. When the Times covers my industry, for instance, it seems to know three stories - Microsoft is evil, Java (or whatever the topic du jour) is the future, and Apple is dead. All other stories are cast as one of those three. Bored readers are looking for alternatives, but because the paper is limited in its number of writers, it can't branch out to cover other angles. My bet says the tide has turned: Informed people will look to amateurs they trust for information they want."

The NYTimes guy (who bets no): "Readers need a source of information that is unbiased, accurate, and coherent. News organizations like theTimes can provide that far more consistently than private parties can. Besides, the weblog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media: The New York Times has been publishing individual points of view on the Op Ed page for 100 years. In any case, nytimes.com and weblogs are not mutually exclusive. We would like to extend our ability to act as a host for all sorts of opinions, and weblog technology might well be useful in doing so. After all, in countries whose citizens don't enjoy First Amendment protection, weblogs are run by people who'd be considered professional journalists in the US. In its six years online, nytimes.com has been a center of innovation, and it'll continue to be, incorporating weblogs and whatever else will enable our reporters and editors to present authoritative coverage of the most important events of the day, immediately and accurately."

This is a tough call. People have been betting against the newspaper biz for years now, without success. And the New York Times is the paper of record, after all. Winer's argument tends to be a bit idealistic; he talks about "informed people," which is a small minority in our culture, and "amateurs," which is a majority of us. Do smart people really want to get their news from amateurs who are only as informed as their ability to create minature networks via the Internet? This goes back to Teachout's eighth point: "For now, blogs presuppose the existence of the print media. That will probably always be the case -- but over time, the print media will become increasingly less important to the blogosphere."

Hmm. Quite a conundrum. Ooh, is that a bit of lint I see?

:: Andrew 06:48 + ::
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