Home > Features > Blog Nation

Blog Nation

An internet staple for years, weblogs seem to have infiltrated the mainstream in 2004. Is this the start of a bold, inclusive new medium, or just more idle chatter?

By Carrie Connolly

Fort Wayne Reader

2004-11-22

The business and political worlds know the power of networks, and right now they are taking note of blogs.

Short for weblogs, blogs are personal web sites updated frequently with opinions, links, comments, or whatever else strikes the bloggers fancy. They’re a conglomeration of urban e-sleuths, pundits, chroniclers, and plain-old venom spewers. Even people with the most casual relationship with the internet know that blogs have been around for a while now, but recently, this niche has exploded.

Blame it on the 2004 election year, which sent more people to the booths than any presidential election in decades, and probably set another kind of record for the number of people talking about it. During the campaigns, journalists, analysts, and professional media watchers used blogs as a sort of highly personalized supplement to their regular media outlets. Unconstrained by traditional journalistic conventions or standards (not to mention the legalistic limits of a corporate institution), these bloggers could fire off comments and analyses not only as they saw it but when they saw it, giving the commentary an immediacy that a weekly magazine or newspaper column doesn’t have. Sometimes these weblogs served as online political soapboxes, and sometimes the “insider” news by the more well-connected bloggers (at least they told us they were well-connected) smacked of the trash tabloids. But every now and then, some of this quasi-journalism could help break a big story in the mainstream press (remember the recent smack down of Dan Rather?) and make blog authors and publishers a buck or two.

Once again, many of these blogs had been around for a few years; it’s the traditional media’s attitude towards them that seems to have changed. Watch the evening news and you’re likely to hear Aaron Brown on CNN give a site or two a mention. Even Newsweek has devoted print to what’s new on the blog scene. Bloggers like the notorious and popular “Wonkette” (wonkette.com), a Washington DC beltway political gossip columnist who tosses around profanity like croutons on a salad, has reportedly inked a book deal, and has appeared as a commentator on several talk shows.

This uneasy parity between print and other traditional media and the blog universe has raised the issue of journalistic standards. By their very nature, the political blogs that get the most attention from the mainstream media are very subjective — that’s part of their appeal. But some think that the line between opinion and information has gotten too blurred already without treating these sometimes highly-personalized blog outlets as legitimate news sources. Besides, aren’t news shows, magazines, radios and newspapers packed with enough experts filling our heads with their opinions? It may be professional speculation from someone who has actually spent time studying the issue (we hope), but do we really need another outlet for more of that?

Scott Rosenberg, an editor for the online magazine Salon who covers technology and internet culture and oversees the site’s weblogs, suggests that in the larger scheme of the blog universe, blogs can serve as a complement to traditional journalism. As he wrote in a column on the phenomenon, “Time-strapped reporters and editors in downsized, resource-hungry newsrooms are increasingly turning to blogs for story tips and pointers. … blogs offer a smart reader the chance to piggyback on someone else's reading time. Good journalists would be fools not to feed off blogs. Careful and thoughtful journalists will …welcome the advent of blogging: At worst, it should keep them on their toes and give them an incentive not to slip up, and at best, it should give them a chance to do their job better.”

Actually, what seems to be happening is that the “professional” blog universe is beginning to resemble traditional media, with umbrella groups springing up that resemble the multi-magazine publishing houses. Wonkette, for example, is part of the Gawker Media group published by Nick Denton, former writer at the London based Financial Times and The Economist and co-founder of Moreover Technologies. Gawker Media got its start with Gizmodo, a technology and gadgets site, in August 2002, followed several months later by Gawker, a general entertainment/media site. The company currently has nine blogs of distinct genres, everything from the original Gizmodo to the snarky Hollywood gossip blog at Defamer to Jalopnik, a site dedicated to automobiles.

Gaby Darbyshire, the current director of Gawker Media, says the comparison between Gawker Media and a traditional media company that has several papers or magazines under its roof isn’t that far off. “Gawker Media has titles in nine niche categories that predominantly appeal to a certain demographic - young, upscale urbans, typically male, 18-34, who spend a considerable amount of their entertainment time online,” she explains. “There is no party line or politics — each title has its own ‘voice’ and style — so we are really just like a magazine company like Conde Nast or Hearst.” Darbyshire says that each “title” in Gawker Media’s stable of blogs has an in-house editor/writer who takes contributions from freelancers, and might have an intern or two to help with doing research for features.

To carry the magazine analogy even further, Darbyshire sees Gawker Media changing its blog offerings, or adding new ones, as its current audience of (largely) young urban media-savvy folks grows up. “Like any traditional magazine, our existing titles will maintain essentially the same tone and voice, and we hopefully will attract new readers as our audience shifts,” she says. “If it seems appropriate we will of course launch new titles in niche areas that will appeal to the right kind of audience.”

Darbyshire says she sees this blog trend continuing, with blogs just becoming another media outlet. In five to 10 years, she says she expects blogs to be bigger than they are, but less distinct. “I expect they will settle into becoming simply another channel in the media mix, and accepted as part of the mainstream press. Traditional media will adopt them for their own uses as they see fit, and the best of the bloggers will succeed as any traditional journalist would do in their own format.”

Right now, though, some of the “pro” bloggers seem to be viewing the medium as a way to make the jump into more traditional media. “The first Gawker editor, Elizabeth Spiers, moved on to The New York Post (although she is now moving to become Editorial Director at MediaBistro.com),” Darbyshire says. “Choire Sicha, the editor after Elizabeth, already freelances for the New York Times and several other publications. The key to a title's success is the quality of the writing: writers with talent will be in demand. Seeing our talent crossing over to the mainstream media is, we think, an indication of our success in uncovering their talent in the first place.” Darbyshire adds that she doesn’t see the well blog talent drying up soon, however. “It’s not really a concern for us. There are plenty of talented unsung writers out there that we'd be delighted to work with, and give exposure to.”

So, are blogs just another way for wanna-be opinion-makers to take up more of our attention and patience? Maybe. Odds are, with the election firmly decided, the feverish political blogging — or at least the mainstream media’s coverage of it — will probably die down a bit. Scott Rosenberg says that with the increased attention on political bloggers, it’s easy to forget that most blogs don’t have anything to do with politics. Some don’t even express opinions or have much of a distinguished voice. “Some weblogs were personal diaries; others were free-form catalogs of personal obsessions; others were focused on one or another arm of the technology industry or Internet culture.”

In other words, there’s a whole universe of blogs out there, and while hearing about the minutae of someone’s day can be as deadly boring as it sounds, some of it can be as entertaining or interesting as “the pros,” like ourmaninhanoi at blogspot.com, a seemingly British twenty-something who chronicles his transplanted life in — you guessed it — Hanoi.

Better yet, there’s no need to stand back and just read them: you can set up your own blog. Once the domain of only the most tweaky and computer-savvy, having your own personal blog is simple these days. Sites such as typepad.com or Blogger.com — just to name two among many — can walk you through the process of setting up a weblog, with no programming knowledge required. Just point, click, and type and you’re well on your way to online publication. At Blogger, they’ll host it and let you post to your site for free. If you know a bit more and want to razzle-dazzle your readers with your keen command of html code, the sky’s the limit. Blogs have become the new canvas of the online world and everything from simple text messages to fully animated images and audio downloads is possible.

Beyond the awesome instant gratification you get from blogging you can actually earn revenue. Blogger.com has a side bar ad inviting bloggers to find out how to turn their site into a cash machine using Google’s adsense.com. This venture is even open to the lowly text-only bloggers (such as yours truly at pollyanna-mom.blogspot.com), all the way up to the big boys with their flashy blogs at The New Republic.

Which, of course, brings up the question: who wants to read your blog? Or the blog of any random stranger who might be talking about their day, or what they had for lunch, or their opinions on the new Star Wars trailer? As Scott Rosenberg explains, it doesn’t really matter. The pros use blogs to deliver rapid-fire opinion and commentary without the constraints of their day job; they don’t have to develop an idea into a full-fledged story for mass consumption. It works the same way for the non-pros. “A blogger with 100 dedicated and passionate readers may consider the endeavor a success even if it's not a road to media mogul-hood,” Rosenberg writes. “Amateur status can free a blogger to focus on material that fascinates the blogger and a few others, material that no media with any ‘mass’ is going to touch.”

That is what makes blogs a unique medium. “Weblogs expand the media universe,” Rosenberg writes. “They are a media life-form that is native to the Web, and they add something new to our mix, something valuable, something that couldn't have existed before the Web.”

Blogs just may be the next goldrush of the 21st century. There is a potential for blogs to achieve a parity with traditional print media. The advent of an assortment of mobile information gathering technologies such as camera cell phones, blackberries, and i–pods will continue to bolster blogs as a rapid-fire means of disseminating information. Beyond the technology, blogs are creating a new avenue for content providers. This allows for crossover with traditional print and web media outlets as writers from Gawker media have shown. Whether the traffic will become a steady two way stream remains to be seen.