John Markoff of the New York Times is one of the smartest and most respected tech reporters around. He’s also seen a lot of trends boom and bust. I didn’t take his comments in an OJR interview to be as dismissive of the phenomenon of blogging as many of my fellow bloggers have. Markoff said:
I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that’s certainly one scenario. The other possibility right now — it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that’s what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio. And, you know, give it five or 10 years and see if any institutions emerge out of it. It’s possible that in the end there may be some small subset of people who find a livelihood out of it and that the rest of the people will find that, you know, keeping their diaries online is not the most useful thing to with their time. When I tell that to people … they get very angry with me. … |
I think he’s right to suggest that it’s going to take 5 to 10 years before we know whether blogging will actually have a lasting impact on institutional journalism. Like most journalistic pros, though, he sets professional criteria: he assumes the yardstick is going to be, can anyone “find a livelihood” from blogging, and do “any institutions emerge out of it.”
But like so many other Web phenomena, blogging may prove significant despite a failure to prove itself as a business. Institutions and livelihoods is not the point here. We already have a class of professional journalists. It does certain things quite well. It fails to serve many other needs. Blogs are something different. They are not displacing professional journalism but rather complementing it.
In one of those great fortuitous juxtapositions of blog-postings that we sometimes witness, on the same day as Markoff’s interview hit the Web, Jay Rosen chose to unveil an extremely pithy and useful list of “Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism”.
The whole list is worth reading, but let’s zero in on point number one: “The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.” Pros live in the market economy and have a very hard time with this concept. And American culture uses dollars as the only yardstick of seriousness and significance, so stuff that is not measurable by that yardstick tends to evoke puzzlement or dismissal.
This is one of the things I tried to emphasize in my comments at Bloggercon: Online phenomena do not have to make money to be of value to people. Blogs can change individual lives — and even, conceivably, the world, in some way — without needing business models and marketing machines. In fact, what makes them unusual to many who produce and consume them is precisely that they are not simply another retread of the media business.
So while I understand, and to some extent share, John Markoff’s sense of deja vu as he surveys the blogscape — yes, sometimes it really does sound a lot like 1993-1994 out there — I don’t think that blogs are doomed to recapitulate the early Web’s cycle of starry-eyed idealism fueling insane visions of wealth collapsing into financial wreckage. If we remember the past we should not be condemned to repeat it, right? This is why my hackles go up when I hear about schemes to turn blogs into Big Businesses. That way madness lies.
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