I spent much of this past beautiful weekend at Wordcamp, an informal, vibrant conclave of WordPress users and developers held in the funky wood-panelled confines of the Swedish American Hall on Upper Market in San Francisco.
One of the highlights of the program was John Dvorak and Om Malik bantering on Saturday morning about the weblogs/journalism conundrum — about as well as one could, given how many times this block has been circled. It’s hard to believe that it was 2002 when I wrote the following, and I thought the discussion was old and tired then:
Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.
Jay Rosen tried to end the debate in 2005. In 2006, Steven Johnson wrote a definitive argument-closer. But this is one of the great undead Internet debates; it simply won’t die, and we will probably still be hearing it long after both blogging and journalism have been superseded by Vulcan mind-melds via Bluetooth cerebral implant.
Malik suggested that professional media companies would have a difficult time competing with super-specialized blogs powered by passionate proprietors willing to post around the clock on their niche topic. Dvorak argued that bloggers looking to be taken seriously by readers should design sites that don’t look like standard blogs: “You lose credibility when people hit the blog and say, ‘Oh, it’s a blog.’ ”
I argued that, in fact — for some significant and perhaps growing portion of the public who feel their newspapers and broadcasters failed them in the leadup to the Iraq war — the inverse is true: The formal look-and-feel of “pro” media is a turn-off, it screams “this is the official story,” whereas the rough-hewn blog format holds forth at least the possibility (though no guarantee) of unfiltered authenticity. Dvorak responded by saying this argument only reinforced his point that there really is a difference in how people perceive the “newspaper or magazine” site format and the blog format.
Lorelle VanFossen, proprietor of the phenomenally popular Lorelle on WordPress blog, wandered the auditorium like some sassy cross between a talk-show host and a revival preacher, offering tips on how to create good blog content. When she declared that, if you want to get people’s attention, you should “show them something they’ve never seen before, or show them something in a way they’ve never seen before,” my first reaction was, “Well, duh.” Then I realized that I’ve been a journalist all my life and this principle is etched into my brainpan (“burned into ROM,” as they say in the Valley), but might actually bear repeating for the new hordes of self-publishers that blogging has created. So if this stuff is new to you, I imagine VanFossen’s book “Blogging Tips” would be a pretty good investment. (Haven’t seen it — there were supposed to be copies at the conference, but the shipment got derailed, perhaps by the global Harry Potter delivery madness.)
What made Wordcamp fun was the sense of a dynamic, two-way exchange between the active, committed users of a piece of software and the developers who created it. It was closer in spirit to the user-group meetings that propelled the personal-computing revolution than to the dollar-fixated industry conferences of more recent vintage. The Wordcamp Report blog offered good summaries of the sessions. (At some point in future I think there may be audio or video of the proceedings, too.)
In my next post: Dave Winer’s talk on blogging, and a discussion of open-identity systems.
[tags]blogging, wordpress, wordcamp, wordcamp 2007[/tags]
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