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Pew Study: Bloggers ‘r’ us

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I’ve been reading and digesting the new Pew study of bloggers (page, PDF) that’s been making headlines this week. The study’s central finding — that the majority of bloggers are in it as a creative personal outlet, blog occasionally rather than obsessively and don’t seek or expect mass readership — come as no surprise. But the coverage, along with portions of the report itself, reveals some confusion about the relationship between blogging and journalism. Let’s dig in.

Take that Chronicle story. Its lead tells us that we think that bloggers are “pajama-wearing partisan ranters” who “fancy themselves a new type of journalist.” Now, thanks to Pew, we can see that in fact bloggers are “more like Christina Palsky,” who “blogs as a creative outlet and does not fancy herself a journalist.”

Note that we are being told that there’s an either/or situation here: Either you’re a wannabe-journalist partisan ranter who dreams of making a big splash or you’re a creative diarist who blogs for friends and relatives.

This misses the most interesting characteristic of blogging (and the Pew report, though less oversimplified than the Chronicle piece, misses it too): because of the nature of the Web, any posting to a little public diary can, under the right circumstances, end up in a national or global spotlight. Every “I’m just doing it for myself” blogger is a potential journalist. If you’re in the right (or wrong) place and time — when the next tsunami hits, say, or the next Rodney King incident unfolds — and you decide to write about it or post photos or video, you’re a journalist, whether you think of yourself as one or not. You’re witnessing events and telling the world about them. And the Web’s structure means that the information you provide can spread quickly and widely.

At its worst, if people see blogging as a competition for the spotlight, this potential could drive people to do dumb things to attract attention. This happens, but it’s hardly epidemic. At its best, it creatively blurs the boundaries of the old mass-market news world. Every “consumer” of news is also a potential producer.

I am saying nothing new here. It’s just strange to see the Pew report — and the discussion around it — fail to take note of the obvious.

New blog notes: Rosetta stone

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In moving the blog over I learned that I’ve written a little over one thousand posts in four years. At 250 a year that puts me averaging one per weekday. In truth, I have had spasms of more vigorous blogging and, particularly during my book leave, periods of radio silence. Still, that’s a useful stat.

The header graphic is a chunk of the old Rosetta Stone. (Turned on its side for, uh, aesthetic reasons: if you slice it horizontally to suit a blog header and you don’t turn it on its side, you only get rows of hieroglyphics, *or* rows of demotic Egyptian, *or* rows of Greek, without the cross-language effect, and that’s no fun.)

I’ve always seen myself as someone whose work translates complex concepts and ideas across various divides. When I wrote theater criticism I aimed to explain the most interesting and ambitious work I encountered for intelligent readers who weren’t necessarily steeped in theater history or the contemporary arts; when I moved on to writing about technology I trie d to immerse myself in the digital world but send back reports that readers back on land could make sense of. So the Rosetta Stone — symbol of translation-breakthroughs across tribes and times — feels right. (I liked the look, too.)

Here’s a Rosetta Stone for code: “Hello World” programs in nearly 200 programming languages.

The blog rebooted

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Almost exactly four years ago, on July 22, 2002, I started my first blog. Blogging felt natural to me since I’d been writing for the Web since 1994 and self-publishing since 1974 (originally via mimeograph).

My blog was part of a larger blogging program I’d put together at Salon, in partnership with Userland. It was the tech-downturn doldrums — an era when every time we at Salon opened the papers or fired up our browsers we knew that someone, somewhere, would be predicting our imminent demise. And there wasn’t a lot of extra cash at the company at the time, so the blogs program was chiefly a labor of love, launched in the wee hours. I did the CSS, wrangling Salon’s home-page design into Radio Userland templates, all by myself (which anyone who knows anything about CSS can probably tell with a single glance at the unruly code).

I loved Radio Userland at the time for the way it combined a blog publishing system and an RSS reader. But times change; Userland put its energy into other products; Salon Blogs produced many great blogs but not a substantial change in Salon’s business; and my blog settled down from the program’s focal point to a personal-publishing bullhorn.

Several months ago, in anticipation of Salon’s plan to build a new platform for users to contribute their own writing, we closed off new signups to the old Salon Blogs platform. Today I’m moving my own blog to a new home, here, at Wordyard.

I’ve managed to export my whole four years’ worth of archives (over 1000 posts, averaging about one per weekday for the whole timespan) to WordPress. (For those who care, I used the Radio Userland exporter, which pops out a plaintext file in Movable Type export format; edited that file to make things like titles and categories work; then imported into WordPress.) The comments, alas, will remain back at the original Salon Blogs location, where they will continue to be available.

With this move, I plan to blog somewhat more vigorously, and to provide more posts about my forthcoming book, Dreaming in Code, as its January 2007 publish date nears. I also look forward to leveraging some of the great features and plugins created by the WordPress open-source community.

If you subscribe to my RSS feed in Bloglines (the reader I’ve been using daily for years), the transition should be transparent — Bloglines will do the flip for you, you don’t need to touch anything. If you subscribe through other feed readers or services, you’ll have to resubscribe to the new feed address, which is here.

More anon!

If everyone has the same privilege, is it still a privilege?

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More on the Apple v. Does decision:
Denise Howell dissects the decision. Dave Winer takes Apple to task: “It’s unwise and hypocritical of Apple Computer, to profit from the expansion of the online community — the latest Mac comes with promotional material touting its ability to write blogs and create podcasts — and at the same time trying to control it to suit its corporate purposes.”

This court has now declared that anyone “doing journalism” on the Net is entitled to the protections the law provides journalists. That’s a great decision. But don’t expect the old-school journalism establishment to cheer in unison (despite the participation of some of its members as amici curiae on behalf of the online journalists). The next phase of this discussion will inevitably include the sound of hand-wringing: Where do we draw the line? If anyone publishing on the Net — and that means almost everyone these days — can be protected by a shield law, won’t the shield laws erode?

Extending a basic privilege — the right to ask questions and publish answers — to the broad public doesn’t come without cost to someone. In this case, a lot of traditional journalists are going to fret about the erosion of their own existing privileges. Don’t be surprised if there are more absurd proposals for things like “journalism certifications” and Official Journalist Membership Cards.

California court: shield law applies to anyone who gathers and disseminates news

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The decision in the Apple v. Does case, in which I am proud to have participated in a tiny way (as signatory to an amicus brief), just came down, and it is a win for the wider universe of bloggers and other Internet-based writers and self-publishers.

See Lauren Gelman’s report. Here’s the ruling (PDF). Here’s a release from EFF. More after I’ve had a chance to read in full.

This appears to be one key passage:

  We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes “legitimate journalis[m].” The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace.

Any judge who uses the phrase “memetic marketplace” seems to have immersed himself fully in the subject!

Reluctance to give credit

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In the early days of the Web, when we were just getting Salon off the ground, we noted with amused snorts how big media outlets were unwilling to credit anyone doing original work online — they’d prefer, when they bothered to acknowledge a source at all, to use vague attributions like “a Web site” or “on the Web.”

These days Salon gets somewhat more respect. Hey, it’s only been ten years we’ve been doing our independent journalism thing — not long enough to belong to any clubs, assuming we’d even want that, but enough to warrant a named-attribution tip of the hat, some of the time.

The rise of blogs has occasioned another turn of this same wheel. Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo (and new TPMMuckraker spinoff) regularly breaks news on those stories it focused on, notes with amusement today that the New York Times won’t actually credit his site for a scoop about documents relating to bribery in the Dusty Foggo/CIA/Cunningham/Wilkes imbroglio.

The documents simply “appeared on the Internet Tuesday,” the Times story says. Apparently they simply materialized.

This is like writing about the Times’ scoop on NSA spying by writing, “News of the program appeared on paper last month.”

How OPML got shared

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Dave Winer has launched Share Your OPML, a service that lets you upload a blog subscription list into a pool of shared information, where you can use it in various ways — see what other subscriptions are “like” yours, see who has subscribed to a specific blog, and so on. Bloglines lets you do a little of this from within its sub-universe of blog consumers, but Share Your OPML is more open-ended and agnostic; it also takes a wee bit more savvy to get your subscription file into its system. (OPML is the Web-based outlining format Winer has championed; it’s widely used for structuring the information in blog reading lists or “blogrolls.”)

Google in China: Shades of good and evil

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Clive Thompson’s excellent New York Times magazine piece on Google and China plays out variations on Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” principle inspired by the company’s new accommodation with Chinese censorship. Censorship is surely a form of evil; but is it all right to compromise a little bit with said evil if one is doing so on behalf of a greater good? Google’s famous mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”; is it okay to fulfill a lot of that mission by betraying a little of it?

These themes, Thompson rightly points out, echo the arguments in the 1980s between the anti-apartheid movement, which argued for boycott, and the “constructive engagement” position of companies that said they were able to do good by doing business in South Africa. But today’s U.S. economy is far more deeply entangled with China than 1980s America was with South Africa. Few today would argue for an economic boycott of China; where would we get our goods? It’s a historical irony that the record national debt run up by today’s conservative Republican hegemony — heirs to the red-baiters of yore — can only be underwritten by the heirs of Mao in the People’s Republic of China.

So boycott is off the table; maybe engagement is better than nothing. I’m not wholly convinced, and I don’t think Thompson is, either. But his piece lays out the nuances in a useful and thought-provoking way.

Most interesting, to me, is this observation about Chinese blogger Zhao Jing:

  The Internet brought Zhao a certain amount of political influence, yet he seemed less excited about the way his blog might transform the government and more excited about the way it had transformed his sense of himself. Several young Chinese told me the same thing. If the Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is experienced mostly as one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand tiny, everyday ways.

I think that observation applies not only in China, but everywhere, and certainly here, in the U.S., where so many observers in the media continue to misunderstand the importance of blogging. Most journalists with successful careers have completely internalized the sort of “empowerment” Zhao experienced when he started blogging. Not only do they take it for granted, they take it as a professional right, and they have a hard time understanding what it might mean for non-journalists to experience. They simply can’t accept that a blogger’s musings might have significance for him/herself, and reach an audience of 12, or 120, and never engage a vast audience, and that might still feel like a success.

A China full of people — not all billion, maybe only hundreds or tens of millions, but lots, anyway — experiencing that sense of “self-actualization” might be a nation that grew less and less satisfied with a censoring regime and increasingly interested in changing it.

That doesn’t get Google off the hook, exactly, since Google isn’t facilitating self-publishing in China — the Google-owned Blogger doesn’t operate inside China the way MSN Spaces does. But it’s another sign that absolutist, black-and-white rhetoric is too limited for this arena. Google might well be betraying its “Don’t be evil” slogan; but the slogan might also be too simple-minded for the complexities of the global stage.

Why clever blog headers are counter-productive

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From Clive Thompson:

  When I interviewed Cory Doctorow — cofounder of Boing Boing — for my recent New York magazine feature on blogging, he pointed out an interesting aspect of Boing Boing’s success: Simple, straightforward headlines. Many bloggers tend to write clever, wry, allusive heads to their blog posts. This is a big mistake, Cory said, because so many people use RSS readers to scan their favorite blogs. Many RSS readers are configured to display the headline to each blog posting and a bit of text; in some cases, they display only the headline, Cory noted. And many people have dozens of dozens of blogs in their RSS readers, which means they’re scanning hundreds or even thousands of headlines a day — and thus scanning them at lightning pace. If you write abstruse, punning headlines where the meaning isn’t immediately clear, the reader will never click on your entry. Boing Boing, in contrast, always writes simple, just-the-facts headlines — and this, Cory says, is one secret to the blog’s success. Get that? The human readers of blogs are beginning to behave like bots, too: Quickly scanning for semantic meaning and ignoring everything else.

So much for my clever-headline-writing ways. Out with the puns! Utilitarian headers ho!

Welcome back, my friends, to the argument that never ends

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Jay Rosen has written an intelligent piece about New York Times editor Bill Keller’s admission that he doesn’t read Romenesko and other media blogs. Jay traces Keller’s aversion to blogosphere chatter through a series of comments about “self-absorption.” This term is closely related to navel-gazing, and somewhat more distantly, to “inside baseball.” These are all terms journalists use when they fear that shop-talk and meta-conversations about their profession will bore the readership. (Sometimes they also fear that such “self-absorption” might lead to embarrassment, loss of authority or a little too much light shed on the profession of light-shedding.)

Of course, the blogosphere has opened an inexhaustible faucet of such meta-conversation. This brings us to the most interesting part of Rosen’s piece, to me. “There seems to be no end to any argument in your world,” Keller complained to blogger Jeff Jarvis in a public e-mail exchange last year. Well, right, Rosen says. He sympathizes with Keller’s concern that all this transparency and online dialoguing might place infinite demands on a busy manager’s time — and that’s a legitimate concern for anyone who is trying to lead a newsroom while also representing it to the wider world, online and off. But really, Rosen argues, the complaint is off base: “Do arguments on the opinion pages normally ‘end?’ How about arguments about higher taxes, racism, war or globalization as found in the Times news columns? Do they end?”

I largely agree with Rosen’s retort to Keller — which is to say, look, of course this thing is a time-sink, but so is any communication of value, and there are smart and time-conserving ways to use your own blog to engage in dialogue with your critics without having it become an infinite loop of self-justification and “self-absorption.”

But I think Rosen has missed one central element of the “no end to any argument” argument, and that has to do with the matter of who gets to say when an argument is over.

Because, until quite recently, for most of the career of the editor of the Times, or any other leading journalist today, it was the newspaper’s editors who nearly always got to say, “This argument is at an end.” An editor operates in a world of limited resources — limited staff, limited time in the day, limited column inches in the paper. The work of editing is almost entirely the work of making choices about how to deploy those limited resources. An argument becomes an argument in the first place because an editor makes a story assignment, decides to highlight the story, assigns a follow-up. And the argument is over when the editor decides, okay, enough of that — now this!

Add up those choices taking place in newsrooms around the country and you have “the news cycle” — that arc of coverage from “breaking story” to “analysis” to “follow-ups” and so on that governs the media today. The news cycle is finite; stories lose steam and are replaced by other stories with their own cycles. This is often because a story has run its natural course. But it is also because editors, forced to choose between expending resources on continuing to cover yesterday’s news or jumping on today’s, will almost always choose to start a new cycle. After all, they became editors because they’re excited by news.

The blogosphere presents an entirely different structure for the flow of information. There is no single news cycle here. If you are blogging about, say, campaign finance reform, or global warming, you will keep dogging that subject day after day. You aren’t going to be reassigned to cover an aspect of the next breaking news cycle. No one is going to tell you that there’s no column-inches (or air-time) left for your beat, and besides, didn’t we already run a big take-out on that topic last week? None of those constraints apply. Keller is right: Here, there is no end to the argument.

In the end, that, I think, is what is so unnerving about the blogosphere conversation to him and his coevals. Gone are the familiar newsroom rhythms — in which last week’s chatter about Andy Card’s resignation is replaced by this week’s chatter about Tom DeLay’s resignation, which will be replaced by next week’s chatter about next week’s resignation.

Certainly, the best editors and publications — among which the Times certainly belongs in the front rank — transcend the news cycle, with long-form features and long-term investigations that make news rather than respond to it. Certainly, too, the blogosphere responds to resignation chatter and other news-cycles; its ripples and waves most often start from newspaper or TV splash.

The difference is between a closed system, one of limits, and an open system, with no boundaries. The editor who assigns three reporters to a six-month investigation of some fraud knows that those reporters are not going to be available to cover City Hall. The blogger who’s got a case against the local school board, or who thinks that Dan Rather (or the New York Times) is biased, is never going to stop. The whole point of a blog is that no one can make you shut up.

So I think, when we hear an editor complain that “There seems to be no end to any argument in your world,” we are hearing the reflexes of a professional who has spent a lifetime deciding, “It’s time to move from this story to that story.” It’s the voice of someone whose whole expertise lies in assessing when one news cycle is ending and another is starting.

When such an editor surveys the blogosphere, he hears a multitude of voices who do not operate in such a zero-sum world — and who stubbornly refuse to give up talking about this issue or that story even if the cycle has rolled on. For the old-school editorial mind, engaging with such voices isn’t just an exercise in futility — it’s an act of self-torture. The world of “no end to any argument” isn’t just a world that challenges specific choices editors make; it’s one that eliminates the very editorial occupation of argument-ending.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Dave Weinberger: “We are not going to settle our arguments. There’s enough room on the Web to permit that…The big question is whether we can adapt this lesson of the Web to the real world with its finite space and inescapable proximities. If we’re never all going to agree, can we at least all keep talking?”