Journalists belittle bloggers; bloggers’ fans respond

I just thought this (from Salon.com) was interesting. It kind of explains and vindicates my self-appointed role as a news-filter and commentator.

Fear of links; While professional journalists turn up their noses, weblog pioneers invent a new, personal way to organize the Web’s chaos. (by Scott Rosenberg)

I thought it was obvious that, on the Web, links are good. They’re a service, a boon, a new kind of communication that distinguishes this strange new medium from its antecedents. I’d always assumed that, as journalists moved onto the Web, they’d welcome their new ability to use links — to document their sources, explain obscure facts and terms, point people to deeper reading on a subject or just offer wittily ironic asides.

So I was taken aback recently to hear a Wall Street Journal reporter, one who covers the Internet industry, refer to a new breed of Web journalists as “linkalists.” It was not a compliment. . . [T]he message was clear: People who provide links to other people are performing a low, menial task that any boob can handle, and that doesn’t deserve comparison to the hallowed labors that constitute the august tradition of “journalism.”

Well, I beg to differ.

And, more importantly, the behavior of millions of Web users suggests that they place an extremely high value on the reliable, timely provision of useful — or quirky, or overlooked — links . . . On the Web . . . pointing people to good links is a fundamental service — a combination of giving directions to strangers and sharing one’s discoveries with friends. All of which explains why a phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today. . .
More fleshed out than a simple link list but less introspective than an online diary, a good weblog is also a window onto the mind and daily life of its creator. By providing an up-to-the-minute and also fully archived record of what they’ve found in their browsing and what they think about it, weblog creators provide their readers with evolving snapshots of the Web, refracted through a single editorial mind. Read more

Here’s another story (from the American Journalism Review), focused more on the original, unfiltered political commentary potential of blogs than their linking function:

Online Uprising; Many in the mainstream media dismiss the screeds of bloggers–people who post their views on their own Web logs–as so much blather. But to this Los Angeles writer, these maverick sites are well worth exploring. (by Catherine Seipp)

Full disclosure: I like bloggers. This is partly because my life as a freelance writer makes me naturally sympathetic to their independence of media institutions, partly because I find the bloggers’ . . . endless links and commentary about stories in papers I wouldn’t ordinarily see quite useful, and partly because my own political bent (hawkish, impatient with P.C. hand-wringing) jibes with that of Bloggerville. Plus, bloggers sometimes link to my articles, which is how I first discovered the whole phenomenon. I reveal all this not out of the usual writerly egomania but in the spirit of bloggerly frankness. . .

In March, The American Prospect’s Natasha Berger worried about “the serious problem of quality control in the increasingly powerful blogging world,” which she also complained is “editor-free.” Big-government fans like The American Prospect and The Nation seem to imagine that blogs, which are by definition creatures of the free market, ought to be pre-approved by some sort of official bureaucracy. The tongue-clucking reminds me of the teacher’s pet who was always raising her hand to protest, “Miss Jones! Miss Jones! Johnnie’s reading ahead again! Unsupervised!” . . .

[I looked a bit, and didn't locate the Natasha Berger piece, but found that American Prospect now prominently features their own blog!]

“Bloggers became Internet sherpas–experienced guides to all the information and wackiness out there,” Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, wrote in a February Sunday Times of London piece called “A Blogger Manifesto.” . . .

But just who reads blogs? It’s not in the nature of the medium to commission demographic surveys, but I’ve noticed that lawyers, scientists and (naturally) media types seem particularly common visitors. Los Angeles blogger Matt Welch describes as his most avid readers “a gay conservative bed & breakfast owner; a retired Republican cop in Pomona; a Naderite expatriate in New Zealand; a liberal literature professor fed up with campus radicalism; a music freak from Minnesota; a thoughtful and pessimistic lefty housewife in Nebraska; a pissed-off quadrilingual Czech-born grad student in Berkeley; a top editor at a major science-fiction publishing house…these people are supposed to have nothing in common, according to the old politics.” Read more (there’s much more)