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February 01, 2005
Blogging Over and Underkill
I kept up on the Harvard Law School conference on "Blogging, Journalism and Credibility" and some of the aftermath. I read Jack Shafer’s “Blog Overkill” column on Slate and Jay Rosen (on Press Think) and Jeff Jarvis’s (on Buzz Machine) reactions to it.
I think the Harvard conference was an excellent idea—it was time that the issue of blogging’s relationship to journalism was addressed. I thought that having the usual suspects—Rosen, Jarvis, Dan Gillmor, and David Weinberger (JOHO)—who were also bloggers and, thus, had a definite agenda and point of view diminished the conference somewhat. It would have been better to have included more non-blogging academics such as Dean Mills, the dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, or Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia, to add a more balanced view ( Orville Schell, University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, was a participant).
Even though I read Jeff Jarvis’s Buzz Machine blog regularly and I think it is a useful blog and that he's a good journalist, I believe he’s too often a self-promoting, self-absorbed egotist who gets into silly blogging fights, such as the one he got into with Eric Alterman, and too often becomes unnecessarily bitchy, snide, and insulting. He can’t tolerate anyone’s opinion that doesn’t agree with his sometimes skewed, typically liberal, or rabid positions and he often gets too defensive. Therefore, I ignore what Jarvis writes when he’s being bitchy and defensive.
I also read and admire Jay Rosen’s Press Think blog; it is required reading for the students in the Media Ethics class I teach this semester at The New School University. I think Rosen is right on target on most issues, but I thought he was unnecessarily sensitive and defensive to Shafer’s “Blog Overkill” article.
Shafer had some well-reasoned, objective, and intelligent comments about blogs and his comments should be taken seriously—no need to be defensive, just get on with blogging. Shafer’s points that blogging is unlikely to put newspapers and magazines and the television news networks out of business as some blogging fanatics are predicting and that blogging might eventually end up in a different space because it’s too early to tell exactly where blogging is going to be in the future were good points. Some of what Shafer wrote reminded me of a study that was done in the late ‘90s by the University of Minnesota center for innovation and entrepreneurship (I think that was the name of the center) that showed the trajectory of innovation. A graph showed how a company would begin to develop a new idea or product and for a while the trajectory was a straight line from the bottom left toward the upper right of a graph. But then the innovation trajectory line would shoot off at an angle (often a 45-degree angle) and wind up in the middle of the top line, not the far upper right. In other words, most innovations ended up in a different place than they started out. The lesson was that new ideas and technology lead us to places we can’t dream of or foresee, often in better, more useful places that respond to the way that people actually use and adapt the technology to their needs and not to the places in the dreams of the original innovators.
It’s too early to know where the blogging movement might wind up; the crystal ball, as always, is cloudy. It would be reasonable for Jarvis, Rosen, and other dedicated bloggers to admit that the future is not as certain as they think it is. Blogging is exciting and is growing faster than Moore’s law would predict, so let’s sit back, relax, welcome all views and dreams, and see where it takes us.
Posted by Charles Warner at February 1, 2005 01:28 PM
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Comments
Gary Goldhammer at February 5, 2005 05:21 PM writes:
Professor Warner, I just recently came across your blog and I'm glad I did -- Jack Schafer's article and your commentary on the Harvard conference were a breath of fresh air in what has degraded, at least in some circles, into a childish pillow fight over who should get the top bunk.
By the way, as Missouri J-School graduate, I agree that not only Dean Mills but also others at Mizzou should become more involved in blogging and new media discussions. Or giving a Missouri Medal to Oh Yeon Ho, Founder of OhMyNews, might not be a bad idea! Thanks again for a great post and an interesting blog.
Charles Warner at February 1, 2005 02:33 PM writes:
Jesse Kornbluth has the most insightful comment of any of the Harvard conference's participants or Shafer, Rosen, or Jarvis...that the main-stream media (MSM) will bear hug blogging, thus smothering some of it, and find a way to make money on it. With MSM's ability to mass promote their blogs, they will take traffic away from many blogs. HOwever, in order to sell advertising the MSM's blogs will become as bland as their other products and, thus won't attract an audience that wants the edgy, in-depth, contrarian opinion and insight that blogs have.
Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine is president and creative director of Advance.net, MSM's Conde Nast's Interactive division and Web site. So does he get a salary for blogging? Maybe he's the first of the new MSM's paid bloggers.
At any rate, both types of blogs have a future--MSM-salaried bloggers and poor, opinionated bloggers.
Jesse Kornbluth at February 1, 2005 02:12 PM writes:
I hate to sound like Marcuse, but....at the end of the day, Big Media --- like capitalism itself --- renews itself by swallowing its critics. That is, Big Media will soon spawn its own blogs (this is already happening). This will give the best of the bloggers something important they currently lack --- a SALARY, an bigger audience, and did I say a SALARY? --- and they won't even have to trade much, if any, independence for it. But something WILL be different.
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