The Bloggers' Historian

Technology journalist Scott Rosenberg recounts how blogs took over the Web.

Jesse Walker | July 15, 2009

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Reason: In your book you write, "The world of the newsroom is one of constrained resources—there are only so many reporters on staff, so many hours in the day, so many column-inches to fill—and editors spend their workdays making choices within those limits. But bloggers lived outside those constraints. They seemed to have all the time in the world to pursue their obsessions."

What struck me about that was that it reverses the usual argument you hear about journalism and blogging, in which only a newspaper has the resources to pursue stories relentlessly and bloggers are just dilettantes.

Rosenberg: The resources that a newsroom has, particularly a great newsroom like the Journal's or the Times', are impressive. They have expertise. They have a certain amount of money. But they're finite. The work is about deploying people and time, and there's never enough of either of those. The resources that bloggers have are passion and time. And in many cases also expertise, as with economics bloggers and legal bloggers.

I don't fully buy the newsroom argument that "We have resources that bloggers don't." That's an accident of history and an accident of the media business model. The truth is, sadly—and I say this as someone who worked for years at a newspaper—that most people who know a subject really well, when they read an account of their field in a newspaper, are if not appalled at least disappointed. There's always something wrong. With occasional exceptions of journalists who just happen to be really great.

Reason: Near the end of the book, you describe bloggers as the "curators of our collective history."

Rosenberg: In the future, when people write the history of our time, they're going to have this incredible trove of information. It's not totally raw, but it is much broader than the material historians have had to work with in the past. It encompasses a much wider swath of humanity. I can't help thinking of that as a monumental achievement.

Comments

qwerty|7.15.09 @ 3:03PM|#

I'm going to start a blog about blogging. I'll call it "The Meta Blog".

|7.15.09 @ 3:13PM|#

I am an award winning blogger and I have the visor to prove it.

Tomcat1066|7.15.09 @ 3:53PM|#

My blog pisses off people in my home town. And, oddly enough, that's the awesome part of it :D

Skip Trace|7.15.09 @ 4:00PM|#

Dibs on the Twitter Historian gig.

Skip Trace|7.15.09 @ 4:01PM|#

"My blog pisses off people in my home town. And, oddly enough, that's the awesome part of it :D"

You live in SW GA? My sympathies to you and your family.

Brandi|7.15.09 @ 4:03PM|#

I took a shit in SW GA once.

|7.15.09 @ 11:53PM|#

Bloging made choas on web.There are billions of blog on internet.everybody want to express his openion but writing the blog is communition, some one read the blog. My openion is no one read blog secrously. Mostblogeres are think this fun making. Most secrious effect of these blog is people forget to read the books.All over the world most public libraries converting themsleves on internet.of closing their shtter

|7.17.09 @ 6:47AM|#

nice post...
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