Jack Shafer Pees In the Pool

Tim Cavanaugh | January 27, 2005

Shafer doesn't get it.

Over at that that lumbering Old Media Dinosaur (or OMD) Slate, Jack Shafer utters multiple heresies against the new faith of Blogger Self-Congratulation (or BSC), then sits back and basks in the insults. One of several choice bits:

With the exception of the "metro" section reporter covering a 12-car pile-up on the freeway, I think most practicing journalists today are as Webby as any blogger you care to name. Journalists have had access to broadband connections for longer than most civilians, and nearly every story they tackle begins with a Web dump of essential information from Google or a proprietary database such as Nexis or Factiva. They conduct interviews via e-mail, download official documents from .gov sites, check facts, and monitor the competition—including blogs—the whole while. A few even store as a "favorite" the URL from Technorati that takes them directly to what the blogs are saying about them (here's mine) and talk back. When every story starts on the Web, and every story can be stripped to its digital bits and pumped through wires and over the air, we're all Web journalists.

The premature triumphalism of some bloggers indicates that they haven't paid attention to how Webified journalists have become. They also ignore media history. New media technologies almost never replace old media technologies, they merely force old technologies to adapt and find new ways to connect with their audiences. Radio killed the "special edition," but newspapers survived. When television dethroned radio as the hearthside infobox and cratered the Hollywood box office, radio became a mobile medium, and Hollywood devoted itself to spectaculars that the tiny TV set couldn't adequately display. The competitive spiral has continued, with cable TV, VCRs and DVDs, satellite TV and radio broadcasters, and now Internet broadcasters entering the fray. The only extinct mass medium that I can think of is the movie house newsreel.

Other highlights include a very special shoutout to Hit & Run [there, I've done my BSC for the day!], and the first reference to John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" I've seen since Calvin Coolidge was in office (or, more precisely, since Brian Doherty mentioned it in Reason five months ago).

One thing I never see mentioned in these MSM-vs-blogs stories is how completely positive, ecstatic, and fawning the old media coverage of blogs is. The bloggers' own claims that they are transforming the media, empowering the individual, making the old fogies at the newspapers and TV stations quake in their boots, etc., are always taken at face value when newspapers or TV news shows do a blog story (and that kind of perfunctory reporting could itself be seen as a form of condescension if bloggers had a lick of sense). Recently I listened to a radio interview with the people behind Bookslut, who were given a forum to blather without contradiction about how they're covering the books mainstream literary journalism ignores, not gassing on about Philip Roth, etc. I look at this blog from time to time (and, disclosure, occasionally try without success to get them to flog Reason's book stories), and I can tell you this is a load of horse pucky. Every damn day they're jabbering about the National Book Association and the Whitbread awards and what Michiko Kakutani said the day before. I'll know the blogs are making a difference when The New York Times does a blog story about how the blogs are all a bunch of parasites on the old media.

Comments

|1.27.05 @ 7:11PM|#

Good article by Shafer there. One advantage of blogs is that it brings you closer to the writers and editors of publications. Granted, it's tougher at a major big city publication, but H&R gives the hard core Reasonites a way to interact with the staff and comment on their stories in a way that we couldn't before. Before the convergence of blogs and the media, the only way you could correct a point is to write a letter to the editor. Today I can read a Jacob Sullum article on a government program to destroy deadly asteroids and immediately I can put a post to correct him. He can then respond. thoreau can tell us the physics behind it and the feasability with modern technology and so on.

Granted, this isn't the detruction of old media revolution that Glenn Reynolds has been implying, but greater interaction and debate caused by blogs will improve the media. Now when I get my edition of Reason and read an article I like, I look forward to the debate it will elicit here. The bigger players may be slower on the uptake because they don't have to as much, but as the world gets more digital, they will get it. Blogs won't destroy The Man, but The Man will be forced to integrate them into the current structure and everyone will win. Until, the next technology that will change the world as we know it comes along.

|1.27.05 @ 7:12PM|#

What I said about Reason is still true for publications without comments. You can get a lot closer to the staff of the National Review than in the old Buckley days.

|1.27.05 @ 7:15PM|#

The feedback's the difference, right?

Where the BSC Collective gets myriad feedback from a million perspectives at once, the OMD River only flows one way. That gives the BSC Collective a huge advantage over the OMD River.

It's the media equivalent of the invisible hand; the reason the S&P 500 outperforms so many stock pickers; the reason the free market outperforms central planners--that's right, the OMD River is the media equivalent of central planning.

...it's the feedback that's the difference--am I right?

P.S. "That Old Man River, he must know something..."

Semolina|1.28.05 @ 1:38AM|#

My BSC-knocking can beat up your BSC-knocking.

I've been carping about blogger hubris at least since the days when Glenn Reynolds moved from daily obscure blathering over at Slate's "The Fray" over to daily obscure blathering on his new personal website.

If it weren't for a couple of brief passing mentions from the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, it's quite possible -- likely, even -- that Reynold's personal site would have slipped quietly into into the Blogspot graveyard.

Three-something years later, of course, and Reynolds is now the king of blogger hubris. He epitomizes more than anyone the give-'em-an-inch-they-take-a-yard mindset of so many in the blogging world.

Now, he'll be quick to point out the posts where he's downplayed the notion that blogging will take over mainstream media. But those scattered posts read suspiciously like consciously crafted plants, designed for the very purpose of giving Reynolds a defense when accused of blogger triumphalism. Because in reality, they're drowned out by the continuous drumbeat of Reynolds' bombastic blogger hubris. You wonder how silly he's going to feel down the road when he looks back and reads some of the stuff he's actually put into pixels.

I read blogs. I like blogs. I'm taking advantage of this one, as you can see, at this very moment. And I certainly wouldn't have any basis for offering overthought condemnations of Instapundit if I weren't a blogosphere habitue.

But no matter how many screaming Jeff Jarvises and Official Important Blogging Conferences grace the landscape, the idea that a sea of amateurs is a threat to the world of professional journalists is just ... silly. Laughable, really. Blogs are just another place for the rest of us to chat while real news gatherers are out there really gathering the news.

Of course big-media types have a self-interest when defending their realm against the blogging world. But the blogging world needs to accept that its increasingly grand pronouncements are based in a similar self-interest. It also needs to accept that pipe dreams don't become reality simply because hitting a "POST" button makes sentences appear on a website.

Jay Rosen|1.29.05 @ 11:11AM|#

Hi, Tim. I liked your piece and linked to it. Tell me, though... if you were the author of this, and the foil for the author of this, what would you do?