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Leah McLaren is a young-ish, smart and sassy journalist for the Toronto Globe and Mail who recently wrote an op-ed piece titled “Logging Out of The Blogosphere”.
James Brady is the executive editor of the Washington Post, who recently, and by now famously, demonstrated his lack of understanding … nay, contempt .. for online readers who dared to question the WaPo’s reporting by leaving less-than-positive or congratulatory comments on one of the WaPo’s blogs.
Here’s an excerpt from Leah’s column-masquerading-as-contempt:
That’s fine for some, but it isn’t enough of a reason for me to go on-line — where the growing, unedited noise in the margins is too loud to ignore — when I can enjoy my favourite writers in more established venues. If I’m supposed to feel part of some cool, fringe community, or world-changing global discussion, I’m not getting it.
Well, yeah and yeah.
In my opinion, she’s right that there is a lot of unedited noise in the blogosphere, in the *margins*, as she calls it … and yeah, I also think she doesn’t get it.
In the article, she also creates her own noise about how *the underground media revolution is officially over”, and points out her conversation with a former blogger (with one of the *sell-outs* that helped create the perception that the *underground revolution* is over):
As Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker and now a senior editor at the New York Observer, told the Financial Times, the democratic promise of blogs has produced more fragmentation at a time when seeing the bigger picture is much more important.
“The word blogosphere has no meaning,” he said. “There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire-service feeds.”
In my adult, and working, life, I have run into many many many smart people who look at, think about and analyze much of what they encounter very quickly. In some ways, we live in an environment that focuses on, and is perhaps even addicted to, things that can be neatly described, that provide *solutions*, and that remain more or less the static model for how things are, and should be, done.
Now, what I would ask Leah (as a journalist .. or is she an opinion column writer ? The latter, I think .. a genre which often makes a living by being a tad edgy and snarky themselves. Nice work if you can get it .. blogger with a legitimate job, not marginalised .. I think) are these two questions …
Do you think, that because you and a bunch of other journalists and editors keep saying that the blogosphere doesn’t do editing and filtering the way you folks do, that all of a sudden, or even over time, people will begin coming back to neswpapers and magazines. Will the papers and magazines continue to provide you with all the information and news that a relatively small group of people decide is appropriate for everyone else .. even in the face of large amounts (and growing) evidence of how inaccurate, propagandistic and even corrupt some, or much, of that information and news can be ?
My sarcastic response .. in the online world, there is a greater responsibility on the part of the reader to evaluate and make decisions about what they read and think about. IMO, that’s clear, and her stated intent is but one example of one type of evaluation and decision. But that process is bigger than *either / or* re: traditional nedia versus blogs.
I would venture a guess that at this stage the world (or medium) of blogging is in a transitional phase wherein more and more filters (let’s call them DIY filters that tread the line between control and openness, where a new point of view is always potentially just a hop. skip and link away) will come into being, and new tools and applications that continue down the path of what has been called the Semantic Web are likely to appear over the next decade.
Because it involves people, information, opinion, voice and interconnectedness, the process of reading, writing, linking is a process of having impact (for better AND for worse) on peoples’ knowledge, opinions, abilities to think critically and understand. It’s social as well as informational, and social processes shape people and cultures.
What I hear in Leah’s cri de couer is a reminiscence for the Pleasantville of old, when kindly and benevolent hierarchs (men for the most part, but in the last 20 years or so having let a few assertive women in on the game) help us understand what we should know, and why and how.
And I found it interesting, too, that she spent time rummaging around the celebrity and gossip departments of the blogosphere … talk about meaningless drivel. Maybe deep down she’s ashamed of her interests, and wants to try to repress them by avoiding “the unedited noise in the margins” ?
I doubt that she drinks whiskey in the amounts Christopher Hitchens is rumoured to have ingested, so in all fairness I can’t use the words *whiskey-soaked*, (from the infamous “whiskey-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay” label George Galloway once applied to Hitchens), but I’d vote for her in any contests seeking to crown a winner for the title of “smug little know-it-all popinjay”.
I’m also assuming that she imagines that one day, as she grows older and moves up in the world of journalism, she will be one of those oh-so-valuable sources of edition that keep us all on the straight and narrow.
Here’s the clue:
My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it’s selling out to the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring. The dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers to keep them in check.
As Butterworth succinctly puts it: “If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.”
Sure .. and do you expect that this blogging medium, like the more traditional medium you know and love, will remain static and not evolve ?
.
6 comments
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February 27, 2006 at 3:17 am
Anonymous
I read some of Brady’s stuff regarding this issue. It seems that our good writers are concerned about the masses of sheep being led astray. They weren’t too concerned when they were the shepards though.
As far as noise goes, there already is a filter in place. It is called RSS, subscribe to the ones you like and ignore the rest. The attitude these authors are taking would be the equivalent of never opening a paper agian simply because you read one editorial you did not like.
One must also remember that Rock and Roll was going to be the death of society as we know it. It was going to be a passing fad and we would all return to more conventional music. I am sure they feel the same about the blogsphere.
February 27, 2006 at 4:23 am
Anonymous
They’re getting a little free publicity every time they print something inane about weblogs. They’re also working the crowd they think should be theirs. Goading gets people off balance and distracts from them from whatever slick move the huckster has planned.
Most newspapers carry little hard news. Even my beloved financial papers only yield a couple of pages worth per day. They make their living off the advertisers looking to target the people coming for the opinion content. Whatever brings ‘em in is money in the bank.
February 28, 2006 at 10:27 pm
Anonymous
Hoo boy, she got under your skin but good.
On the other hand, for people who get their panties in a bunch over the blognotosphere, I just quote Shirky.
“Old media - filter then publish; new media - publish then filter, get over it”.
Maybe her sitemeter showed to much plunging traffic lines.
March 1, 2006 at 12:40 am
Anonymous
Yeah, she did .. that doesn’t happen very often, and I generally don’t say semi-nasty things about people in public (except Bush and Cheney, I suppose) .. but did you read her piece ? Popinjay, I say !
March 1, 2006 at 9:51 pm
Anonymous
I saw that piece too.
I kinda nearly liked Leah when I first started reading her stuff in the Globe a bunch of years ago, and I still think she’s capable of being smart and even occasionally funny.
I stopped caring enough to read her columns, though - ever since it became clear that her Carrie Bradshaw emulator was throwing out some rogue high-pitched whiny noises rather too often.
In fact, with Heather Mallick now gone, there’s really not much to recommend the Saturday Globe any more. The book section still limps along, but much of the rest is bog roll, really.
The thing that struck me as most odd about this particular piece of hers was the curious rhetorical elision of the pivot point in her argument. This:
“The dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers to keep them in check,”
…does not compute. Even taken in context, it doesn’t hang together. There’s a lot of bad, boring blogging - that I’ll grant her - but it has bugger all to do with an absence of editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers.
And, thinking about it, one can level the same charge of tedium just as squarely at the mainstream. Without meaning to be too obviously smartarsed, one could apply one’s own tidy elision to Leah’s words and arrive at this point. Viz:
“My own problem with the … mainstream [is that] … most of it is spectacularly boring.”
Unfair and exceptionally creative editing - but it’s an accurate reflection of how I feel. It’s why I don’t really watch much TV, and why even a life-long lover of newsprint like me is starting to feel the ennui sink deep into my bones. They’re losing me.
Sure, there’s a lot of dull, dire shite making up the majority of the blogosphere - but there’s also enough incandescent points of utter brilliance to make it more than worth while. And I’m finding more and more of these every day - all of them unaided by editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers, yet all of them somehow managing not to be boring.
The Globe & Mail and its legions of mainstream counterparts continue, meanwhile, to sink further into grey, homogenized uniformity. All the time helped along by an army of boredom-alert editors, fact-checkers, etc. etc. Again, there are moments of luminous genius in the mainstream – lots and lots of moments – but it’s getting harder to find them as they retreat behind their paywalls and “Insider Editions”.
Bland tedium is the lowest common denominator in any mass medium, it seems. So we now know, thanks to Leah’s argument, that this occurs in the blogosphere because of a paucity of editors, fact-checkers, blah blah to keep us all crisp and stimulating.
Hmmm. OK then, mainstream columnist girl – so what’s your excuse?
March 2, 2006 at 11:38 am
Anonymous
Michael:
Sure, there’s a lot of dull, dire shite making up the majority of the blogosphere - but there’s also enough incandescent points of utter brilliance to make it more than worth while. And I’m finding more and more of these every day - all of them unaided by editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers, yet all of them somehow managing not to be boring.
A resounding YES to that. And …
The Globe & Mail and its legions of mainstream counterparts continue, meanwhile, to sink further into grey, homogenized uniformity. All the time helped along by an army of boredom-alert editors, fact-checkers, etc. etc. Again, there are moments of luminous genius in the mainstream – lots and lots of moments – but it’s getting harder to find them as they retreat behind their paywalls and “Insider Editions”.
… to that also. You know, using an aggregator, or blogrolls, or your own crazy quilted path through what’s available, there’s enough good stuff out there that you can easily replace the newspapers you once read, the foreign affairs and political analysis journals, magazines of literary citicism or poetry, compendia on feminist theory , etc.
It’s all there … and why should it surprise us that for every professional journalist or contrinbuiting editor out there, there are ten or twenty people who have equal or better skills but maybe chose a different career or got overlooks in various hiring processes, or are on sabbatical re-thinking qorking in a clueless organization, or whatever,
There’s much much very good work to discover, and that possibility will NOT disappear.