Charlie Madigan On Blogging

[Annie]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...90.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

Bloggers from hell -- or heaven-sent?

By Charlie Madigan
Tribune senior correspondent
Published February 14, 2005, 1:06 PM CST


CHICAGO -- I would like to head off the ranting about blogging by offering this rant about blogging.

Shut up with your whining and appreciate the fact that after generations of stagnation, something new has arrived. And like all new things, it's going to take awhile for it to work itself out.

Conventional journalism seems aghast that a whole collection of independent voices from all sides of the political spectrum are popping up now to pick and smear and slander and point accusing fingers, wreck careers, cast aspersions and introduce something besides a century-old sense of entitled hierarchy to the formula for news presentation.

It's a pretty hot mix, everything from the delightful, dangerous Wonkette, who has created an industry out of passing along some gossip, saying, "Woo, I'm drunk" and lifting up her imaginary angora sweater (in Washington, I suspect, this is viewed as really hot stuff), to thorny arch-conservatives eager to whittle away at what they view as the dishonest conspiracy that runs all of journalism.

Good for Wonkette.

She knows her market and she knows how to get its loyalty and attention. It's not her fault that the Washington cognoscenti seem drawn to an unusual amalgam of sex fantasy, pretend bad behavior and policy. But it's to her great credit that she found a way to invite them in for a drink, dirty talk and some imaginary misbehavior.

If she's not making a bundle of money on it, she's a fool.

As for the wild-eyed conservatives, welcome aboard.

You finally have a place where you can gas on until you faint.

Sooner or later you will either develop a following or expire from lack of air. Maybe you can ascend to talk radio. Maybe you can disappear. Maybe you can libel someone and get penalized so far back into the economic dark ages that you won't be able to upgrade your launch platform.

Then someone will say, "Whoops, better straighten out."

That's how media has always been, and that's most likely how it's always going to be.

It all reminds me of a mix of what I have read about genuinely robust periods in American journalism, the era of the pamphleteers back before everything became so formal, the "yellow kids" era, when the media barons of the 19th and early 20th Centuries were carving up the pie, and maybe the birth of TV, when no one quite knew what to put on the screen.

The difference is that, in those eras, it took decades before media became self-referential enough to develop ethics and standards and journalism schools and thoughtful journals that would deconstruct every aspect of this messy business. Because the medium of blogging is speed-of-light stuff, we have become self-referential and obsessive about what happens well ahead of the historical curve.

Also, it's so easy an idiot could do it.

Witness the fact that many are!

I'm already wondering whether what I am doing is "right" in the "decent and honest" sense that I have always equated with journalism. Can't say. I think it's pretty interesting if you apply the same standards of diligence you apply to newspaper stories, assuming you apply diligence.

The difference is in how you tell it. It's a lot breezier and a lot easier to read, I think. And you can occasionally say, "Shut up you fatuous gasbag!" or ask, "What do you think?"

Geez, it took me five years at UPI back in the 1970s before I started picking at my own stuff and asking the painfully silly question, "What does this all mean?"

We have barely had the time to grow a real nice navel here in the blogging world, and we're already gazing at it.

Amazing!

These thoughts are prompted by the latest media development, Monday morning's New York Times story in the business section that ran under the headline "Bloggers and New Media Trophy Hunters."

It took three reporters, with one doubling as a writer, to put the piece together.

What it amounts to is a report that a CNN executive who got caught up in a statement about the military and journalists as targets was buried under an avalanche of blogging stuff from conservative critics who said he was tarnishing the reps of our young people in uniform in Iraq.

This may or may not be unfortunate.

Maybe CNN was going to get rid of the guy anyhow and the bloggers just came along and provided the beard for the dismemberment.

The same holds true of Dan Rather and his CBS news problem with the fabricated National Guard papers on the president.

Dan is headed off to the pasture soon enough (where he was most likely headed anyhow because TV doesn't like geezers and he has been around since the Neolithic and, frankly, you can grow tired of raging down-homerism.) Yep, the bloggers raised holy hell about all of that, too, crowing about their ability to determine what was printed by an inkjet and what came from an IBM Selectric and what was not.

So, they all get to climb up on a pedestal now and thump their chests and prounounce, "Got another one!"

This isn't going to stop and I would argue, even more uncomfortably, that it shouldn't.

What new media gets to do now is exactly what old media got to do back when it was new media, which is work out how it is going to be.

Let me give you an example.

I got a great picture last week from London of the headlines in response to Prince Charles' plans to make a lady out of his well-worn girlfriend, Camilla.

"The Wife He Always Wanted," said the Daily Mail.

"After 30 years, Charles puts his affair in order," said the Times.

"After years of agonising, Charles finally names the day," said the Guardian.

Then it gets really interesting.

"Boring Old Gits to Wed," said the Daily Star.

"LADY IN WED" said the Sun.

Up in the corner, the Daily Sport basically asked whether you would want to have sex with her and dedicated its front page to a feature called "Boobs, Bums and Banned Bits," which doesn't sound like a sports story to me.

Those folks have carved their marketplace into lots of little slices and everyone gets one based on the voice and content of what they present.

One thing you have to say about Fleet Street.

You gotta be very fleet.

I believe that is what we're seeing here, too, and part of the carving up that is under way is on the marketplace itself.

We can either sit back and watch this process continue and wake up some morning to discover our legs have been taken while we slept.

Or we can be fleet.

People who are marketing ideology as truth will eventually go the way of the pamphleteers, I suspect.

What will be left are the people who market truth as ideology.

You want to blog, make that your ideal.