All Intensive Purposes

Revised substantially:

I would have expected more blogospheric reaction to the big Financial Times article about blogging today -- maybe I'm not looking under the right rocks. It strikes me as a fairly stale rehash of blogs from a journalistic perspective, and a chance missed to consider what is new and different about blogs as a tool. (That would be an opportunity cost.) This article surely captures Trevor Butterworth's interest in blogs (or lack thereof, although he seems to have been on the net for a while): "[B]logging would have been little more than a recipe for even more internet tedium if it had not been seized upon in the US as a direct threat to the mainstream media and the conventions by which they control news." At least one mainstream journalist is heading to the ramparts to defend his turf from the likes of Hugh Hewitt, although Butterworth describes him as a "syndicated radio host and law professor" who has written in the Weekly Standard, apparently oblivious to the fact that he also blogs. Thus, while noting that new blogs start every minute, Butterworth is uninterested in what these bloggers are doing. His preoccupation is those few blogs most like newspapers in their ability to claim a substantial readership.

And how better to put them in their place than quoting a few outrageous claims for blogs? Then all you need is someone who's left a blog to find a place with a newspaper, like, say, Gawker veteran and senior editor at the New York Observer Choire Sicha:

“The word blogosphere has no meaning,” he said from across a folding table vast enough to support the battle of Waterloo in miniature (the apartment owes much to eBay, the Ikea of bohemia). “There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other.” The democratic promise of blogs, he explained, has just produced more fragmentation and segregation at a time when seeing the totality of things - the purview of old media - is arguably much more important.

“As for blogs taking over big media in the next five years? Fine, sure,” he added. “But where are the beginnings of that? Where is the reporting? Where is the reliability? The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds. And they’re all excited about the global reach of blogs? Right, tell it to China.”

The delight that Butterworth (and his editors?) find in this diagnosis is almost palpable.
And they back it up with some facts about blogging economics that will be familiar to anyone who has put down a newspaper long enough to spend some time on-line. Turns out there's not a lot of money in blogs. (Who knew?) So they can't afford to hire many people (read: no jobs for journalists) and they're not making much in advertising, whcih means "advertisers are still sticking with the mainstream media" (read: our jobs are safe).

For a moment, the whiff of something new and interesting breezes into the room:

“There is a certain loss of control when it comes to advertising on blogs,” said Mark Wnek, chairman and chief creative officer of Lowe New York. “The connection the most popular citizen journalists cultivate with their devotees is through an honest, uncensored, raw freedom of expression, and that can be quite uncomfortable territory for a traditional marketer.”

Sounds interesting, no? Not to Butterworth, who is more focused on where those traditional marketers are spending their money than on what might be said with an honest, uncensored, raw freedom of expression. And "raw," it turns out, reassures Butterworth that people who can write solid, journalistic sentences will always be in demand. Trailing that whiff of the new thing is what one might call a cloud of dubious orthodoxy.

Although Butterworth's article runs to great length by print standards, there is little hint in his article that he has much idea of what bloggers actually are doing with this new technology even as they fail to displace the mainstream news media:

[I]n the end, . . . the dismal fate of blogging" is that "it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.

Something new and different is going out here on the interweb, but if Trevor Butterworth has something to say about it, you wouldn't know from this article. (Though you could tell him.)

Instead of writing about what blogs are not doing, the Financial Times could have chronicled what they are up to. To take an example of particular salience to traditional journalists, blogs provide a tool to open up what you might call "an illiberal press, which works to restrict the free market of ideas." Take the example of Deborah Howell, the Washington Post ombudsman. (Take her, please!) She touched off an internet "firestorm" by writing that Jack Abramoff gave money to both parties, and then stuck to her guns, continuing to paint Abramoff as corrupt in a bipartisan way. A couple of years ago, might have prompted a couple of angry letters to the editor, of which the Post might have run one or two. Not now. Blogs fueled the outrage, both by permitting Howell's critics to self-publish, but also by giving the Washington Post's readers the conviction that they are not simply passive consumers of whatever the Post might deign to tell them, but participants in a dialectic process. Indeed, the Post itself buys into this bold new world, not just with its web site, but also with a blog that invites reader comment. Or invited -- faced with the reaction to Howell's work, the editors shuttered the blog, and only just re-opened it.

Even if the blogs that criticized the Post in this episode are not about to supplant its reporting or plunder its advertisers, there is a new dynamic here that Butterworth fruitfully might have explored. For example, exploring the Post's side of the story might have been interesting. Bloggers have failed to get answers to many of their questions for the Post, but maybe the Post's editors would have felt compelled to answer a reporter from the Financial Times. More broadly, the Howell episode is a small window onto the many ways in which Washington journalism lately has been exposed -- by bloggers -- as hidebound: the dependence on official sources, often unattributed; the compulsion to tell two sides of every store; the unwillingness to contradict public figures who say ridiculous things; the willingness to be played and spun; the preference for covering the game of politics rather than matters of policy; and so on.

The Deborah Howell saga sits at the borders of the corner of the blogosphere which Butterworth actually discussed -- bloggers who focus on the news. But that's like dismissing the telephone because people will always have clocks. Technorati says that Boing Boing is more popular than any of the sites mentioned by Butterworth, and it offers something distinct from traditional media. For academics, sites like Crooked Timber, The Volokh Conspiracy and Cliopatria offer a way to circulate and develop ideas without publishing them in the traditional journals. Many people uses blogs as journals, which you can read to keep up with people you know or people you don't. I could go on and on -- that's just scratching the surface.

While none of these threaten the Financial Times's market share or Trevor Butterworth's professional standing, I imagine that if he gave some serious attention to them, or the many other things happening out there that I don't even know about, he might have something interesting to say about them.

eta: As you may have gleaned from one of the links above, Butterworth started a blog for the discussion of the piece, and has been responding to readers who post on it. I posted a link to this post, and a rather lengthy follow-up post as well. (Butterworth is moderating the comments, and my second post hasn't yet appeared as I write, though I'm sure it will.) The whole thread is worth a look. Now that I've read that exchange, I take the spirit of the original piece somewhat differently, and would not have written in the same tone.

eata: Jack Balkin hits many of the same topics here.