If you read my article
responding to Dvorak's column on blogging, you can tell I'm a bit annoyed
with it. Having had a day to think about it and lots of email on the topic, I've
narrowed down specifically why his column bugs me so much:
- It's based on a number of false premises. Specifically, he lumps all
blogs together as if every person on the net is aiming to be a
quasi-journalist. It's sloppy research which really bugs me when it's in the
pages of PC Magazine.
- I like Dvorak. I know he's off sometimes but I really respect him a
great deal. So seeing him, well, blow it on something I'm familiar with
makes me question some of the things he says when I'm not as familiar with
the topic which is a bit of a let down.
- Condescension. I don't like someone treating me like I'm a sucker. To
imply that bloggers are a bunch of chumps for not realizing how few people
read most blogs is insulting. Of course we know. Personal web pages have
existed for a decade. I've had a home page for nearly that long. The
difference is purely that now there are tools that make it much easier to
update the pages with daily news and such.
- It's revealing. That is, such a hard sell on readers that blogs are a
passing fad makes me wonder if there's more to it.
Let's get to the brass tacks. What he's referring to is indie journalism.
Most indie journalism comes in blog form. While
Glenn Reynolds didn't think that
Dvorak was talking about him, to me it's pretty obvious - top blogger now
writing MSNBC articles, who else fits that profile?
http://www.glennreynolds.com takes
you to MSNBC. People like Reynolds, Sullivan, Lileks and others may be
"professional" writers but what they write about is definitely different than
what most people hear about.
For example, anyone who checks out
Right Wing News, or Little
Green Footballs, or Steven Den Beste's
pages can find out things that they haven't heard about from "big media".
It is up to each individual to do analysis on the source and determine what they
think is true and what is suspect. While Bill O'Reilly may argue that you
can't trust any of this "Internet stuff" and Dvorak thinks everything worthwhile
is already "co-opted", the fact is, the traditional forms of media are just as
suspect in many cases. I've been in the press enough times and up close enough
to know how sloppy it is often done. And I've seen press releases from lobby
groups taken as fact and regurgitated. Remember the "millions" of homeless
stories we used to hear about? That number was made up. Maybe there are millions
homeless people (I doubt it) but when the number was being thrown around, it
hadn't been researched one iota. Or the infamous examples of stories that
talk about how much domestic violence there is that turned out to have been
fabricated. In other words, the quality of news on Instapundit or other
"top blogs" is right up there with what you can expect from NBC or CBS or ABC
and certainly CNN (which was recently outed for bending the news in favor of
Saddam for the past decade in exchange for getting to stay in Iraq. Oh yea, big
media is to be trusted...).
The numbers though really speak for themselves. I've seen them first hand.
Since we opened up JoeUser.com for other people to have blogs, we've gotten
thousands of new bloggers just here. The Alexa ranking of this site is now
in the top 17,000 sites. People clearly are interested in hearing the views of
other people.