Blogged to death
IT'S ALWAYS kind of embarrassing to see an elderly relative shaking her booty on the dance floor at a wedding reception. That's a little how I felt when I discovered that The
I hadn't been aware that the paper had any blogs at all, until I was asked to contribute to one. This led me to an index, where I was dazzled to find blogs about everything from politics and technology to wine and chess. Chess?
I don't mean to single out the Times. Virtually every newspaper and magazine has launched a blog - or 12 - at this point, in a frantic effort to attract those young readers who don't "do" paper. The Boston Globe has 40 blogs by my count. Should the Red Sox make it to the World Series again, that number will probably double. (The Globe is owned by The New York Times Co.)
There's nothing surprising in all this. Blogs are cheap and easy. They're like those cable TV shows with all the talking heads shouting at one another. All you need is the means to broadcast and an opinionator. (The Times, naturally, has a blog called The Opinionator.) There's no real overhead, no editor, and more often than not, no reflection.
Ay, there's the rub.
The stalwarts of the mainstream media view blogging as another way to reach readers. The idea is that they might bend the medium toward their own editorial ends.
But the medium is also bending them, changing the way in which their staffs process and present the news. The Times, for instance, now offers readers live blogging - in real time! - from presidential debates.
Does this instant kibitzing give us any deeper insight into the policies of the candidates in question? Just the opposite: it provides a kind of superficial play-by-play that frames these events as rhetorical boxing matches.
I'm not suggesting that blogging, as a medium, is harmful to the republic. There are plenty of bloggers who use their electronic soapbox to offer insightful commentary about the world. Blogs also provide a sense of community, a digital campfire around which those with similar passions can gather and interact. That's a wonderful thing in a culture this lonely.
I write an occasional blog about my daughter for a parenting website, and I've contributed essays to online venues that include blogs. That said, blogging does have a tendency to elicit the worst in people. How could it not? It's a medium that basically allows everyone to become an instant pundit. Forget research or reasoned analysis or nuance. Forget job qualifications. Heck, forget the byline. In the blog game, it's all about making the sort of witty snap judgments that will draw the most site traffic (read: ad revenue).
As a writer, I've seen this repeatedly in the world of literary blogs. Lit bloggers present themselves as an alternative to the mainstream media's anemic coverage of books. But few offer serious criticism of particular books, or how that work might relate to the culture at large. Instead, lit blogs consist of links to other articles, gossip items, and ad hominems. They are part of our burgeoning culture of grievance. The discourse they provoke bears more resemblance to a talk-radio show than a literary salon.
Newspapers have embraced blogs in the desperate hope that they can capture the devotion of the digital generation before it's too late. But in the end, they may only be quickening their own demise.
What young readers lack isn't a tolerance for newsprint, but the will to investigate the troubled world that exists outside their various flashing screens.
Speeding up the metabolic rate of news consumption, and giving it the glib gloss of the blogosphere, will do nothing to solve this essential crisis. If anything, it will diminish the intellectual patience and empathy upon which honest brokers of news depend.
Steve Almond is author of the new essay collection "(Not That You Asked)." You can read his work at candyfreak.com
