Blogging on
Weblogs are multiplying like a virus and the 'traditional' media don't like it one little bit. Conor Brady looks at the rise and rise of the 'blog'
Who'd want to be a media mogul? Or a controller of programmes or an editor? There's always some damned thing coming up that threatens to destabilise "traditional" media, drawing off valuable revenues, fragmenting audiences or readership and altering the shape of the known media-world.
This year it's blogs.
TV news executives at their springtime conferences in the US spent most of their time worrying about them. Website editors and managers were talking about them earlier this month at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) congress in Nairobi. Political analysts are still trying to quantify the influence of blogs and bloggers in the US presidential election in November and in the more recent UK general election.
If you are over 40, the chances are that you nod in vague bewilderment when your children or younger colleagues quote a blog that has taken their fancy or in which they participate. For the uninitiated, blogs may be defined as a sort of electronic round-robin, a seamless, limitless trail of views and information on a given topic that lives on the internet.
Blogs (the word is an elision of 'web logs') can be about anything – politics, sport, sex, travel, technology, religion. You name it. Anyone can start a blog with minimal knowledge of website engineering and hardly any money. It is the internet equivalent of going to Speakers' Corner with a soapbox, standing up, giving one's message and waiting to see how the dialogue picks up.
The blog is the cheapest, most flexible, least controllable form of publishing that has ever been invented. It means that anybody with a mind to do so can become their own editor, preacher, programme-maker, pundit, rabble-rouser, evangelist, agent provocateur or old-fashioned news hack, as they wish. There is no training required, there is no entry-qualification and there are no effective sanctions if the blogger screws up, gets it wrong or spreads disinformation that results in people being hurt – or worse. By one estimate there were more than half a million election blogs running on the internet at any one time in the weeks running up to the US presidential contest in November. Hundreds more are added each week, operating for the most part within the mainstream domains on the web.
Blogs are a terrifying concept for traditional media. They subvert utterly the notion of any control by professional programme-makers or editors. There are no mechanisms for the validation of content, for the screening out of material that is inaccurate, dangerous or likely to spread hatred, panic or fear.
And they are spreading fear across media advertising departments. Because as the bloggers draw off audiences – and build their own – they threaten mainstream revenues and create new business opportunities for themselves. Already some of the big, successful US blog-sites, such as www.gawker.com and www.gizmodo.com have garnered substantial advertising revenues for themselves. Some are now being quoted on the Nasdaq – and traded briskly.
The business threat presented to established media is two-fold. The bloggers are fragmenting the market. And they operate on a cost-basis that is close to zero. Most of their content is generated by loyal "bloggers" and is thus free. There are no journalists or editors or creative staff to pay. The blog effectively creates itself anew each day, as "bloggers" post their information and views, building into a round-the-clock mish-mash of commentary, supposed "facts" and sometimes bizarre links.
Much of what appears on the better-established blog-sites is accurate, thoughtful and informative. But the overwhelming bulk of blog material is piffle and nonsense – at best. At worst, much of it is downright dangerous, pandering to the lowest common-denominators of prejudice, hatred and ignorance.
Traditional media would prefer it if blogging didn't exist. But it does and it is not going to go away. So print and broadcast and web-based extensions of these older media have to decide how to come to terms with it. Ignoring it is not an option. So do they take it head on – or do they try to incorporate it into their own operations?
Blogging inverts the traditional dynamic between publisher and end-user. Newspapers and broadcast organisations have related to their end-users on the basis that the professionals edit raw material first and then disseminate or transmit it to the end-user. In the new ethic of blogging, the "publisher" (the blog-site) puts everything out first and leaves it to the end-users to edit it for themselves.
In this new ethic, truth and accuracy cease to have any fixed parameters. This horrifies traditional news-media practitioners – and a great many other people. In contrast, committed "bloggers" say: "why should we not be free to make our own minds up about issues? Why should we depend on the judgment and say-so of editors, journalists and the people who run TV and radio stations?"
Some established media thinkers and planners believe they must reach out and embrace the "bloggers." They recognise that "citizen content" or "citizen journalism" is playing an increasing role across all modern media. Material that is generated by people who are not professional journalists is taking up more and more air-time and more newsprint, especially in the United States. Communities that want to use local media to publicise and report events and issues in their immediate locality are being given space and time by publishers and broadcasters who are happy to cut costs while simultaneously building profitable commercial links to the local community.
Reaching out to embrace the "bloggers" is simply an extension of this process, according to this argument. But of course a great many "bloggers" have no desire to be taken into the embrace of the big businesses that now dominate US media at local level.
Conor Brady is Emeritus of The Irish Times. He is a senior teaching fellow at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, UCD, where he lectures in modern media.