[Media]

Longer Oregonian Op-Ed

My penultimate draft of the Oregonian op-ed that appeared in yesterday's paper ran something like 250 words longer than the one that made it in. There were some good edits that we made subsequently and if I had a mind, I'd fix those in this draft. This slightly longer draft is nevertheless more coherent, I think. (Bix's longer version is here.) Anyway, here it is--

*

By blogging standards, I’m an old-timer. I started my first blog three years ago, during that punky, anarchic period before they had become a national phenomenon. Bloggers hadn’t raised any money for political candidates yet, they hadn’t been quoted in the mainstream press, and they weren’t appearing on the cable news shows. We were small time. By way of illustrating how little I thought of my site’s commercial prospects, here’s what I named it: Notes on the Atrocities.

Although bloggers all secretly hoped we’d begin to influence the mainstream press, we never imagined how quickly it would happen. Some of the bigger blogs like Daily Kos and Instapundit, with over 100,000 readers a day, now get as much traffic as regional newspapers and definitely exercise some influence. Inevitably, the talk has begun: as old news—newspaper and broadcast television—watches its audience sag and blogs enjoy burgeoning popularity, won’t the latter one day supplant the former?

The short answer is no. In fact, here’s my bold prediction: not only will blogs not destroy the mainstream media, but they may actually help save it. The reason is that blogs are entirely different beasts than newspapers or television. The mainstream media have a mission to gather news objectively and inform the public about the important events of the day. They are organized vertically: a single newsroom gathers the stories across a spectrum of subjects. They must necessarily decide which news to present, and, whether they are commercial or public outlets, they’ll tend to throw the net wide to appeal to a large audience.

Blogs, on the other hand, are a horizontal medium. They exist as interlinking nodes throughout the internet—sometimes working in tandem with other blogs to reveal a single story, sometimes collapsing into one post relevant pieces from a number of different sites. For this reason, they’re sometimes called a “collaborative” medium. Almost all blogs are focused, sometimes very narrowly so. Bloggers address a single subject—and in many cases an aspect of that subject, as when political bloggers specialize in labor (Nathan Newman), law (TalkLeft), or economics (Brad DeLong). And despite the traffic that a handful of the biggest blogs receive, they mostly appeal to fragmented, smaller audiences. Finally, bloggers, because they don’t have the resources to cover news themselves, generally offer their own commentary, making sense of the news rather than reporting it.

The role that blogs will play in the future, and their relationship to the mainstream media, is hinted at in BlueOregon, a blog I founded a year and a half ago with Kari Chisholm, an internet political strategist, and Jesse Cornett, who works in the Secretary of State’s office. We started the site with the mission to become “the water cooler around which Oregon’s progressives gather.” Founded before the 2004 election, BlueOregon immediately became a landing spot for political junkies, including politicians and activists. Our regular writers include some of Oregon’s most interesting political thinkers—Oregon Center for Public Policy Executive Director Chuck Sheketoff, longtime Oregon columnist Russell Sadler, and Secretary of State Press Secretary Anne Martens, to name just three—and they’re joined in the comments threads by many others.

We’ve broken news about Karen Minnis, tracked rumors about Dan Doyle, and even had City Commissioner Randy Leonard propose policy on the site. And conservatives seem to enjoy BlueOregon as well—even Lars Larson has left a few comments on the site.

What makes BlueOregon a successful blog actually prevents it from enjoying the mass popularity of a newspaper. The number of people who have an active, avid interest in Oregon politics is relatively small. BlueOregon is one of the bigger political blogs, but it gets only about 2,500 readers a day—a fraction of a newspaper’s readership. Yet this is an advantage for us. It means we can delve into what would be regarded as minutiae to a larger publication, but which is critical content for a smaller, engaged audience, and unavailable anywhere else. Our credibility arises out of our fidelity to our narrow mission There is no question but that we have a point of view, and perversely, this gives us a level of transparency.

The future of blogs is not to become generalized; it’s to stay specialized. Look past the dozen or so most popular sites, and you’ll see this is already happening. Every group with a special interest has a blog. In each case, they depend on newsrooms to go out and gather quality, unbiased news. Blogs and the mainstream media have a separate, complimentary function: blogs are partisan specialists, newspapers are nonpartisan generalists. Both reach audiences the other can’t.

This is why blogs will never replace the mainstream media. They emerged to fill a void, offering specificity in an ever more bland, colorless media universe. Should the worst come to pass in news media, and daily papers start dying across the country, blogs won’t replace them. We can provide advocacy, opinion, and discussion, but we can’t send people to report from Baghdad.

When I look five years down the road, I hope to see BlueOregon as the indispensable sounding board for liberals. I hope it is a incubator for policy discussions—imagine if the next bottle bill or Oregon Health Plan is an idea first proposed there. If this happens, it means we’ll have become a credible provider for this new kind of collaborative media. But here’s the ironic thing: by succeeding with our mission, it’s also my hope that people will begin to care more about public policy and become more interested in hard news. When bloggers first began our revolution, that’s what we were after. If we’re successful, the MSM may be an unintentional beneficiary. Just think, a future where blogs don’t destroy or replace the mainstream media, but save it.