‘Manly’ Maney Says Blog Novelty Will Wear Off

Update (6/2): I don’t like this guy. The memory of John McWhorter eviscerating and embarrassing him on a talking head show is a cherished one. His column is not worth commenting on, but I thought you might interested in what this “journalist” has to say.
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I shouldn’t take the bait, especially after reading this:

[L]et’s create an Alice in Wonderland moment: I’m writing about reading about my columns in blogs, which bloggers will inevitably post. So now, I’ll be able to read a blog about my writing about me reading about my writing in blogs.

But I can’t resist. “Manly” Maney, I’ll bite. I’m a blogger posting about you writing about reading about your writing on blogs (got that?). I’m sure one of my readers will e-mail you this post so you can read about yourself on LBC.

When journalists who don’t like blogs write about blogs, their contempt is usually expressed with outright envy by “journalists” like Nick Coleman or hidden behind snarky, witless, pseudo-hip fluff written by “cool” technology columnists like Kevin Maney of USA Today. He writes:

So, yeah, blogs are cool. Anything that gives people a voice benefits society and makes us all better and smarter — and, as bloggers have proved, makes established information outlets more accountable. But blogs don’t seem to be the second coming of the printing press. They’re just another turn of the wheel in communications technology.

More likely, a few years from now, after the blog bubble has normalized, we’ll look back and say that this technology made a difference and that our total fascination with it seems quaint.

For some reason it’s always male journalists who have a problem with blogs. I’ll let Dr. Freud deal with that.

This post isn’t really about Maney’s column specifically. I have something to say about the attitude of journalists as a collective and the bold new medium we call blogging. Maney displays some hard-to-conceal blog envy but with a much lighter touch than I’ve seen before. He knows bloggers will write about his column because bloggers like to criticize journalists who criticize them. It’s a vicious cycle that won’t change anytime soon. Mainstream media (MSM) in general are in denial about the power of blogs, and we bloggers find it very blog-worthy.

Maney must have been bored and stumped for ideas when he wrote this column. He patches together a collection of ideas and quotes from various sources, but the big idea is that once blog novelty wears off, the fascination will wane. Whenever I read or hear someone say that, I always think of television. In 1950 some pseudo-hip radio person said the same thing about television. Later, cable TV. The personal computer. The Internet. Anything new.

Those resistant to change are a sad lot, especially when the change causes an obvious dramatic and deep-rooted paradigm shift. Once upon a time, radio was king. It pervaded people’s homes, bringing new music, new voices and new sounds to living rooms. To watch moving images, you had to either go to the movies or make 35mm 8mm home videos.

Then came television, an exciting and revolutionary innovation. Seemingly overnight, people were watching people talk and sing and perform in black and white on a box in the living room. Why just listen to Jack Benny when you could watch his antics and get the full thrust of the joke or routine?

Blogs are as revolutionary today as television was 50 years ago. Unlike Maney, I’ll confess my bias. I’m a blogger. This new medium has changed how we think about information. The traditional press once had a lock on it, standing guard over what the common people were fed every day. Radio was quicker on the draw, able to provide immediate on-the-scene sight, sound and taste of an event, but newspapers still reigned.

Through the years there have been (and still are) information sources of various types, like local and community newspapers, which are more in touch with the people, private individuals creating radio programs, news web sites and distributing newspapers, newsletters and tracts of every kind. But none of these had the impact of newspapers. With newspapers bought and sold by corporations and millions of copies circulated, they had a virtual monopoly on what was news, why they thought it was news, and by exclusion, what wasn’t news.

Then came blogs, an exciting and revolutionary innovation. Seemingly overnight, people were talking to potentially thousands upon thousands of others on their home computers. Why read the liberal rags when you could talk to like-minded people about why a particular story wasn’t newsworthy and why the real story was either downplayed by the media or never covered at all?

To say that this shift of focus or power can be intoxicating is not an overstatement. Forget about blog-driven stories like Rathergate. Think about the day-to-day interaction of blogs, the public community chat. A blogger who covered Rathergate said, “[B]y making the news cycle interactive, bloggers had essentially resurrected the front-porch aspect of civil life where folks used to gather to discuss the issues of the day.[ Blogging is] revitalizing democracy.”

It’s better than that. Democracy is revitalized not only by talking about “issues of the day” but actually creating and shaping the issues in a way that mainstream media can’t or won’t.

MSM still have the means to print massive volumes of newspapers and run corporate-sponsored news sites, but citizens now have the reach, or the potential to reach, millions of people who share their sense of what is news. We don’t have to wait for the paper or until a news site updates its pages to know what’s going on in the world. Twenty-four hour cable TV changed that. But with the advent of easy-to-use free technology, we don’t have to accept the “official” story or read it through the MSM filter.

Bloggers can cover events and report them fact for fact like a hard news story or sprinkle it with editorial comments. If you’ve got Insta-Status, a few hundred thousand a day will see it. If you’re like most bloggers, a few hundred or thousand will see it. The point is that no matter who sees it, it’ll have a greater impact than if it were a Letter to the Editor squeezed in on the back page of even the most influential newspaper.

There’s no limit to what a motivated blogger can do. With inexpensive equipment, a regular person (non-traditional journalist) can cover an event or story, sound record or videotape it, and post it on the blog later or live. Journalists at corporation-owned news outlets might laugh at the crudeness of it or our enthusiasm for it. They may be laughing at this post right now for all I know and care. But writing about blogs and mocking bloggers means they find blogging newsworthy. Just as radio struggled to remain relevant in the early years of television, journalists are struggling to either understand the new medium or mock us into oblivion.

Kevin Maney doth protest too much, methinks, but it’s a natural reaction to a perceived threat. When journalists insist so strongly that blogs are a passing fad, a trend that will inevitably decline, they betray their own lack of depth and knowledge about the sheer number of blogs out there for whatever profession, pastime, or perversion one could imagine. Maney’s understanding of blogs barely scratches the surface of what’s really going on all around him.

The relationship between MSM and bloggers doesn’t have to be antagonistic, but an honest curiosity and objectivity about the new medium would be more useful to Maney than simply viewing blogs as a threat driven by people with a political agenda, although some clearly are. The technology can and is being used for purposes other than defending the Bush administration or dogging MSM. Once Maney takes the time to find out what those other purposes are, I predict superficial and tedious columns like his latest will be supplanted by fairer and far more interesting ones.

Blogging is not the enemy. It’s one of the greatest things to happen to a people who already value freedom of speech.

Other bloggers: Don Giannatti, you’re it!

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