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"Blogging makes me look younger"
Participating this week in the Atheneum's Geschke Lecture Series on "The News Media's Role in Society," Rosen has focused of late on the advantages blogging has over mainstream reporting and also on the mainstream media's reception of blogs. "Journalists keep comparing blogging to journalism," Rosen said. "What I don't find often enough among traditional journalists is the kind of curiosity I would expect about what is different about this activity and about how it works. It's amazing to me that it doesn't happen more often. If it did, journalists would have different ideas than the ones they reflexively have." Rosen summarized the most common responses to blogging he encounters among journalists: "One. 'These people aren't going replace us.' 2. How can you trust it - there's no editor or standards.' 3. 'Anybody can say anything on the Web.' 4. 'It's all opinion.' 5. It's all based on original work journalists are doing.' 6. 'Are bloggers going to pay for serious investigative reporting?' "There's no curiosity," Rosen said of blogging. He cited a conference at Harvard in January of 2005, when New York Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson (who spoke here last week), famously asked if bloggers knew how much it cost to maintain The Times' Baghdad bureau for one year. "She was implying that no matter how good you are as an informal reporter, you're never going to be as good as a professional reporter," explained Rosen, who also participated in the discussion. Bloggers responded to Abramson's response with democratic indignation and claimed that Abramson had "missed the point.' "It was an example of the mainstream media's first reaction being '[Blogging] is not going to replace us.' Not curiosity," Rosen said. "Their kneejerk response is 'Are we gonna be made obsolete by this?' And if you're looking at it that way, you're not looking at what it is. You're just looking at it in relation to yourself." (It should be noted, however, that according to the Harvard Gazette, February 3, 2005, Abramson did say she kept track of the "coolest blogs" as a way to suss out new talent.) To explore the dynamism of blogging, Rosen posted a blog on his website (journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink) entitled "The People Formerly Known as the Audience." It is a fictional letter from "the audience" to Rosen, explaining the end of their passive reception to the news and their new involvement as interpreters of it. "The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another - and who today are not in a situation like that at all," the blog said. "This has been one of the most linked to pressthink posts ever," said Rosen, who would encourage anyone attending his lecture at the Atheneum's Great Hall to read the post beforehand. "Not only did people respond to it, but they talked about their own insights on the questions raised by this post." Rosen did concede that blogging, like any other form of expression, is subject to an "attention economy" (a cousin of supply and demand, whereby only so many readers can find interest in only so many blogs) as well as issues of credibility. As such, the blogosphere is not necessarily a place where every person is heard equally, nor is it a place where every person is equally credible. "One has to understand that as a blogger, you still have the whole struggle to gain attention for your views, it's there," Rosen said. "That's a whole lot better than sitting at home thinking maybe one day I'll write a newspaper. It's better to be in the game. The point is not that everyone can do this, but many more people can have a role in public life as publishers and producers." Now that blogging has been around for a while, "brand names" (like Daily Kos, Hullabaloo by Digby, Daily Blog, America Blog and Wonkette) have a unique value. "I very rarely deal with anonymous bloggers. If I don't know who somebody is; it's very rare that I'll link to them," said Rosen. "Having a brand name is a way of storing reputation so it doesn't have to be re-established each time. ...When you don't have that, you do have this question of 'Why should I believe this report?'" But Rosen suggested that the Internet has internal regulations built into it - meaning that if a blogger publishes a false report on his site, the chances are good that, if it gets read at all, it will also be corrected by someone with accurate information. "And that is where the whole art of linking and the collective dimension of blogging come into play," Rosen said. "What the user should care about is if the whole blogosphere gets it right, not whether Joey the Blogger gets it right." Rosen added that blogging is filling the muchneeded demand for filters of the massive amount of information accessible to the "audience" these days. "A good blogger filters the Web for you and adds thoughts you'd have had if you did this filtering," Rosen explained. "Some people find it easier to enter into the news that way - through the human filter of a blogger." In the context of modern civilization, the technology behind blogging may be newfangled, but the underlying concepts aren't really. Politically minded citizens have found another way to share information and opinions with one another, in a way that cannot be edited or controlled by people with more money or influence than they have. Rosen offered it this way. "Think of Gramercy Park, in New York - a beautiful park which is the property of the few. Blogging is like if Gramercy suddenly opened its gates and everybody could use this beautiful park. And the people who used to use it would say, 'Ugh, there's so much garbage. It's so loud. People are so rude.' But if we pulled it back 15 feet, we could see that more people are using this thing, and isn't that great? There is something lost when you do that, from the point of view of the old kings of the park, but there is also a large democratic gain."
I JAY ROSEN |
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