Alternative Title: Blogging Is Good For Lazy People Who Don't Have the Stamina to Answer Any More Emails About Matt Klam's Sunday Times Piece.
General thoughts, incoherently ordered and incoherently articulated, for people who have asked (I assume you're the only people who actually read this site):
1) Ana Cox is hot. Jack Germond, not so much.
2) All press is good press, and this piece is probably good for everyone involved. More exposure = more traffic, etc.
3) That said, I thought the piece was condescending and it actually made me feel compelled to defend blogging, which is almost as creepy and alien to me as feeling compelled to defend traditional media.
4) Given the title and the setup, you might be under the impression that the article was about the effects of blogging on politics, but - HA! - you would be wrong! The piece was really about the effects of blogging on big media (and vice versa). I seem to remember Klam appearing in TMFTML’s comment section months ago, indicating that he was working on a blogging story for the NYT mag [Ed.--Yep, and he was a bit unfairly mocked by the bloggers, which may explain the attitude in the piece. Google also indicates that the the LA wing of the blogosphere was approached in May], so I guess the election was a news peg for an article was already in progress or languishing in CopyDesk. [Ed. - Also, I realize you may have seen this before, but in case there's any confusion: what you're presently reading is a "fake" editor of my own creation, who breaks in, midsentence, with parenthetical questions and accusations.]
5) The question that is posed in the article - "Is blogging ruining political journalism?" - implies a hard dichotomy between the two, then disingenuously goes on to profile people, most of whom are not only bloggers, but journalists in a very real, professional, get-paid-and-bylined sense, and certainly understand the rules and ethics of journalism. Klam acknowledges those print affiliations** but doesn’t seem to have internalized that particular cognitive Venn diagram or it would have presumably affected his analysis. There is a tendency on the part of some traditional media people to separate the two and to assume that bloggers, given traditional journalism assignments, can't or won't follow standard practices, and that their editors have to accommodate that. But it's not like Josh Marshall gets a "get out of fact-checking free" card when Remnick assigns him a New Yorker piece because he's incapable of understanding this "fact-verification process of which you speak." And I don't think he expects one. Nor do I think he's as desperate for old media validation as the article seems to imply. The article seems to dismiss Josh's Atlantic and New Yorker assignments as if he just found them at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, and there are no actual editors who read and respect his writing. From reading the piece, you’d think that Josh was staring wistfully out the window, hands clasped furtively over his (quickly wrinkling) shirt, long eyelashes batting innocently in the moonlight, telling himself, "One day - one day! - I’ll have a real press pass. I just know it!" [Ed.--That said, the description was oddly endearing. It made it seem like all Josh really needed was a big hug. A big hug from a stodgy print publication, but a big hug, nonetheless.]
6) I think for the most part, big media is embracing blogs. When I was covering the RNC, nearly every major news outlet had an RNC blog--and Newsweek was blogging the Olympics in case anyone caught up in the RNC orgy free cocktails and hot air forgot they were happening. Not all of the blogs used standard blogging conventions (cross-linking, permalinks, etc.) and some of them--ie._the Hardball blog - read awkwardly, but they were certainly warming up to the concept. And no matter how many times Pinch Sulzberger wants to use the phrase "opinion-ridde n free-for-all" in reference to anything other than the NYT'’s own editorial page, the NYT increasingly has blog-like elements, some of which may, godforbid, technically constitute "blogs" - whether they choose to admit it or not.
Gratuitous digression: I didn't really understand the backlash in Jeff Jarvis's comment section with regard to James Wolcott's new blog. There are only three reasons I read Vanity Fair anymore: Wolcott, Hitchens and the occasional Neal Pollack piece. If A.A. Gill were a regular, there would be four, but I guess there are only so many column inches left for interesting stuff after you take out the Asprey ads and the nostalgia articles on 1930s Hollywood. [Ed. - If Hitchens ever starts a blog, I might have to start blogging again, just on principle.] At any rate, more Wolcott is a good thing, and unedited Wolcott is highly entertaining. More Wolcott, I say! For all the complaining in the blogosphere about big media snobbery (How dare the puny little bloggers presume themselves journalists!), it's surprising to see a sort reverse snobbery on the part of small media (How dare the big institutionalized media people presume themselves bloggers!) and it's equally annoying and equally asinine. [Ed.--If this keeps up and big media political correspondents keep starting blogs, I suppose we'll see another NYT mag story that poses the question, "Is political journalism ruining blogging?"] I'd frankly like to see more big name big media people keeping blogs even if it means Bill O'Reilly writing "Shut up, Begala!" posts and banning IPs.
7) I'm not saying there's no legitimate opposition to blogging by traditional media people, but the occasional snippy comment from Tina Brown (who, a year or two ago was much more pro-blog and seems to have soured on them as of late) or desperate "pajama people" denunciations from an embattled Dan Rather are no more representative of the average journalist's attitude toward blogging than Tina Brown and Dan Rather are representative of the average journalist.
** To wit,
Cox = ex-Chronicle of Higher Ed, ex-Mother Jones, ex-American Spectator, plus any number of pubs she for which she writes currently
Marshall = The American Prospect, The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Post, The New York Times, Salon, Slate,
Etc., etc.