More on blogging
In this week's New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann writes about whether blogging is actually journalism.
No, he says, it is not.
And I agree.
Blogging, I think, is closest to opinion writing (and I should know, since I'm a columnist). Mostly, we are remora fish feeding off the work of reporter-sharks. Journalism is tough, grinding, daily work. It's the ceaseless cultivation of sources, the slack-jawed viewing of hundreds of meetings, the constant review of documents written in ridiculous government speak. Reporters actually find out news.
Bloggers--and columnists--merely comment on it.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I love column writing. I love connecting with a readership by translating the news into something people find interesting, or accessible. But what I do is not journalism.
And bloggers who connect to news stories merely to add their snarky comments aren't journalists.
I wonder if some day we will get tired of this sort of Wonkette blogging. The blogs that are most interesting, I think, add knowledge to the news, or seek out happenings in a niche and explain them to the wider public (one of my favorite blogs of ideas is at the University of Chicago Law School blog
which I became addicted to when I worked there), or collected news stories and opinions on one theme, like Salon's Broadsheet, to tell a wider, more nuanced story, instead of just perpetuating the web echo chamber.
I'm thinking about all of this, of course, because I'm trying to figure out what kind of blog I want to write, and how to go about writing it. My guess is that I'll continue to be a remora fish. But you never know.
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