O Tempora, O Mores
An unkind cut, but worth pondering: Joseph Rago in today’s Wall Street Journal on blogs and bloggers:
The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.
More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren’t much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .
And “buon Natale” to you too, Mr. Rago!
This is the only Blog I have posted on, so I am probably a poor judge of comparative quality, but that said, I think this Blog attracts many good postings with a minimum of trivial ones. I once did look into another Blog, which I will not name, and thought it was chaotic and full of idiosyncratic nonsense.
People create blogs or post on them for different reasons. I can vouch for that because I read quite a few, and make frequent postings for my own. Most people probably just want a low budget technology to broadcast to the world certain personal opinions in a timely way and in the process enduring only self-censorship as to the content. I would like to think that the quality of what I post surpasses that of a first or second draft, but readers will decide on that for themselves. It would not be a fair comparison to lay a blog comment side by side with an opinion piece in any magazine that has passed through editorial hands and at least has to be aligned with the world views of the publisher. There are some of us who for personal reasons do not accept the delay and censorship inherent in a publication process. Looking back through the history of written works, the vast majority of them until the arrival of the printing press were (self)published first (like blogs) and thereafter subjected to public critiques.
If you take out some of the adjectives of Rago’s piece (logorrheic??) and ignore the sweeping indictment of the blogosphere (there are blogs and blogs just as there are newspapers like the WSJ and the National Enquirer), I think he offers some good cautions for keeping blog standards high.
1. Exercise good writing skills.
2. If you are commenting on the news, not reporting it, offer well-thought-out insights, not gut reactions.
3. Show your sources.
4. Provoke ideas, not people.
5. Offer comment, not just links.
6. Everybody appreciates humor and irony once in a while.
I think dotcommonweal fulfills this prescription pretty well, so, no offense taken here.
In fact, I will try to think more about these precepts when I post.
Although the point can be overextended, there is a difference between blogging and reporting, and with a few rare exceptions, blogs don’t serve as an original source of news and information. However, it’s also worth noting that even serious newspapers have been known to blur the line between reporting and opinion, though the best of them do try to signal when they are “interpreting” rather than “reporting” the news. And of opinions . . . well, a lot of current bloggers started their blogs out of sheer frustration that newspapers weren’t giving a sufficiently diverse or even honest assessment of events that their own reporters were unearthing, mostly related to the Iraq War. I know that’s why I started reading blogs. As for comments, it’s been my experience that a lot of blogs start out with interesting and informed comments but the comments degenerate with popularity as well as trolling, unless the blogger really makes an effort to supervise.
When the car was first invented there were many, many makers and cars were pretty diverse in appearance, design and quality. The world is not necessarily a better place because there are now fewer than 20 carmakers and cars are mostly alike.
There is much wisdom in all of the posts raised by Robert in his sharing of Rago’s remarks. As a long time reader of Commonweal and a person who chose to participate at an early stage in Commonweal’s discussion group (established Dec. 1999) at yahoogroups.com and as someone who this pass September began what he hopes is more than a blog but is built on blogger (WordPress) software, I would like to share my insights from my journey to reinforce the previous comments.
I chose to join the discussion group because reading Commonweal in Canada, whether living in Toronto or the rural wilderness of Northwestern Ontario, was the same isolated experience. Discussion was supposed to occur on topics published in the magazine and often did but ranged far and wide under Grant Gallicho’s liberal moderation.
Interestingly, although the number of registrations hovered for a long time in the 120 range (now the 200 range) fewer the 25-30 people made posts on any kind of consistent basis much like this blog. In fact although the number of posts has actually increased the number of daily persons making the posts has actually deceased.
There have been two distinct groups, those interested in theological issues and those in political issues. Right now the “theologians” are ruling the roast.
I learned a great deal about writing in this medium, especially the difficult task of self editing. I also learned a great deal about Catholicism, the institutional Church, American politics and perhaps most surprisingly about other Commonweal reader’s personal struggles with our faith.
During the same period of time I began writing book reviews and magazine style articles for a variety of publications in the field of elementary and secondary school education in Canada. I can certainly relate to the issue of “delay” in the publishing process mentioned by Paul. Censorship is another issue, both self and external; it is needed on many blogs as Jean attests with her rule four.
Unfortunately, in Canada there was no place dedicated to publishing articles on Catholic education on any consistent basis even though in three provinces we are tax supported at full equality with public schools. After spending three years trying to convince a consortium of Catholic organizations to establish such a vehicle patterned after the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association’s magazine Education Today (for which I write) plus the U.K.’s Catholic Education Today and the NCEA’s Momentum I gave up and used blog software to create an ezine including a blog to fill, in my opinion, the gap. So Barbara’s reference to filling a void is confirmed in this case.
I can also confirm that it is in Paul’s words a “low budget technology” as it cost me less than $500.00 to have the site designed including a years worth of hosting. I have spent twice that on advertising the sites existence.
In keeping with Jean’s comments WordPress allowed me to create categories so I can clearly distinguish, news (and it is original) from editorials, commentary, academic pieces, administration and leadership, reviews, teaching and learning and/or special series. I have been able to recruit a number of published contributors at no cost patterned after the dotCommonweal and Mirror of Justice blogs. Actually one of those categories is really the blog component separated out from the newsmagazine component, again a little like dotCommonweal blog within commonwealmagazine.org.
I also set out some rather strict rules for posting based on material Grant has shared here and my years of experience at the Commonweal discussion group. I don’t know if it has scared off posters or if is the nature of the clientele I am attracting, (religious education specialists, principals and superintendents as opposed to classroom teachers) but I have gotten precious few comments, yet.
Jean if you come up with more good “precepts” please do post them, as I, for one, am most interested.
Finally I agree with Barbara, blogs take us back to the days of self publishing broadsheets and handing them out on corners in England. 19thC leaders in Catholic education in Ontario had their own newspapers and wrote with a ferocity and intellectual level well above today’s newspaper standard which is interesting considering most public or Catholic trustees were not literate enough to read them. One only has to look at the diversity in quality of papers to realize what is available on the web is not much different from the range of published material at the corner variety store to Borders.
A letter in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Blogs’ Valuable Service
In regard to Joe Rago’s Dec. 20 editorial-page commentary “The Blog Mob”: The key service provided by blogs for those of us who use them is the provision of links to articles in newspapers, magazines and specialized journals that we would otherwise have missed. This process adds to the amount and utility of information available for readers.
That these links are often accompanied by brief commentaries by the particular blogger who provides them is beside the point. Sometimes those commentaries are illuminating; sometimes they are worthless. It is certainly possible for a reader to tell the difference.
The task of so-called mainstream media is to find a way to use blogs and the Internet to deliver the kind of content Mr. Rago laments is disappearing from the world. The Wall Street Journal has been notably successful in doing just that.
John Endean
President
American Business Conference
Washington