ONLINE JOURNALISM
INTERVIEWS
Jaron Lanier
Weblogs: A new
Parts 1 and 2 of this series were included in the anthology We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture (Perseus Publishing, 2002).
As Doc Searls, one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement, says: "It's a
matter of 'and' logic, not 'or' logic. Weblogs will inform old media. They
will increasingly be a source of information that traditional media will
rely on."
The first Weblog has generally been ascribed to Dave Winer (interviewed
below) in 1997. Blogs began taking off in 1999 with the launch of sites like
Blogger, Weblogger and LiveJournal, which made self-publishing painless for
the masses. While tens of thousands of blogs have blossomed, mainstream
media have only recently shown a glimmer of interest in the form.
That's hardly surprising. Weblogs are the anti-newspaper in some ways. Where
the editorial process can filter out errors and polish a piece of copy to a
fine sheen, too often the machinery turns even the best prose limp,
lifeless, sterile and homogenized. A huge part of blogs' appeal lies in
their unmediated quality. Blogs tend to be impressionistic, telegraphic,
raw, honest, individualistic, highly opinionated and passionate, often
striking an emotional chord.
Sometimes they veer toward immediacy and conjecture at the expense of
accuracy and thoughtful reflection. But the best news blogs offer a personal
prism that combines pointers to trusted sources of information with a
subjective, passion-based journalism. If nothing else, Weblogs are about
personal publishing - people sharing what's in their gut and backing it
up with facts or persuasion.
The serendipity factor looms large. Weblog writing may not often sparkle but
it often surprises. Blogs unearth the strange, the quirky, the interesting
nugget that would have remained hidden. As more people take up Weblogging
and more of us come to rely on blogs to help us shape our own personal media
universe, media organizations would do well to incorporate them into their
Web sites as an important new addition to the journalistic toolkit.
Here's a sampling of a few publications featuring Weblogs:
• Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News has been
publishing a daily Weblog on the paper's SiliconValley.com site for more than 18 months.
• Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a staffer with the Minneapolis
Star Tribune, tackles subjects like genealogy, Webcams and other topics of
reader interest in a weekly
Weblog launched in February 2000 that recently began appearing in the
print newspaper as well.
• Aaron Barnhart, television columnist for the Kansas City
Star, publishes a Weblog at TVBarn.com.
• Boston Globe business reporter D.C. Denison recently began
writing a tech-news
Weblog.
• Derek Willis writes a Weblog called The Scoop for Congressional Quarterly and
publishes another on his personal
site.
• Suzanne Lainson writes a blog about the Colorado tech
scene, written in the style of a society columnist, for Courtney Pulitzer's
The Cyber Scene. "It turns out it has been a much more enjoyable
experience than I had ever imagined," Lainson says by e-mail. "I can write
about people, companies and events that wouldn't be considered newsworthy in
a traditional sense. While I do incorporate serious reporting, I offer
considerable commentary - a good chunk of it done tongue in cheek."
• Kathy Shaidle, a religion columnist for the Toronto Star,
publishes the Relapsed
Catholic Weblog.
• The Guardian in the United Kingdom run a good international-news Weblog.
• OJR's long-running Spike Report dishes up
interesting factoids culled from online news publications. Slate's Today's
Papers and Omnivore cover similar
blog-like turf.
• A number of alternative weeklies, such as the San Francisco Bay
Guardian, run Weblogs.
• The Christian Science
Monitor plans to launch five topic-based blogs in about a month.
For a list of Weblogs, Eatonweb
publishes lists broken down by category, while Yahoo lists dozens of popular sites
and Userland posts a running tally of its Top 100 sites.
A word about the term Weblog: We'll focus here on Weblogs in the strict
sense (where the content may run from journals and diaries to political
screeds or travelogues, but the owner-publisher decides whether anyone else
may post) rather than the more loosely defined genre that we'll call
collective Weblogs (community news sites such as Slashdot.org, Kuro5hin.org,
Freerepublic.com), which resemble forums but whose content relies heavily on
links, short news snippets, essays, rants and other blog-like features.
What does Weblogging herald for journalism? Here are perspectives from three
significant figures in the Weblog movement:
Dan Gillmor
Dan Gillmor, business columnist for the Mercury News, was the first
mainstream journalist to author a Weblog and have it published on a
newspaper Web site. His eJournal runs daily, with excerpts published in the
print edition.
Among his peers, Gillmor is considered the leading trailblazer of this new
online journalism form, but he's typically modest about the mark he's made.
"I'm still feeling my way into it, so I don't know the big answers here," he
says. "Everyone's still kind of groping about where this is all heading, but
Weblogs have already become a significant phenomenon."
Regular readers of Gillmor's eJournal will recognize his commitment to user
participation. "One of the things I'm sure about in journalism right now is
that my readers know more than I do," he says. "To the extent that I can
take advantage of that in a way that does something for everyone involved
- that strikes me as pretty cool."
One fascinating aspect of Gillmor's Weblog is how he lifts the veil from the
workings of the journalism profession. "There have been occasions where I
put up a note saying, 'I'm working on the following and here's what I think
I know,' and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I'm on the
right track, I'm wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing
pieces," he says. "That's a pretty interesting thing. Many thousands more
people read my column in the newspaper than online, but I do hear back from
a fair number of people from the Weblog."
Gillmor rates the interactivity with readers as one of the most striking
features about blogs. "I frequently hear from readers after a column,
saying, 'That was interesting, but have you thought about this or that
angle?,' and often the answer is no, I hadn't, so the next time I return to
the subject the missing piece makes its way into the article.
"I think journalists have to do that. I doubt there is a beat at any
newspaper or publication or program where it is not the case that the
readers collectively know more than the reporter," he says. "That shouldn't
come as any great revelation. Anyone who's dealt with networks knows that
the network knows more than the individual."
While other newspapers have been reluctant to embrace the form, Gillmor
says, "In my case it helps that I'm working for people whose reaction is not
fear and loathing but, Wow, that sounds interesting, let's see how it
works."
He encourages other publications to weigh the possible benefits of launching
a Weblog. "Journalists need to experiment more as a group - not with
our core values or with things like getting it right, but with things like
how we produce news. We're just going to get dull if we don't. We're in the
midst of a change, where journalism is changing from a lecture into
something that resembles something between a conversation and a seminar, and
that's pretty exciting to me."
For journalists thinking of taking up Weblogging, he cautions, "It's
important to recognize that it takes a fair amount of work to do it right.
Man, this is a beast that's hungry all the time."
Gillmor says professional journalism needs to make room for a new brand of
amateur journalism that Weblogs are helping to fashion. "No question, this
is another kind of journalism. Technology has been leading us toward new
ways of looking at things, and the idea of talented amateurs becoming part
of the conversation is just the next logical step. It's the model of the
pamphleteer journalist. Will the pamphleteer journalist become Gannett? No,
but I don't think the pamphleteer wants to be Gannett."
He pauses and considers the future of blogging. "Let's see where it takes
us," he says, "because clear as hell it's taking us somewhere interesting."
Doc Searls
Doc Searls, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., is a veteran journalist,
computer industry analyst and senior editor for Linux Journal. He's best
known as one of four authors of The
Cluetrain Manifesto, a near-mythic essay that laid out 95 theses about
the new reality of marketplaces in a networked world.
When Searls began his blog in November 1999, he found 9,000 search engine
results for the term Weblog. That number has since grown to more than
624,000.
He launched the Weblog as an online counterpart to the book publication of Cluetrain.
"But in the course of that I discovered that Weblogs are really personal,
and as soon as you pluralize a voice, it loses some of its meaning," he
says.
Searls believes that blogs offer the news media a means of "re-personalizing
journalism," through their subject matter and by connecting journalists to
other journalists' journals and to expert sources.
"That's what Weblogs offer to journalism," he says. "Weblogs are personal
journalism. For real journalists who aren't used to writing without a net,
Weblogs have a self-informing and self-correcting system built into it. When
Dan Gillmor published an item whose source said it wasn't ready for public
dissemination, Dan apologized and took it off his Weblog, and that increased
his stature. You can't do that with a regular paper - you'd get a
retraction instead."
One of the interesting hallmarks of a successful Weblog is that it becomes
an authoritative source of information based on community endorsement.
"People link to it, and those links increase the site's authority and raise
its profile in as natural a way as possible," Searls says. "So what we have
is a marketplace in which we grant authority to those we trust to alter or
author our own opinions. I let Dan supply me with many of my opinions
because he's really good, not because his name is on the masthead of a print
publication. Many of the Weblogs I visit have no connection to the print
world."
While many blogs get dozens or hundreds of visitors, Searls' site attracts
thousands. "I partly don't want to care what the number is," he says. "I
used to work in broadcasting, where everyone was obsessed by that. I don't
want an audience. I feel I'm writing stuff that's part of a conversation.
Conversations don't have audiences."
Searls says the media remain blind to the cultural and technological changes
that are overtaking traditional modes of communication. "What's happening to
every business is they're melting into the marketplace," he says. "It comes
as a profound revelation to most in the first world when they discover that
markets are a conversation. But in the third world that's a given -
market's are a bazaar, not a conveyor belt moving goods. They're about
relationships and connoisseurship and social life - not something you
can describe in accounting language. We forget that the price tag is only
125 years old. Before that, everything was negotiated.
"When we think about media or journalism," Searls says, "you have content
that's loaded in a channel and delivered to a target group or demographic.
That's just not applicable to the world of Weblogs, where you go looking for
interesting conversations, where you might run into soccer moms and students
discussing Plato and a whole noisy marketplace speaking to itself.
Journalism is going to have to get used to making room for lots of other
people who are not journalists by training but who are just moved by
whatever their nature happens to be."
Searls agrees with Gillmor (as do I) that many Weblog authors are assuming
the role of amateur journalists. "Just because you don't get paid for
writing a blog doesn't mean you're any less authoritative," he says. (He
writes more about what he calls "soft journalism" - the any-to-any
system of talking and sharing rather than the traditional "hard journalism"
model of writing that is distributed to the masses - in an essay on his blog.)
Searls finds himself writing often in his blog about Linux, open-source
software and the hacker community because those topics reflect his interests
as senior editor at Linux Journal. "The blog serves as a kind of steam valve
for me," he says. "I put stuff out there that I'm forming an opinion about,
and another blogger starts arguing with me and giving me feedback, and I
haven't even finished what I was posting!"
For mainstream journalists, Searls believes that Weblogs will become an
indispensable source of niche expertise. "For certain kinds of listings,
farmer's markets, community events, movie reviews and the like, it's just a
matter of time before traditional media give blogs their due. One loser in
all this may be the traditional sources of authority - the analyst
houses and think tanks and talking heads. They'll be quoted less because
they're not part of the conversation. They won't be your sources of
authority anymore. The Weblog community is basically a whole bunch of expert
witnesses who increase their expertise constantly through a sort of
reputation engine."
Weblogs are already becoming an important source of news for readers. Searls
says he found out that the author Douglas Adams died by reading the news
and an
appreciation on Dave Winer's blog. Says Searls: "I'd spent that day in
the car listening to news stations in Santa Barbara and heard not a word
about it - and he died in Santa Barbara! I picked up the local paper
the next day and there wasn't a single word in there about his death. I was
astonished. "
Does Searls have any advice for aspiring bloggers? "You don't have to be a
good writer. What matters is meaning. What you need is passion - a deep
interest in a subject - and then all you have to do is say something
interesting. For us readers, it's actually a bit like eavesdropping. Who do
I want to drop in on unannounced?"
Dave Winer
Winer, founder and CEO of Userland Software in Silicon Valley, has been
credited as the first regular, widely followed blogger. He started Scripting News, a Weblog about
technology, business and other Weblogs, in early 1997, and began Weblogging
in early 1995 ("it wasn't called Weblogging then," he notes).
Userland's software products power tens of thousands of Weblogs. But for
Winer, blogs are not just a publishing medium but a personal crusade that
could foster a new brand of journalism. (He wrote about amateur
journalism on his DaveNet site.) His dream is to put a live Web server
with easy-to-edit pages on every person's desktop, then connect them all in
a robust network that feeds off itself and informs other media.
Winer might well be the godfather of the blogging movement, but a better
term might be agent provocateur. His blog is peppered with musings, pointers
to other sites, and Molotov cocktails that he lobs in the hope of sparking a
lively debate. "We're all players in Uncle Dave's court," Searls says. Adds
journalist-blogger Glenn Fleishman: "When you look at your stat sheet and
see that your traffic spiked by 900 percent, you know that Dave has linked
to you."
How great is Winer's influence among bloggers? When I asked Gillmor and
Searls what spurred them to start a blog, both said the idea came from
Winer.
For months Winer, a software developer and technology columnist for Hotwired
in 1995-96, has denied that he's a journalist. But he now says, "I've
finally resolved in my mind that I am a journalist. It's not how I earn my
living, but I'd argue there's no less quality and integrity in being an
amateur journalist. Maybe there's more integrity, because my writing doesn't
depend on a paycheck."
Winer stirred the pot April 17 with a provocative essay on Web publishing that concluded: "writers who work for
others have less integrity to offer than those who do it for love." That
drew retorts from Fleishman, Deborah Branscum, Searls and others, while Gillmor also chimed in.
Winer often returns to the theme - familiar to any journalist who has
wandered through Usenet or other back alleys of the Internet - that
professional journalists are inherently compromised by the business
interests and skewed editorial policies of their publications. (Winer would
use language a tad stronger.)
Says Winer: "Some of the success I've had as a software developer is related
to the fact that I'd had the ability to put my own story out there (on
Scripting News), where I don't have to deal with cynical reporters who are
interested only if it's being pushed by a big-name company or by editors who
insist on dumbing down a concept because they think it's too complicated for
their readers to handle. What happens if the casualty in that process is the
truth?"
Winer says journalists are ignoring the serious work being done on Weblogs,
and online publishers should embrace the form. "Then they won't have to
worry about dumbing it down, and multiple points of view will be able to get
through."
He suggests that struggling sites like Salon begin broadening their content
offerings by hosting user-created Weblogs, creating a sort of farm system
for essayists. "Salon could highlight the best ones on page one and invest
time and effort in the ones that are inspiring and exceptional." He says
online newspapers, too, should "go out and let anyone write for you. That's
scary for professionals, who'll be put off by writers who may be just as
talented but didn't have the patience to climb your stupid career ladder."
Winer says he checks in on about 200 Weblogs on a regular basis. "You do it
not so much to see what it gives you," he says. "It's more like checking in
on a friend to see what's going on. It's like walking through a
neighborhood, or reading columnists in a newspaper, even those you dislike
because you enjoy the experience."
Winer has this advice for new bloggers: "If you have a story to tell -
even if it's about some really mundane aspect of your life - you'll
attract others who share your interest. Just don't set a goal of becoming
the most popular person on the block. If you work too hard to be politically
correct, if you go back and change your Weblog because someone complained
about something you posted, you'll wind up with writing that gets flat and
boring. Self-censorship defeats the whole purpose of a Weblog."
Indeed, Winer says his most gratifying moments come when he posts an entry
without running the idea by his colleagues first. "It can be a very scary
moment when you take a stand on something and you don't know if your
argument holds together and you hit the send button and it's out there and you can't take it back. That's a moment that professional journalists may never experience in their careers, the feeling that it's just me, exposed to the world. That's a pretty powerful rush, the power to publish as an
individual."
source of news
Blogs will supplement, not supplant,
traditional forms of media
This column appeared May 31, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here's the version on the OJR site. See Part 1: Blogging as a new form of journalism.
By J.D. Lasica
Will Weblogs displace established media organizations as a source of news,
information and opinion? Not in this lifetime. But they will continue to
make inroads as a supplement to traditional news sources.
"Journalism is going to have to get used to making room for lots of other people who are not journalists by training but who are just moved by whatever their nature happens to be."
– Doc Searls
"One of the things I'm sure about in journalism right now is that my readers know more than I do"
– Dan Gillmor
http://siliconvalley.com/dangillmor
http://doc.weblogs.com
Winer suggests that struggling sites like Salon begin broadening their content offerings by hosting user-created Weblogs, creating a sort of farm system for essayists.
http://www.scripting.com
Web journalism: Articles and columns
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